Many experts in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) consider Google’s algorithm to be the “secret sauce” that determines which websites rank high on search engine result pages. The Google algorithm is shrouded in secrecy, but there are rumours about what factors influence its rankings – and how often it changes. This article provides an overview of different Google SEO algorithms and what it takes to rank highly on Google.

Google Algorithm Basics

In the early days of search engines, there was only one algorithm used by all search engines. In 1998, Google changed everything when its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to use a different method for ranking pages that took into account popularity or “link popularity”. This idea is where the term “PageRank” comes from – a name that seems to have stuck even though Google has since changed their algorithm.

It’s important to understand how PageRank works because it is one of the main factors used in all modern SEO algorithms. Essentially, Google counts the number and quality of links coming into a given webpage, with more links being better. When PageRank was first introduced, it allowed popular websites to rank higher. Over time, Google tweaked their algorithms to allow for other ranking factors – including the freshness of content, keywords used in the title and URL, social signals from platforms like Facebook and Pinterest, user experience signals (time on site), and more.

Today’s SEO Algorithms

Since Google’s major algorithm updates are rolled out once or twice a year, there is speculation that they release smaller updates constantly throughout the year. One reason why these smaller changes can be difficult to track is because most people do not have access to Google’s all-powerful tracking tools – the majority of SEO experts need to rely on watching how traffic rankings change over time to catch these minor updates.

One of the main components of Google SEO algorithms is to target spam websites. Websites that are unhelpful or unpopular will likely receive a lot less traffic, while high quality content that keeps readers coming back – like Quicksprout! – tend to rank higher on search result pages.

The algorithm looks at dozens of different factors before it decides if your website should rank higher or lower, which makes it difficult for webmasters to improve their rankings within Google’s algorithm specifically. Fortunately, there are many other things you can do to drive traffic from Google – including setting up an AdWords campaign, starting a blog about your brand, and promoting yourself on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Google Algorithm Updates

The Google algorithm is a constantly changing system that looks at different signals to determine which websites rank higher for certain keywords. In recent years, Google has been releasing updates at a faster rate than ever before – with the most recent being named “Hummingbird”, launched in 2013. While many of these algorithm updates have been small tweaks to existing algorithms, Google released several major announcements over the past few years:

Panda (February 2011) 

Aimed to reduce rankings for low-quality content and sites that used techniques like keyword stuffing or link farming.

Penguin (April 2012) 

Looked at links and penalized websites that were buying or selling links as a way of manipulating search engine results. Penguin 2.0 was then released in October 2012 to further penalize websites with unnatural links.

Hummingbird (September 2013) 

Algorithm update that focused on semantic search, meaning that Google can now understand complex questions and how they are connected instead of just keywords. Hummingbird is the reason why Google Now exists – a service that can answer random questions based on location and your search history.

Mobilegeddon (April 2015) 

This update gave priority to mobile friendly websites, increasing their search engine rankings. With this update, it became vitally important for SEO to make sure their website is mobile-friendly if they want to rank highly for many SERPs.

RankBrain (October 2015)

 The first major algorithm change from machine learning techniques. RankBrain allows Google to process search results in a different way – this means that there are more opportunities to get traffic from Google, but it also means that the results you see might be completely unfamiliar.

Universal Search Algorithm (February 2016) 

Merged Google Knowledge Graph with traditional SERPs, allowing for deeper information on topics and higher rankings for certain sites.

Pigeon Update (July 2015) 

Split local SEO into its own algorithm, which has been shown to have a major impact on small businesses. Pigeons were released to target specific geographic areas, so if your website is ranking well in your home town but not elsewhere – you might have been hit by Pigeon!

Mobile Update (Earlier 2016) 

A major update that aims to give rankings to websites that Google considers engaging and useful on mobile devices. This probably means that websites with more mobile-friendly pages will be favoured, including Quicksprout!

Google Algorithm 2017 – With all of these changes happening in the last few years, what should SEOs expect from the future? Well, it’s hard to tell – but here are some educated guesses based on certain trends within search engine optimization:

Voice Search

 With Siri, Cortana, Alexa and the other virtual assistants dominating the market – it’s clear people are using voice search much more than ever before. This might mean simple changes like optimizing for your local area adding a phone number to your website, or more complex changes like increasing CTR and click-through rates on your ads.

Video 

 With YouTube dominating the online video space and Google investing in video streaming, we can expect to see video playing a bigger role in SEO campaigns than ever before. This means optimizing for keywords that relate to both videos AND text, as well as making sure your website is mobile-friendly since many users will be watching videos on their phones.

Personalized Search 

 The internet is quickly becoming an incredibly personalized experience with certain websites tailoring themselves depending on who you are and what you’ve searched (including Quicksprout!). This requires extensive technical work to make sure your content isn’t showing up to the wrong people, but also requires special attention when crafting digital marketing campaigns.

Ads 

 It’s clear that Google wants its users to only see the most important ads when they search, and this means advertisers will need to work harder than ever before if they want their adverts to show up in high positions. This also includes making sure your website is mobile-friendly since many ads are served based on location and type of device!

Machine Learning 

 Machine learning is a powerful tool that’s going to be increasingly important across the internet, and this even includes Google Search. This means that digital marketers will need to learn to develop their own machine-learning capabilities – which could make them invaluable employees in the future!

How do you upgrade the Site according to Google algorithms?

1) Make your site mobile friendly

If you want to be in Google good books, make sure your website is well adapted for mobile browsers. This means making it easier for users to navigate your site, read content and find what they’re looking for without getting distracted by popups, broken links or intrusive ads. It also means improving user experience by blocking spammy pages that are set out just to get through adverts or affiliate links, which will help improve CTR – something that Google takes into account when ranking websites!

2) Focus on high-quality webpages

You should write articles with clear titles, headlines and paragraphs so that web crawlers can easily ‘read’ them. While this doesn’t seem like SEO at first glance – it directly impacts your website’s ranking. This is because Google wants to provide users with the best results possible, and this means giving priority to websites that are well written, easily understood and are relevant for the user’s search term. Websites that don’t match these criteria often land in lower positions than their competitors – so keep it long-form, friendly and high quality!

3) Link building matters

As you probably know already, Google uses links as a way of evaluating how popular or authoritative any given webpage is. However, they’re not just looking at them from other websites – they’re also looking at internal links on your page (those relative to your own domain). Make sure that pages on your website back to important web pages using internal links, as well as links to important pages on other websites. Not only does this increase the likelihood of those webpages ranking, but it also helps you improve click-through rates which are taken into account during rankings!

4) Make sure Google can crawl your site

There are a few things that play a big role in whether Google sees your website or not. This includes using HTML tags correctly (meaning including keywords for SEO), making sure your URL’s don’t have unnecessary parameters and blocking spammy directories/pages that could be seen as disruptive by search engines.

5) Improve CTR on ads

It’s clear that CTR is an essential metric if you want to rank high in Adsense results, so you should work hard on improving your CTR. This means making your ads relevant, avoiding popups and disruptive adverts, and of course making sure they look great!

6) Improve load time

Google has been paying close attention to site speed for a few years now, so make sure you keep this under control if you want to rank high. You should check out tools like Pingdom or Google’s own PageSpeed Insights to get a better idea of how fast a page loads – and what you can do to improve it.

7) Build links from other websites

Link building is an essential part of any SEO campaign since Google uses them as a way of identifying the importance of webpages. However, it’s not just about quantity anymore – quality matters too. In 2015 Google admitted that they’d been using links from ‘low-quality websites as a metric for determining the importance of any given webpage – but in 2016 they admitted this had changed. Now, they look at overall website quality and then discount bad links when evaluating a site’s ranking potential. If you want to build quality links, you’ll need to invest in creating high-quality content that other websites will want to link back to!

9) Keep it natural/Don’t overdo keyword stuffing

Google has gotten a lot better at filtering out spammy or irrelevant results since its algorithm began changing regularly in 2011. This is why keywords have become less important over time – so avoid trying too hard to stuff them into your text because users don’t want to read things that look unnatural.

10) Mind your meta descriptions

There’s a lot of misinformation about what meta descriptions do and how they impact rankings, but the basic truth is that Google uses them as a way of supplementing their search results with additional information from your site. Meta descriptions are important for SEO because you should make sure they’re written in a way which entices users to click on your link – this means including the most relevant keywords possible!

11) Optimize for mobile devices

The fact is that more people now search using their smartphones than they do using desktop computers, so it only makes sense to optimize your website for mobile devices if you want Google to see it as an authority. This involves making sure all pages are mobile-friendly, reducing image file sizes so there’s less time spent loading pages, and making sure your website is compatible with all devices.

12) Make sure you’re not blocking Google bots

It’s pretty common for webmasters to block search engines or other bots from crawling their websites, but this can actually have a negative impact on how high you rank in results. This happens because search engine crawlers are able to identify which links matter based on the number of times they appear – so if lots of links get blocked then Googlebot won’t know which ones are important. The way to avoid this? Just don’t block any crawlers!

13) Increase overall traffic

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that increasing your overall website traffic can boost your page ranking in Google. This is because more links from high-traffic sites are seen as a metric of your site’s importance, so make sure you get more people visiting if you want to get noticed by Google!

14) Use Google Search Console to improve your site

Google provides its own website for learning about potential issues with SEO – called the Search Quality Rating Guidelines. If you want to make sure your website is in tip-top shape when it comes to SEO, use the resources on this page to identify any problems and then try fixing them yourself or by hiring an expert if necessary!

15) Get ready for mobilegeddon!

On April 21st 2015, Google introduced their most significant algorithm change since Penguin hit in 2012. Dubbed ‘mobilegeddon’ because of how it penalizes websites that aren’t optimized for mobile phones, these changes caused many websites which were previously ranking high suddenly start dropping down search rankings. This was all done with the intention of increased relevance, so you can expect Google to continue putting a lot of emphasis on mobile devices from now on!

What are main Domain Factors for high Ranking?

1) Age of domain

2nd factor is the age of your website/domain. Usually, an older site will rank higher than a new domain. A new website takes time to build authority in Google’s eyes while old sites are more trusted and tend to rank better (although this also depends on other factors like backlinks).

2) Backlinks

Backlinks are difficult to get when you have a new site so there is no point in creating everything at once because it will take some time for search engines to trust your site. You need time for people to link back to your content so that Google knows you are reliable and deserves a high-ranking spot.

On the other hand, if you buy an established domain with old content, you can get good links immediately through the links built by the previous owner.

3) Keyword in domain

The next factor is whether a keyword appears in your URL. When a keyword has a presence inside a website’s address, it becomes easier for Google to understand what your site is about so therefor websites with keywords inside their URLs tend to rank higher than those which don’t have any related keywords at all.

4) Age of social media accounts

Websites with social media accounts that are older will usually rank better as well. So if you’re trying to build authority through Twitter or Facebook, be sure your account isn’t too new or else it won’t have an impact on SEO!

5) Domain registration length and location

Domain registration length and location also play a role in how well your website ranks. If you want any chance of succeeding online, make sure to register a domain name for at least 1 year because this is what Google recommends all websites do! It’s also important that a website uses a dot COM or else it won’t be considered by search engines as much.

Conclusion

To conclude, it’s important to note that these are only the main factors that influence your website’s SEO. There are many other things to take into account when trying to improve your site’s rankings but these are just some of the biggest contributors. If you have any more questions about how Google works or what you can do for better search engine optimization, just comment below!

Graduation is a big accomplishment in life so be sure to check out our guide on Graduation Party Invitations! We also have guides on College Graduation Gifts and Graduation Cap decorations.