If your company website’s ranking and traffic has dropped since a Google algorithm update, and it’s still not bounced back, you’ll be looking for a strategy to recover. In this post we look at the history of Google algorithm changes, how you should approach the issue, and what you should do about it.
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this post, a TLDR if you will:
- Google Algorithm History: Google’s search algorithms have evolved significantly over the years to combat spam and improve search result relevance.
- Frequency of Updates: Major core updates occur a few times a year, with thousands of minor tweaks annually.
- Notable Updates: Key updates include Panda (low-quality content), Penguin (link spam), BERT (natural language processing), Core Web Vitals, and the Helpful Content Update (HCU) focusing on quality content.
- Google’s Guidance: Aim for relevant, authoritative, and people-first content. Avoid quick fixes and focus on long-term improvements.
- Practical Steps:
- Improve content relevance and authority.
- Enhance technical SEO (page speed, mobile friendliness, Core Web Vitals).
- Conduct competitor analysis.
- Publish new, high-quality content.
- Audit and improve low-quality content.
- Reaction to Updates: Maintain a long-term marketing strategy aligned with Google’s guidelines. If affected, conduct a website audit and follow the practical steps outlined above.
If you need a professional design and digital marketing agency to help your website traffic and search engine rankings to recover, get in touch.
Call us on 01276 402 381.
Your Website is Your Shop Window
Websites are key pieces of commercial real estate in the digital world. They’re the shop window for your business, the entry point for the majority of your leads, and one of the most cost-effective platforms in your marketing mix.
As you build your website, it’s not just about making it look pretty, its about ensuring its fit for SEO purposes. Once you’ve built your website – you need visitors.
You can put your website address on every piece of corporate literature, distribute PR pieces, run PPC campaigns, share links in your social media posts, but organic traffic to your website is what really makes the difference.
So what happens when one of those Google algorithm changes comes about?
What Are Google Algorithm Updates?
To answer that, let’s first go on a little trip down memory lane…
Google Search started way back in 1996 when two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created the first iteration of Google. It was actually called “Backrub” at the time.
Running on Linux servers and built using Java and Python, their search engine crawled and indexed the web using an algorithm, a set of instructions to perform the task of indexing and ranking. That algorithm, named after Larry, was called PageRank. It looked primarily at the interplay of links around the web and ranked websites accordingly.
Ever since then the world wide web has grown exponentially, and the Google algorithms have had to evolve at scale with it.
Today Google’s search algorithms are a commercially sensitive and closely guarded secret. In fact, they’re so important that digital marketers around the globe have spent decades trying to understand, decode, and reverse engineer them. After all, if you can work out how Google ranks web pages, you can work out how to get greater visibility for your own web content, right?
How Often do Google Algorithm Updates Occur?
If you were to cast your mind back over the past 28 years, there would be key dates on the timeline of “algo updates”. However, these are now seen as the “big” ones, the “core updates” as they are now commonly known, where fundamentally important changes are made to the algorithm. These happen a few times a year.
In between, Google makes constant tweaks to their computations. They have to adjust on a daily basis, and these “twiddlers” as they’ve been referred to inside Google, can add up to thousands of updates per annum.
Why do These Algorithm Updates Happen?
Way back in 1998 I remember seeing people put “any old rubbish” into titles, meta keyword and description tags just to get ranking. And it worked.
By 2001 this had become only slightly more sophisticated and questionable practices like “keyword stuffing” were used to fool the search engines into thinking the on-page content was more relevant than it was.
With the threat of users getting irrelevant results, Google got wise to these tactics and started adjusting its algorithms to make the search results ever more relevant. That was good for searchers.
Of course, the less scrupulous website owners were also adopting ever sophisticated tactics such as triangulation, link schemes, and content stuffing. As Google cracked down on these malpractices, they further tweaked their algorithms to ensure it was surfacing quality content for users.
Didn’t The Algorithms All Have Silly Names?
Well, that’s a matter of opinion. But some of the most well-known algorithm changes have been Panda and Penguin. Panda was named after Navneet Panda, the Google engineer who was crucial in its development. The Panda update focused on downplaying low-quality content and what were called “content farms”.
The Penguin Update targeted link spam and manipulative link building practices.
There have been many others that I can remember including the Florida update, Caffeine, Big Daddy, Hummingbird, Hilltop, and even one called Fred.
But since then, the Medic update, Maccabees etc. have all started to give way to names that are either more meaningful in terms of what they address or when they are released. The mind no longer has to perform mental gymnastics to relate a seemingly unconnected term with a specific algorithm goal.
And Now the Algorithms are Called…?
The naming conventions are less colourful now but they’re more relevant.
We’ve had mobile-first indexing back in 2018 when they started to crawl and index the mobile versions of websites before the desktop versions.
Then we had the BERT update, which may be one of the first large language model updates where BERT, a transformer in a large language model (LLM), was used to better understand queries, using natural language processing (NLP).
Since then, Core Web Vitals, SpamBrain, and the Helpful Content Update (HCU) have gone live. We’ve also now got the more regular and understandable Google August 2024 Core Update pattern: Month, Year, Core Update.
Additionally, Google now officially announces when core updates will be put in place, where geographically they will affect the indexes, and how long they are expected to “roll out” for. It’s all become very civilised.
But What’s in These Core Updates?
The truth is that we don’t exactly know. Nobody does, apart from Google. The algorithms are commercially highly sensitive intellectual property. There’s been a lot of speculation, some great analysis from those with the time to scrutinise huge volumes of data, and even the occasional leak hinting at what Google does.
Anyone who’s been involved in SEO long enough will remember the “200 ranking factors” discussion that happened around 2010 or so. Google mentioned it a few times and the concept took hold as people speculated about what the “200 ranking factors” were and how they could decypher, understand, and then exploit them. Of course, this was probably an off-the-cuff remark and public liaisons at Google went on to further iterate that each factor might have a further 50 aspects, exploding the potential number of factors to 10,000.
There was much discussion across the SEO community about this, and even opposing opinions that this was all “a myth”. However, compared to “Backrub” and early iterations of the Google algorithm, which took into account backlinks, the algorithm(s) is now far more sophisticated.
What we do know is that it can take into account a great many factors such as mobile-first, page speed, core web vitals, clean code, title tags, meta descriptions, h tags, keywords and their variations, E-E-A-T, backlinks of course, engagement rates etc.
Ultimately, it’s all an educated guess as to what specifics are in these algorithm updates, and we can only go by what Google says about them and what people with websites are observing. That said, we adhere to best practices and get results anyway.
And What Does Google Say About Algorithm Updates?
Headline announcements usually say things like:
Today we released the August 2024 core update. It continues our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.https://t.co/T6Qt0JUoWt
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) August 15, 2024
This is a typical announcement from Google, fairly ambiguous, and linking to its Search Central blog with further details, which in this case aren’t much. But it does link to Google’s guidance on core updates and your website.
What Does Google’s Guidance Say?
The official advice is quite nuanced.
Google say that their primary goal in core updates is to ensure that their search results pages show relevant, and authoritative content.
They also say that, if a website has been “hit” by a core update, e.g. your web pages have gone down in ranking, then there may not actually be anything that needs fixing.
And What is Clever Marketing’s Advice?
We have always worked within Google’s guidelines. However, even before core updates became a regular calendar event, we were designing, building, and creating content for websites in a wide range of industries and sectors. It doesn’t matter what your company does, we always adhere to the concept that you should talk directly to your existing and potential audience, and provide them with everything they need to have full information, make informed decisions, and transact with ease so that your business, whatever it produces or sells, can be successful.
If there’s one thing we’ve always done here, it has been to make sure that what we provide is as comprehensive as possible. We’ve learned that from experience.
Also, as Google advises, “quick fixes” are not the way to go. They say publishers should think about and work for the long term and we agree. Short termism is tactical whilst long termism is strategic. If you want a successful website then you have to play the long game.
Talking of Which, What’s this Helpful Content Update?
The Helpful Content Update or HCU was initially rolled out back in August 2022 and again in December of that year. It was applied globally and took over a month to complete.
In September 2023 there was another major update and then a big one occurred in March 2024; this update added to the HCU with some very specific anti-spam policies.
But overall, the HCU was all about trying to surface quality content that was mostly, er, helpful!
Now, even though there hasn’t been specific mention of a helpful content update, the HCU instructions are part of every core update as they’re regularly fine-tuned and updated.
So What’s the Specific Advice on Algorithms Again?
- Focus on Quality Content: Google advises that the primary goal of core updates is to ensure that the search results present relevant and authoritative content to users. Therefore, focus on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.
- Remember – There are NO Quick Fixes: Google has indicated that pages that drop after a core update may not have something specific to “fix” immediately. Instead, they suggest focusing on long-term improvements.
- Long-Term Improvement: Google evaluates sites over an extended period, so recent changes may not be reflected in the immediate aftermath of a core update. Significant improvements over time are necessary for recovery.
That’s Very Academic: What Are the Practical Steps Then?
- Improve Content Relevance and Authority: Make your content more relevant and authoritative than your competitors. This involves enhancing the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) of your content.
- Technical SEO: Revisit and improve your technical SEO basics, including page speed, mobile friendliness, and Core Web Vitals.
- Competitor Analysis: Conduct competitor analysis to understand how your content stacks up against others in your niche.
- Publish New Content: Offset traffic loss by publishing new, high-quality content.
- Audit and Improve Low-Quality Content: Remove or improve low-quality content flagged by audits, as this can help better-performing content on your site.
So How Should We Respond to Algorithm Changes?
Back to the original question of this post: how should your business react to a Google algorithm update? In our professional opinion, you shouldn’t need to. If you have a business plan, with a long-term marketing plan, and a fully-aligned digital marketing strategy, which includes your website, then you should be covered.
If not, and your previous website designer has contravened all the official good advice, then you need a recovery plan. It needs to be based on all the good advice above, but to sum it all up, this is what our team would do to help you out: Conduct a thorough website audit (marketing review), and then go through the practical steps above.
Once you’ve collated all the information, you should be able to embark on a website refresh or redesign and we can help you with that.
Best of luck!
Clever Marketing is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Surrey. We design and build websites that shouldn’t need to “recover” from algorithm updates, but we can certainly help your company if you’ve been “hit”. Call us on 01276 402 381 or complete the contact form.