Site Visibility and the Wisdom Behind What Google Says

11 Apr Site Visibility and the Wisdom Behind What Google Says

Google has been changing the landscape and definition of what a high ranking site is. What dominated early website tactics during the pre-Google days of search engine optimization (SEO) for capturing coveted visibility in search engines was the emphasis on technical requirements (a.k.a “spam”) that attracted the kind of artificial intelligence or bots automated to crawl and harvest sites that had the right keywords, meta tags, links, domain names and content that can either be syndicated or unique. Websites were constructed for search traffic with little or even no consideration to audience sensitivities and the whole surfing experience of the user.

Now enters Google. 2011 introduces their most recent evolution called the “Panda” or “Farmer” that promises to weed out low quality and shallow sites that simply wastes the viewer’s time. The new algorithm retains in their high ranks sites that sets the more modern SEO principle of mainly having original and valuable content that the audience can use, refer to or share and “buzz”. This is now applied to all English language queries worldwide and already had a measured 12% impact or effect on the searches made. This is of course continuously subject to updates for a more fine-tuned delivery of quality sites for every query.

Google has released a set of guidelines for three main areas of design and content, technical and with a special emphasis on quality guidelines that are to be followed so that a site wouldn’t be penalized or eventually blocked from being searched on Google. These guidelines boil down to an ideal site that contains good and original, if not outstanding content that is aimed for the user.

A company’s goal should therefore shift from attracting search traffic to that of providing a site whose composition should be well orchestrated and contains enough quality content that is valuable and relevant for it to be “morally” acceptable to Google standards and their new “high quality sites algorithm” as they call it.