Latest Google Algorithm Update – Now People Panic!

Darren Franks - April 27, 2011

The age old axiom of, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” has had so much meaning for me over the last few weeks with the latest “algorithm update”. In actuality, Google makes so many updates a year, that this isn’t really an “update”, just a reinforcement of SEO philosophies that I and other SEOs have been preaching for years: “low quality websites will be penalized in the long-run!” Don’t believe me? Read this blog post by SISTRIX: http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html.

Data aside, while I do feel a little sorry for some webmasters, I can see Google’s point of view. Google is a search engine that wants to serve pages in their results that are relevant and provide a favorable user experience. Good user experience can mean a multitude of things: interesting and relevant content, fast page load times etc. For Google to stay the number one search engine in the world, they need to ensure that their search results are the best search results you can find, anywhere. While other search engines like Bing and Ask may be a little less stringent in their webmaster guidelines, their algorithms just aren’t as sophisticated as Google’s in that they can be a little “naïve” with the results they serve.

Google’s algorithm was built on the foundation that the amount and quality of the inbound links pointing to a web document should be a major signal when ranking pages. Google also want to present the most relevant, topical (if need be) and compelling data that they can. With the plethora of Google algorithmic updates per year, it’s possible that Bing may fall by the wayside. The only real way to detect any obvious differences between the algorithms of both search engines is to simply compare search results for the same keyphrase.

With that being said, it’s safe to say that all search engines are always looking to serve pages in their SERPs that adhere to all of the same basic SEO best practice doctrines: well structured websites with good content, created for users and not just for the search engines, will always garner better rankings than ones that don’t.