vintage house number 3 by a Columbus website design firm

As a Columbus website design and SEO firm, we live in the SEO world week-in, week-out, and we try to keep up on all things SEO-related. But for those who don't live in that world, you probably don't even think about Google;s ever-changing algorithms.

Or, on the rare occasions you do, you may think Google's algorithms are there to wreak havoc among companies who just want their website to show up and not worry about changing things. But that's certainly not the case.

As with pretty much everything in life, things rarely stay the same, and Google's changing algorithms are only there to make the world of search a better place. Google’s goal is simple, really: to help people find the best information as quickly as possible. If they didn't do that, people would stop using Google pretty quickly. Therefore, it's in their best interest to continue to make search results better and more accurate.

In as simple terms as we can cite, here are three ways Google's changing algorithms actually help you.

1. Algorithms are updated to stop cheating.

During the last Presidential election, there were more fake news stories than real news stories being passed around the internet (ie: people cheating).

Why do people start these fake news stories? Some might do it to sway voters, but for the most part, the people propagating the fake news stories are doing it for the money. The more outrageous the headline ("The Pope endorses Donald Trump!") the more eyeballs they get to their sites. Which means they can charge more money for the ads appearing on those websites.

You might know it as "click bait," and it's done to get people to click the links to get to those websites. Because even though a click generates just a tiny amount of ad revenue, (just a fraction of a penny per click), it adds up. And if you're a fairly tech-savvy kid living in a poor town in a poor country, it is the difference between making a living or not. Oddly, many of the websites created during the 2016 presidential election originated in the country of Macedonia.

While it might not be YOUR inclination to cheat people, there's a lot of others who do it because it's skill that comes naturally to them. And because there are so many people who fall for their scams.

Then there are companies that try cheat Google for the honest reason of getting people to their websites. Like anyone, they just want as many of their prospects finding their company's websites. But there's a right way and wrong way to do it.

electronic thumbs down on screen from Columbus website design firmIf you cheat Google can prevent your website from showing up in their search results.

Cheating can be done in so many ways, which is why every time some less-than-honest SEO method is devised as a way to work around Google's algorithms, Google needs to update their algorithms to stop them. This is why there's so many updates to Google's algorithms.

Read this article entitled "10 big brands that were penalized by Google." If they can stop brands like BMW, Overstock and JCPenney from appearing on their search results, no one is safe from Google's efforts to keep their results honest.

So Google's goal is just to:

  • weed out results from companies using less-than-honest methods to rank high, and
  • not show results from websites that don't offer valuable information

Google doesn't want to show you links from purposely misleading websites from Macedonia. Nor do they want to s cheat Google;s algorithms, but really don't bring value to the table.

For our purposes, we're only considering the honest companies trying to get their website in front of prospects who could benefit from what they offer.

Some of the algorithms Google has done were intended to penalize companies that take shortcuts, like making backlinks come from their own "free-standing" websites (what JCPenney did). They also penalize folks for things like:

  • "keyword stuffing," which is using too many keywords on a page (keywords should only be 5% of the total word count),
  • not updating their website often, or
  • don't put good content on their websites.

woman reading iPad seeing Columbus website design firm's website2. Algorithms let your users decide how good your website is.

Think of it this way: if Google DIDN'T show you the best results for what you're looking for, you'd use Yahoo or bing!

Several of the ranking factors are intended to show Google how much (or how little) your users think of your website, such as:

  1. The amount of time your visitors spent on your website. This is a pretty obvious signal: according to Google's algorithms, the more time someone spends on a website, the better the content must be.
  2. The Bounce Rate. If a user comes to your site, then leaves from the same page, Google assumes the user didn't find what they were looking for, based on their keyword search. To Google, that means the site doesn't have relevant information to those keywords.
  3.  Social Shares. If your website has good content, and you have social media links on your site, the more people share them, the better your content must be, the more Google thinks your site is of value.
  4. Backlinks. The more people like your content, the more they'll link to it (just like we're linking to other websites in this blog post). Google's thinking is: if people link to your site for reference, your website must contain valuable information.

3. Algorithms reward those who offer good information

By now you probably realize having new and valuable content on your website is important. In today's SEO world, “length is strength,” which means longer content tends to rank better in search engine results. Longer content is 2,500 words or more according to top SEO expert, Neil Patel. (This post, for example has about 1,200 words.)

chart showing amount of share by blog length by Columbus website design firmWhile this is nothing new in the SEO world, the top three things (of the 200 or so main algorithms) Google looks at are:

  1. Backlinks, meaning links from other websites to yours. Links FROM your website to others is easy. Links from other websites TO yours are much harder to get.
    And not all backlinks are created equal. The more respected a website is that links to your website, the more "SEO juice" you get from Google. Backlinks from other credible websites tells Google your  website has good information. A link to your website from a trade publication is worth so much more than a link to your website from "link farms," or even your own social media. Getting backlinks from reliable sources takes time, and more importantly, good content.
  2. Good content, added often (every time you add content, search engines re-index your website) that educates you audience. While the content on your website needs to be original, if you subscribe to blogs of people smarter than you, you'll never be short of ideas for your posts.
  3. A well-optimized web page. Essentially these are the important things Google looks at when "scanning" your website:
    Page Titles
    Meta Descriptions
    SEO-friendly URLs
    Headlines (also called "H-tags" with keywords)
    Keywords in the first 100 words of your article or blog
    Words peripherally-related to your main keywords
    Responsive design
    Outbound links to legitimate websites
    Internal links (to other pages in your website)
    Image Optimization (naming images with keywords
    Alt Text (describing photos in your website for sight-impaired individuals)
    Social Sharing Links

And finally, just as an update...

Search Engine Land posted an article recently detailing what they know about Google Brain Rank. From what we understand, it's a new level of artificial Intelligence developed by Google to help return even better results to everyone's searches.

Along these lines, we've also been reading about Google's latest leap in artificial intelligence used to translate between languages. It's an amazing effort that can translate signs in one language into another. So when you're traveling in, say, Russia (as the example below shows), you point your phone's camera to the sign and it will translate it to your language.

The biggest leap at the end of 2016 is Google's artificial intelligence can "read" and interpret complete sentences. Previously their algorithms interpreted phrases within sentences, which returned less than perfect results.
phone pointed at Russian sign translates words to English