I love posing a question within my blog titles. It just gets people thinking, right? I’m not talking about running a zoo, a professional NHL team or Asian fast food restaurant here… oh, come on people, you get the references (animals, the Pittsburgh Penguins and Panda Express – my favorite place and the only real option for Orange Chicken). Anyway, I’m talking about Google.
Do I have your attention now? Yep, as us so-called “SEO Experts” have been saying to our clients for a while – Google is constantly changing. And even more so in 2012. Quite honestly it would take most folks hours of “light” reading and sifting through technical terms to even come close to figuring out exactly what Penguin and Panda are.
In simple terms, they are names for groups of updates that Google is constantly making to their algorithm. This means that the things you need to do both on your site pages and off of your site pages in order to maximize your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) presence (i.e., ranking on Google Page 1 for keyword X) are always changing.
The main things you need to know though are this…
– It’s getting hard to “fake” popularity. Google doesn’t want sites to be rewarded anymore for creating backlinks on non-relevant sites or blog networks tied to the same IP range or domain name registrar. Real talk – your business now needs to be very careful what you pay your SEO specialists or third parties to do for you. What they’re doing can now hurt more than ever.
– There is no longer a get rich quick scheme way to rank high on Google “quickly” or “in 30 days” or even “three months.” It just doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, many businesses / SEO Experts are freaking out right now because their sites are being de-indexed or even blacklisted in some cases due to these algorithm updates. Why? Blackhat SEO. Our mindsets have to change. Real talk – do what’s right for your business: create compelling content on a consistent basis and push it out to the right people.
– Regarding on-page SEO, you can no longer simply stuff your keywords in your document or meta data. Generally, this was a bad practice even before these animal updates, but now even more so than ever, again, you simply have to have really relevant and compelling content.
This is all very hard work for sure. No doubt. But that’s how Google (and other search engines) wants it. They want their searches to be relevant, period, otherwise people will look for alternative ways to find their information. Seems extreme, but it’s true.
The main take-away from this article is that Panda and Penguin updates can definitely hurt your business, so be careful. Check into what SEO techniques your marketing department or third party partners are using. Become educated yourself on what’s happening.
Trust me though, there is still a way to achieve your “Google Goals” / SERP results. Doing the right things consistently over a long period of time. What are those “right things?” More to come on that in a future post. Stay tuned.
Tags: Google Updates
