The Importance of Listening to Google
Updates to Google’s algorithm have rippled through the web and damaged many unsuspecting companies, but the warning signs were always there, if you just listened.
Updates to Google’s algorithm have rippled through the web and damaged many unsuspecting companies, but the warning signs were always there, if you just listened.
For those who’ve been in the trenches of SEO for any extended period of time you’ll know that if you just listen to what Google is telling you (and sometimes not telling you) you’ll be able to take advantage of change before it happens and avoid issues both large and small.
Those who may be just getting your feet wet or who may not be SEOs but be business owners or executives responsible for their budgets, hopefully this article will help you understand the significant research and time invested by top SEOs (hopefully you call them “employees”) into following Google’s words, deeds and even patents to insure your budget isn’t always spent keeping up with the Jones’ but working on tasks they may not even know about yet.
Before we get into some resources to help keep up or know if those working for you, let’s look at some examples of Google telling us about changes before they take hold and imagine what this could have meant had their words been heeded before they were needed.
The Panda Updates
The first Panda update visited us on February 23, 2011. The focus of this algorithm was to devalue thin content, content farms and sites with a high ad-to-content ratio. Essentially it was an attack on spam. Unfortunately there were sites that weren’t spam but looked like it and they got hit too. Even worse, there were business owners following the advice of their SEOs and churning out poor copy only to get hit when the Panda invaded.
Worth noting, this wasn’t a single update. There were a total of 27 official pushes of the Panda algorithm and the “threat” that another could roll out at any time. But what’s important here isn’t the number of updates or even their impact, it’s the date they started … February 23, 2011. And now we have to ask ourselves, “Could we have seen this coming?” Let’s take a walk down memory lane. Here are some statements and actions from Google prior to the first Panda update:
These are far from the only examples of clear indicators of the Panda Update but they certainly serve to prove the point, Google wasn’t hiding what they wanted prior to the update series. But let’s look at another example in: The Penguin Updates.
The Penguin Updates
While the Penguin update technically targeted spam as a whole, it has become synonymous with link spam and for good reason, as some of the largest effects came in the form of link penalties and the complete decimation of rankings based on these. For the purpose of this article and to keep the examples on topic, let’s focus on this aspect in our examples. What we’ll be asking ourselves then is, prior to the April 24, 2012 launch of the Penguin update series (which went into everflux mode on December 10, 2014 after 6 unique updates).
Worth noting before we begin, the links the Penguin updates seemed to attack were those most subjected to manipulation, including: blog networks, comment spamming, directories, and pretty much anything that was easy to do. It seemed that when Google created an algorithm that included links, they really only wanted to include natural links. Go figure.
So let’s look at some of the warning signs. This one’s a tough one as it’s difficult to limit the times these link strategies were brought up by Google, but let’s find just a few of the clearest:
So anyone hit by the Penguin update for links couldn’t, in any way, claim ignorance. It was clear from these and many, many other statements and warnings from Google that link manipulation was an area of contention and violating Google guidelines in this area could lead to trouble.
But let’s pull into a more current example.
The Mobile Update
This may be the first time that Google has given so much formal warning of an update and who can blame then, adding a new index just for mobile is big. Who could have seen that coming?
So the writing was on the wall well before the announcement of the mobile index. If you didn’t have your site over by the announcement, you couldn’t say you weren’t warned. Heck, for most people, you simply need to look to your analytics to know mobile was important but Google definitely gave us signs they thoughts it was.