Google released another major 2011 algorithm update earlier fall and we’ve been monitoring its results on both our client sites as well as others.
There are a few things that we’ve gleaned so far on this latest algorithm change that we feel are valuable enough to share, not only with our clients but with the WWW.
- We’ve been preaching this for a long time, but SEO is way more then just link building and keyword targeting. SEO companies that sell on those two action items alone (‘You get 500 links a month for $1000 in our Silver package’) are outdated and outclassed. They’ll never be able to achieve long term results in competitive industries, without putting a significant risk of manual action by Google coming into play. One of our clients received an offer today for ‘blog posts’ for $.10 each. What the SEO company meant to say was that they were offering low quality forum links for $.10 each. I explained the dangers of engaging in such practices and covered some of the intricacies of the way algorithms evaluate links. When looking for an SEO company, look for one that talks about a lot of Google’s algorithm factors AND how users experience your website. Ultimately the two go hand in hand.
- Newness is relevant. Google has long been heading towards a direction where the recency of your content and updates influence the value of your site. Although the Freshness update will likely be tweaked further to somewhat mitigate the affect, Google will continue to favor sites that are regularly updating their contents and materials to be more relevant and ‘fresh’ for their users. Many of our clients that are either engaging us for content creation or are working on this leg of their marketing themselves are seeing great returns in competitive searches because of this adjustment. We see this as a big opportunity for smaller companies, individuals, and startups to pursue- posting regularly with great content is a chance for you to get your name out where a bigger brand is not.
If you have questions on other components of Google’s algorithms, or would like help with monitoring, managing, and creating an SEO campaign, please contact us. We’re located conveniently in Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles, CA and in the Seattle area in Washington state.