This is another popular question for search engine marketers and Google-snipers to ask, but it should be met with a fairly resolute, “no.” Google updates its search engine algorithm almost daily in order to keep up with the fluid world of search engine marketing.

Black hats start to lose their shirts

As Google adapts its algorithm and implements changes to it, it’s getting harder for black hats to use their shady techniques to boost themselves up the rankings. The latest updates favour newer content to give fresher results. Doing this shows that good quality, organic content. The black hats who swear by out of date algorithms are going to see their traffic disappear like a Las Vegas magician.

Like the Panda update, these changes to the algorithm are actually quite significant. Panda sent a lot of businesses into a fright because it changed the game in a big way. Panda would downgrade the beastly content farm websites that have copied content or saturated their pages with useless, black-hat content. Some legitimate sites have also suffered losses in their ranking positions since the algorithm change

What the new algorithm looks for in websites:

• Fresher results that will affect 35 per cent of results: that’s huge compared to other updates to the algorithm. The new content added to sites will be higher in the rankings. This isn’t new necessarily, but it has been radically improved from the 17.5 per cent freshness of previous updates. Does this mean that they are improved by 35 per cent; that’s an important distinction to make in order to look at the  algorithm update objectively. It simply means that 35% of results are going to be affected by the most recent algorithm update.
• Official pages will now rank highly in the search engine rankings: all official brand or company pages, official blogs and sites will all be boosted in the Google rankings. This increases the effectiveness of all ‘official’ pages and should – in theory – cut down on some of the more underhanded search engine marketing techniques employed by various competitors within certain industries. This modification should render fake or dodgy pages irrelevant or certainly impact on their effectiveness in the search engine rankings.

People always feel like they are having the proverbial rug pulled from under them whenever Google does something to change the way it ranks pages. The reality is that search is like that; it’s a fluid process and it is always evolving in order to compensate for changes in the industry or changes in technologies. It’s an organic medium and one that should always be evolving in order to give a balanced approach to marketing via search engines and the rankings. As Google grows to decide what’s ‘important’ and what is deemed to be unimportant.

Paul