Recent Google Search Updates and How They Effect You
I’ve been getting a lot of emails from subscribers about the recent Google updates and how my methods are effected by it.
If you’ve bought any of my courses, you know I’m an advocate for unique content… and unique content that actually serves a purpose. I’ve been doing SEO for a number of years now, and I’ve noticed the number 1 key to longevity in search rankings is to do what the search engines want you to do.
They want REAL unique content written by a real person. They don’t want automatically spun garbage, auto blogging (I’ll talk about that in a sec), and any of the usual stuff that people try and short cut with.
The good news is, if you’ve followed what I taught you in any of my trainings you are 100% OK.
Here’s what it all boils down to… you ready?
Making your websites for the users, and not the search engines.
That’s right! All you have to do is make a website that YOU YOURSELF would want to spend time reading. How do you do that? Simple:
- Write content that has value (300 words or more). While you can get away with creating ‘common knowledge’ content, every extra bit of effort you put into your content creation carries it a long way. Actually write about tips and info that if you read, you’d learn something as well.
- Add images and videos to capture user interest.
- Proper formatting (while SEs don’t care about formatting, it makes your content more readable which equates to higher conversions)
It’s as simple as that. Nothing has changed – however one thing I would suggest you do is try not to overload your site with affiliate links. Occasionally publish an article here and there that is pure content. If you use affiliate links, make them no-follow.
Now…. Auto-blogging: dead or alive?
The recent Google updates were designed to weed out auto-blogging sites – however I’ve seen a number of Google updates in the past that were supposed to weed out those auto-blogger sites, yet they still continue to grab search traffic. Most of my auto-blogging sites are still getting organic search traffic, so clearly the update wasn’t as effective as everyone thinks. I did notice a couple lost their traffic, but those were very thin and crappy auto-blog sites that had very little content within.
While I think they did change their search algorithms a tad, something tells me all they really did was take on a few more manual editors to review search results to manually weed out junk sites as a short term effort to discourage people from auto-blogging. If you couple that with a ‘big announcement’ of an algo change, the effects ripple through the webmaster community. Some webmasters notice that their auto-blog sites were de-indexed, they freak out and associate it with the Google updates and then run to their favorite webmaster community to tell everyone about what happened. Other people start jumping on saying they also lost some traffic, and before you know it those threads go viral, and people start proclaiming that Google has “effectively eliminated auto-blogging”.
It’s another one of those ‘the world is ending’ mindsets IMO.
But the thing is… I’ve been hearing that for years, but yet people are still effectively using auto-blogging effectively to get traffic from the search engines.
Let me show you some of the traffic stats for one of my auto-blogs. The update was around the end of February. Look at my traffic which is organic search driven for March 2011 ( btw, I accidentally let the account expire for about a week during March)
Thoughts?
