When Google announce updates like panda and penguin, the internet world took notice. Initially, it was all about Page Rankings and Google’s algorithm. This was how Google measured the amount of links from and to a website. Things have changed, now quality content rules the day.
The changes in the Google system of ranking in the way they ranked websites by using keywords and text located on the individual web pages was to become known as the “Panda” update. What this translated to was that a web page with a lot of text that also contained keywords that a person may be searching for would get a higher rank in the search results. Makes sense…but it didn’t work so well.
People soon realized that they can influence the Google system by placing huge quantities of keywords on their websites. This became “keyword stuffing”. Then came the “scraper sites”, a popular cheating method. People would scrape the internet and actually be stealing content and duplicate it on their site. Advertisements would be added, and these types of sites could be done on auto pilot by the thousands. What this would do was confuse the search engines and web surfers alike. They would click on the ads and the scrapers would reap the profits.
Google Catches On
It wasn’t long before Google caught on to the underhand tactics that were being deployed. It was time for a second adjustment to panda, which meant that Google would now be looking for complete articles, and would not give any credit to the duplicators and cheaters. Then came the widespread use of “Spun” content. Programs were used to change words in articles making them look like original unique articles that contained keywords. The idea was to trick the Google search-spiders so that they could not ascertain the difference between an original or a spun article.
Google Evolves
Google introduced artificial-intelligence into the game and changed everything. Penguin came along in September of 2012. It employed an algorithm that could “learn”. Now Google was able to spot sites that contained spun articles and duplicate content, even high quality sites from low ones. Black-Hat Tactics like: phony articles, link schemes, stuffing of keywords, scraper-sites, etc., are now being spotted and ignored, or worse…penalized in the rankings.
The bottom line is that now Google is only paying respect to websites that are legitimate. So if you want to obtain great page ranking, your site needs to have genuine info relevant to the topic it promotes. It is highly advantageous to have many genuine articles and blog posts written by real people containing the keywords and keyword phrases.
The more the better…….this is the key to great page rankings.
The idea is simple……when you type in a keyword for a search, you should get a reliable result.