The last two years have been one of the biggest shake ups in the world of search engine optimisation (SEO). The Panda and Penguin updates saw Google make some dramatic changes to their algorithm*, which has drastically changed the way they rank websites and, in particular, how they rate the value of links to your site.
*Google’s algorithm defines the criteria for ranking websites on their search results pages.
The History of Google and SEO
In order to fully understand the impact of these changes it is useful to go back and look at how search has evolved and, with it, SEO and Google.
The first dominant company in search were Yahoo!, who launched the Yahoo! Directory in 1994. The idea was that sites would be submitted to the search engine for users to search and find.
In the mid 90s Altavista launched with a superior index and new way of crawling the internet and ranking sites. This heralded the start of on-page SEO and the technique we now know as keyword stuffing. Five years later, as Google entered the scene, everyone was stuffing their site full of keywords and this practice had become so widely abused it was adversely affecting search results.
In the early 2000s Google totally revolutionised the way that search worked. It started to rank sites using the number of links to a site as one of the core ranking factors. The idea was simple – the more links to a site from other sites the more useful that site must be to users. Each site was given a PageRank, a score out of 10. The value and number of links began to become extremely important.
Google’s focus on quality search results gave it the upper hand over its competitors. It also meant the beginning of the end for keyword stuffing as Google sought out those trying to trick it. There was a famous example of BMW being de-indexed (removed from Google) for stuffing hundreds of keywords into their brand new flash site. Flash can’t be read by the Google bots, so the idea was to stuff loads of keywords into the code, which wouldn’t be visible to people, but would to search engines. This practice was hugely abused so Google decided to penalise any site using this technique. Even though BMW wasn’t trying to trick it, Google had decided that any practice that could easily be abused needed to be punished.
Google’s Dominance is Complete
Many of the early SEO tricks are now completely redundant. Google stopped even noting the meta keywords on a site years ago. Alt-tags (used to describe an image if it fails to appear or the user is using a screen reader) are now broadly ignored. Links in the footer containing keywords are defunct. Onsite SEO is now limited to the page-title, headers, internal linking structure and content. There’s little use in trying to stuff keywords anymore, Google is far too intelligent for that.
So SEO’s were left with link building, the most difficult part. With clients wanting results quickly and an entire industry promising first positions, they needed techniques that could propel sites right to the top. The result was several practices which were relatively easy to implement and could trick Google easily.
Redundant SEO Techniques
There are, broadly, two schools of SEO thought – black hat and white hat. (Now a little old hat, but to understand the history it’s important to understand these terms.) White hat SEOs tended to use straight forward and above board techniques, such as online PR, content creation and social media to build links. Black hat techniques were generally about trying to replicate many links using some of the following methods:
- Paid and non-paid directory submissions.
Directories are sites that list hundreds of links, some useful (dmoz) and many which were really only designed for SEO purposes. These sites would have pretty high PageRanks and then sell space on their sites to other sites. These became link farms – pages of links of no use to an actual person. - Article submissions.
This involved writing an article and sharing it in as many article directories as possible. The article would show you to be an expert in your field, which would then link back to your site using relevant anchor text. - Duplicating content on lots of linked blogs.
Duplicated content is difficult for Google because if it is faced with the same content it is difficult for it to know which to rank higher. This practice is not dissimilar to article submissions, but involves creating lots of blogs on different i.p. addresses to try to trick Google.
There are many more, but they are generally variations on a theme. These are the kind of link building practices which Google has worked extremely hard to penalise through Panda and Penguin.
The Result of Panda and Penguin
The two major updates to Google’s algorithm drastically changed the way SEO worked. Companies who had hired SEOs who carried out black hat techniques, or had adopted them themselves, saw their traffic fall by up to half. Some businesses had become to rely so strongly on the revenue from one major keyword that when their site dropped down the rankings overnight it had a dramatic effect on the whole business.
Overall the effect has been that we all have to work a lot harder to rank higher on Google. Creating great content on your own website and using social media, email marketing and PR are now the best and pretty much only way to create links.