What Are the Algorithm Updates Telling Us?

Every time our traffic takes a sudden nose dive, we go into a frenzy to uncover the cause and find the quickest way to undo the damage. We’ve trained ourselves to get by until the next horrific update takes our sites out again.

What if we looked at what’s going on another way? (Yes, I know many of you are sitting there thinking it’s all about Google making more money, but let’s put that thought on hold for a minute).  Humor me for a moment and let’s compare a website to a movie.

The Penguin Update

As you’ve probably heard, a big focus of the Penguin update was taking out SEO blogs. SEO blogs exist purely to give out links to websites from each post.  Whether paid or not, most of them contain many completely unrelated topics, giving the blog no main focus. The obvious conclusion is that Google wanted to subdue a tactic that has been very successful in gaming search engine rankings.

The less obvious observation is that Google wants to let a focused website rank well. When you physically go to work, you go to one job. You specialize in that job. That makes you an authority. Websites can be authorities by focusing and doing a really great job at one thing. No one is a jack of all trades and websites shouldn’t be either.

Now, think about what makes a box office hit a success. It tells one story, it has action, it develops the characters and has a climax. Success is measured by many things: money, recommendations, ratings, etc.

Now apply this thinking to a website. How should Google know your website is a box office hit? Is it exciting, does it induce recommendations and ratings, etc.? Online, we see these things as links from related websites, chatter in forums, likes and shares on Facebook and mentions on Twitter.

The Panda Update

Panda was and continues to be about poor quality content. Thin content sites are like B movies: few people see or ever hear about them. They tell the same story that’s been done in other movies, have bad actors, low budgets and thin plots. It’s obvious to us why they don’t succeed. If we spend money to see them, we consider it a waste and tell people not to go see it.

You see the same type of behavior show up online when people leave poor ratings about your products and/or customer service. You see it show up as a high bounce rate on your pages, meaning users are back clicking off your pages.

The Long Haul

Pretend your website is a movie. Find ways to create excitement, even if it means doing research, conducting an interview with someone in the field, running a contest or giving something useful out for free. I think if you change the way you think about ranking, you can change your rankings. If you think about producing a box office hit, you can establish your site as an authority in your field.

  Theresa Happe

About the Guest Author:

Theresa Happe works with NameFind.com where you can find business name ideas for creating a website to suit your business.