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Google Announces New Algorithm Change

Guest post by: Karen Scharf

Article Overview: If you’ve been paying attention to your website traffic, you might have noticed a significant dip in the number of visitors coming to your website by searching longtail keywords.

Google Announces New Algorithm Change

If you've been paying attention to your website traffic, you might have noticed a significant dip in the number of visitors coming to your website by searching longtail keywords. (Longtail keywords are search terms that have more than 3 words in the phrase. "Marketing" is a keyword. "Indianapolis Small Business Marketing Consultant" is a longtail keyword.) Google has recently announced an algorithm change that went into affect at the beginning of May. According to Google's Matt Cutts, the change is more noticeable with longtail keywords than "regular" keywords and it is expected to be a permanent change. He also mentioned that the change has nothing to do with Caffeine.

According to Matt, the algorithm change was brought about because Google engineers wanted a better assessment of the quality of websites being presented in the SERPs; although he was adamant that it is strictly an algorithm change and does not involve any human review of individual websites.

How Does This Affect You?

First, the important thing to point out is that the new algorithm affects mostly longtail keywords. This is significant because searchers using longtail phrases are typically closer to the end of their buying cycle. That means they're more ready to make a purchase. If you're seeing a big loss of traffic from longtail searchers, there's also a good chance you're seeing a loss of sales.

On the other hand, I know several webmasters who have experienced a reduction in bounce rate with the new algorithm, since the SERPs are sending only the most relevant traffic to their sites. So, apparently, the new algorithms are presenting a better user experience, which is what Google is after in the long run.

What Can You Do About It?

First, rest assured that websites are not being hand-picked to get a better Google SERP position. It's not necessary to be the cousin of Google CEO Eric Schmidt to rank well with the new Google algorithm.

The next thing to remember is that Google does not release the details of their algorithm changes, so it's never as easy as saying "do this, this, and this and your site will rank well." But we can read between the lines and watch our own traffic logs in order to figure out what Google is looking for.

First, Google is after an enhanced user experience - and to Google, the user is the web searcher, not the webmaster. The most important thing you can do to provide a great user experience is to have lots of unique, authoritative content on your site. (The best way to add lots of content is with a blog.)

Some tips that other webmasters have noticed include:

• If your site includes a lot of affiliate links, you might try reducing to only one or two links per page.

• If you're a distributor for another product, be sure that you don't simply copy and paste the product descriptions that you receive from the manufacturers. Google is looking for unique content, and if there are several distributor sites with the exact same product descriptions, there's no guarantee that yours is the site that will rank well.

• If you're selling affiliate products, the same suggestion applies. Be sure to write your own sales copy and provide additional, unique information.

• Don't spend too much time trying to stuff your keywords into your URL. If it works naturally, that's fine; but it appears as if this particular SEO technique has gone the way of the keyword meta tag.

• Make sure you site has plenty of high quality, unique content. Unique content is the key. If you're simply republishing other people's work, chances are you'll see a significant loss of traffic.

And if you did get hit by the algorithm changes, don't let it get you down. Several very high-profile websites have noticed a significant decrease in search traffic, so at least you're in good company. Remember, Google makes over 400 changes to their algorithms every year, and most of them go virtually unnoticed.

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Article Tags: google, marketing, SEO



Related Forum Posts
Re: Cool Video - How Google Updates it's Search Algorithm - Great Video Evan! As per the recent Google Algorithm update. Google also give more value to content and even shows rich snippet in Google SERP's.
Re: Google's algorithm - Thank you for all this useful information on the latest Google Algorithm. I think personally that so long as one writes unique articles with good information they will be OK. MichelleJ
Re: Search Engine choices and SEO - to my experience if you optimize for Google Bing eventually catches up and Yahoo uses Bing Algorithm so that works as well. It's just Bing and Yahoo are a bit slower of discovering new content and also are more likely to get spammed because Google's web spam team is actively trying to figure out ways to improve search quality.
Re: Article Marketing - No doubt, Article Marketing is a smart way to collect do follow, one way quality back links for your site. You can promote your business with article marketing easily. However recent updates in Google Algorithm has pushed article marketing a bit down still it's a good resource to promote your business online.
How Do You Check Google Ranking? - Now that Google is so responsive to your own search history, how can you get a good idea of what your Google ranking really is for your web pages? Whenever I check my ranking for specific keywords on Google, my web pages appear on the front page, or suspiciously high. My way around this is to check Google ranking via other computer Internet links, i.e., whenever I'm working in a library I will use a library computer to check. I check Google ranking before logging into my Gmail or other Google-related accounts. Does anybody else have any other tips for discovering your Google ranking? Nowadays, I check Bing.com for my webpage ranking as it gives a much less favourable (and so, I guess, "truer") ranking for my webpages than Google does...


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