“Just google it.”
When a search engine becomes so mainstream that it’s name becomes a verb, it likely because nearly everyone is using it. And when nearly everyone is using it, as a website, the fight begins to get noticed. To get noticed, you want to be on the first three pages. And to get on the first three pages, a website needs to not cater to Google.
While it seems like a good idea, catering your site and its content to Google is NOT a good idea. In the early days of the Internet searching tool, there were ‘tricks’ you could do to get yourself moved up the search results pages. With these tricks and tactics available, there were a TON of tricksters publishing pages whose sole purpose was to get users to the page because page views equated to money from their advertisers. Remember all of those pop-up boxes?
The Revolution
If your site didn’t actually deliver anything useful, which these bogus sites typically did not, it frustrated users. Google figured out that many of its top results were these bogus pages designed to get users to view the page with no actual content. They weren’t happy with this either. Google knows users want good, reliable information delivered quickly. So, in 2011, revolutionized SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and cleaned up the search results in a hurry.
In addition to their very frequent algorithm updates1, Google started releasing large milestone updates to their algorithm, which hit the bad sites hard and impacted some good sites in the process. The caveat to these updates was that if your (good) site lacked proper code, lacked purpose, got stale, or didn’t work well with mobile devices you would see your site drastically fall in the search results and in some cases fall off the search results pages altogether.
Aftermath
This definitely created a panic, especially in the corporate world. After the scramble, we all learned just how valuable a high-quality developed site was in Google’s eyes, and how bad it was to add “fluff” to your site.
The moral here is that Google doesn’t reward you for trying to cater to them. They don’t want your attention. Google understands that a user’s time is the most valuable asset. As a business, getting users to your site is a legitimate metric. If you are providing what users are “googling”, whether a product, service, or information, then users will continue to come back to your site. Google rewards sites that are well written, well coded, and provide useful, fresh information to users.
If you do these things, you should see your site improve its position in the search results. If you need help, or would like an SEO analysis on your website, please contact Cranson Solutions… we are happy to help!
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