Google’s results have recently sent SEO-ers a little bit crazy, with many online businesses seeing their rankings go either down or up the ranking results with no apparent reason.
This has finally been explained by google who have informed us that they have released a new search algorithm that affects about 90% of searches.
This new update named hummingbird has apparently been in place for about a month and appears to be leaving the smaller online companies fighting to retain their position as the larger companies seem to be getting preferential treatment.
Hummingbird now allows for more complex search queries to keep in line with voice searches. Nowadays one might ask ” where is there a rembrandt exhibition in europe in the next month?” when previously you may have just typed in rembrandt exhibitions.
After some research it seems that pages with a lower bounce rate are climbing up the results, login pages seem to be fairing quite well as it is likely that the user will of course go deeper into the website. It seems a little strange that a page with little or no content fairs better than a content rich web page that has a good menu structure and offers a far better user experience.
Another website that was based on a WordPress template ranked really well for some keywords has disappeared from the results, despite the fact that WordPress sites normally do very well as they create a naturally SEO friendly menu structure.
I suppose the point of this piece is that Google seems to have gotten it wrong, it may be a temporary glitch,(and as an SEO man myself i hope it is) but its a glitch nonetheless. As a small business owner all you can do is keep the content relevant to your website, produce quality, interesting web pages for your viewing public, and keep your incoming links as natural as possible. This way you should be able to handle the peaks and troughs that are no doubt happening to your rankings.
This will of course have a knock on effect for the other search engines, chatter on the net is that more and more people are going to be using Bing as their default search engine of choice, the stability and consistency of the results they produce makes them a far less stressful choice than Google at the moment. The SEO world will soon be doing the same, getting stable results for our clients, being able to show improvements is the name of the game. When google makes it hard for us to show results, of course we will go elsewhere.
Of course you can always rely on the experts at Smartbox to do the best for you.
