After living through the Bronze Age, the the Iron Age, and even an Ice Age or two, mankind has reached what may very well be known to future historians as “The Google Age.” Beyond providing instant answers and a bit of interactive fun via its trademark Doodles, Google is a driving force of industry innovation and a source of inspiration (and occasionally, frustration) for website owners everywhere, to the tune of billions.
Crawling and sorting and analyzing the 60 trillion pages that make up the modern Internet takes a fair degree of high-tech wizardry, and Google is constantly updating its search and indexing technology. And when they do, even minor updates can have a big impact on search results—and, by extension, the success of websites that show up in those results. Given that landing on the first page means a bite at 95% of all search traffic, understanding the ins and out of Google magic is a key part of online success.
Updates to Google’s algorithm (beginning with Panda in 2011) improve search results by removing spam and dropping “low quality” sites (i.e., sites with minimal value, repetitive content, etc.) from the top results. Changes in results formatting, authorship/attribution, and localization, along with other customizations make finding the right search results easier, but they also make creating high-quality content more important than ever.
With Penguin, the latest update, Google levies heavy search penalties against sites with a “link profile” that contains links to low-quality sites, paid links, or links to pages with “over-optimized” anchor text. Subsequent changes include advanced predictive searching (based on results other users have found useful with searches similar to yours), reformatted, context-dependent Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and more. With every update, walking the line between content that’s Google-friendly and content that gets kicked to virtual curb becomes less of a process and more of an art form.
And while mastering that art form can certainly be worth the time and effort, the companies taking the time and money to do so are major cash cows for Google. In fact, companies seeking the top spots paid almost $38 billion in advertising fees to Google in 2011 alone. As Google continues to create an Internet experience that’s both more intuitive and more customized than ever before, site owners, Web designers, and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists will no doubt continue their struggles to the top of the heap by playing by Google’s rules—and lining their coffers.
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