Search quality on the rise

The biggest or close to the biggest change to the algorithm has just been rolled out affecting nearly 12% of Google queries. Don’t panic. Well don’t panic yet, these changes are currently live in the US and no date has been set for these changes to be rolled out globally. Panic if you rely on search traffic and have a large site consisting of poor quality search fodder type content. Danny Sullivan also has a great article on these Google changes here.

The key SEO implications and takeaways from the changes on Friday are:

• Link building: One favourite strategy is submission to article marketing sites.  Well if these have been downgraded in Google, which it appears they have, then it is likely the links which weren’t worth much on average to start, will suffer even more.

• Buying Links: Don’t think about changing your strategy to buying links, Google dealt with that last week.

• Feeds: If you are using feeds or syndicated content, keep in mind this is duplicating someone else’s content, which means you will eventually get filtered.

• Content: Improve your content, including video, image, infographics and text, with all of it to be targeted to your users, unique, well researched and useful. The changes will come, you need to be ready. Stop getting content written en masse overseas for next to nothing. There is a normally a good reason it is so cheap. Think about your content structure, core messages and conversion factors. Keep people on the page, give them the facts and then keep them on the site, get them to convert.

• Changes will continue: These are early days, the spam pressure is on. JC Penney and Overstock amongst others have felt the wrath so far. The testing and roll outs will continue. If you have been sailing close to the wind. Be careful.

We think there might be some rolling back of strategies and undoing of linking practices in the near future. The world has changed again.

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