Google and other web search engines are continuously making updates to their search algorithms in order to increase search rankings and traffic flow. Each year, anywhere between 500 and 600 algorithm updates are made to the Google search algorithm; most being very minor, while others can have major impacts on search results and SEO.
It’s important to stay on top of the most recent algorithm updates to understand how these changes can affect organic website traffic or rankings, as well as your overall search engine optimization strategies. With the magnitude of updates that took place in 2011, we’ve boiled down the hundreds of changes to 4 key shifts in the SEO landscape this year.
Google Panda, also known as Google Farmer, algorithm update rolled out on February 23, 2011. This update, a change in Google’s search result ranking algorithm, was intended to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” and return “high-quality sites” near the top of search results. With Google Panda update, there was an increase that impacted 12% of queries.
Problems with Google Panda arose as “low-quality sites” were ranking higher than “high-quality sites, “causing Google to execute multiple updates following the February roll out; 6 updates to be exact. From February until mid-November, Google made numerous updates to Panda – including the international Panda 2.4 release in August.
Google introduced the +1 button on March 30, 2011, allowing users to recommend content directly from Google. With the unsuccessful Google Buzz effort, Google introduced the +1 button as another attempt to make Google more social. +1 allows users to share recommendations on Google search as well as Google+, which was rolled out just two months after the +1 button. In just one month, Google+ had over 10 million users, and has been continuously on the rise – with both personal pages, and recently, the launch of Google+ Business pages.
On June 2, 2011, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! announced their joint alliance of Schema.org. This alliance provided a common foundation of support for a set of Microdata types. Through this alliance, site owners and developers were able to learn about structured data and enhance their search results display, adding markup to their pages using this metadata.
Google announced their Freshness algorithm update on November 3, 2011, an update allowing search engines to pull up the most relevant and recent data searches. This update was a change in Google’s search algorithm, opposed to the rollout of “Caffeine” which was only an infrastructure change to make sure Google could generate faster results.
The Freshness update impacts three main searches: recent events or hot trending topics, regularly reoccurring events, and frequent updates. Through the Freshness rollout, 35% of searches were impacted, but not necessarily improved, resulting higher than the 12% impact of Panda earlier this year.
With the constant information overload and search engine updates, it’s very difficult to discern the factors ranking sites at the top of search listings, let alone generate the perfect SEO strategy for a business. Though adopting the updates to your business’s site is time consuming, these search engines are continuously updating their algorithms and figuring out the next best practices to implement in order to provide users with fast and relevant information, as well as boost your organic search rankings.