The search algorithm of Google changes quite often. Because these changes aren’t always announced, it is very easy to not be aware of when they take place. It is up to those who rely on online marketing to remain alert and know when these changes take place, primarily by seeing that there has been an obvious change in the performance of your SEO, after the algorithm changes.
If you suddenly notice a few unexplainable shifts in the performance of your SEO, chances are the algorithms have changed. These changes can negatively impact the organic progression of your SEO strategies. To successfully manage your SEO performance, it is essential to remain apprised of the activity in the SEO industry.
Below are recent changes and the effects they could have on your SEO performance:
Fred
Not a hurricane, but very similar in impact, Fred caused severe turmoil in the SERPs. There was significant crashing of website rankings and a major shift in keyword rankings. Google eventually made it known that Fred targeted those sites with an abundance of ads but low-quality content. The primary goal of Google was to shadow the sites that were focused on generating money, instead of displaying good content.
If this impacted your site, you should:
- Clean up your links
- Improve the quality of content on your site
- Balance the number of targeted ads on your site
Mobile Interstitial Drawbacks
The ability to browse sites from a mobile device is a pleasure that is often interrupted by an intrusive amount of ads o the screen. This is a big deterrence to mobile visitors of websites. The ads have the potential to block the content unless you select to visit the advertiser’s page. Google has taken steps to penalize those sites that are plagued with annoying ads. In addition to obstructing the view of the intended content, the ads have the potential to cause the site to load slowly ad perform poorly, which has an adverse effect on search rankings. When visitors are bombarded with ads when visiting websites, Google will downgrade the site’s ranking.
What Google wants:
- Sites to value the visitor more than the need to throw unwanted ads at them
- Controlled advertising
- Users to have a quality experience when visiting websites
Webmasters should ensure that sites are adapting to the demands of Google. It is imperative that sites adequately respond to these demands, as Google is diminishing the SEO rankings of sites every day. There are proven methods available to attract your target audience. But this must be done while adhering to the guidelines as set forth by the search engine.
Quality SEO practices are only as strong as their counterparts. A quality approach is one that understands, studies, continuously educates and abides by the requirements of search engines. Failure to know and understand the changes of the algorithm could land you at the bottom of the search barrel, with very little chance to ever rise to the top.