Why has your SEO stopped working?

Have you started noticing that a lot of your efforts to push your site up the search engine results pages (SERPs) are now not having as much of an effect as they used to?

If so, then there is a good chance that your website has been penalised by Google’s algorithm updates.

Google's Panda and Penguin updates over the last 9 months have heavily targeted content and link spam.
Therefore these "less than white hat" tactics which used to work in the past (e.g. content farming, link networks, etc.) aren’t so effective anymore and in fact are much riskier now. This effect on your site could well be because Google has significantly changed it's ranking algorithm to penalise websites that breach their best practice guidelines. In fact, Google is known for making around 300 changes a year to this algorithm, which has over 200 factors (or 'signals') that affect it.

The Panda updates were meant to affect sites that depended on poor or duplicate content. It therefore hit sites that pulled or 'scraped' content from others.The Penguin updates that came a little later then affected sites that purchased links from other sites, rather than building them up correctly over time.

Now, the very work that has previously made your website rank well, may be having the opposite effect.

Note: I've been told by a few people recently things such as "we like your blog, but sometimes it gets too technical. Can't you write something a little less complex?". This posting is in response to that feedback and therefore I'd appreciate any further comments about its content.

Google Instant – a radical change?

Last week Google changed the search landscape yet again with the launch Google Instant, which transforms its search engine result pages (SERP’s) from a static list of results to an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) powered set of results. Now Google has been using a cut-down version of this technology for several years in its predictive text within the search box….. but what is impressive about this change is that the search results now update with every keystroke.

The whole SEO industry is continuing to deliberate about whether this is a big change or a small change for search engine optimisation professionals. Both way, it is a change that does have an impact, but then everything Google does (and it does a lot all the time) has an impact on SEO.

Suffice to say that the principles of SEO have not changed and Google has admitted that it has not changed it algorithm, just the way results are presented. But it is fair to say that after a week since its introduction there is now an additional layer of complexity for SEO people to deal with.