Google algorithm archives

It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were …

In the week of August 1st Google rolled out a “broad core algorithm update.” This update has been dubbed the “Medic update” online. We know it was that because they said so on Twitter. There was quite a bit of buzz around this update. Some sites “won”, others “lost”, which is logical because, in the …

Last week, I wrote about Google’s decision to shorten the meta descriptions. Now, meta descriptions are about the same size as they were half a year ago. But for a couple of months, they were much longer. We got a lot of questions and quite a few people were pretty annoyed — understandably so. Is …

Ranking signals or ranking factors are characteristics of a website that determine the position in the search engines. All ranking signals combined form the algorithm of a search engine. How this algorithm works is a secret. Nobody knows exactly which factors decide the order of the search results. Google’s algorithm isn’t static. It changes regularly. The …

Websites that have made the mistake of hiring some shady SEO company to buy bad backlinks for their website can lose almost all of their rankings. In this post, we will go beyond on-site optimization and explain a bit more about bad backlinks for your website and how to clean them up. Although buying bad links …

According to Maile Ohye of Google, “SEO is evolving into what Loren George McKechnie described as ‘search experience optimization’. It’s less about top ranking, and more about optimizing the searcher’s journey. It’s the intersection of content, UX, and as always, staying smart about search engines.” We had the chance to ask Maile a couple of questions, …

Over the weekend we saw an incredibly big shuffle in Google search results. I wrote about it earlier this week, as we were researching what happened. I’ll be honest: we’re still researching. But let me update you on what we know and don’t know about this Google core algorithm update. What we know We know …

Panda has become a part of Google’s core algorithm. This post discusses what that means for SEOs and webmasters. Amidst (or actually slightly before) all the kerfuffle about the changes to Google’s core algorithm this week, Jennifer Slegg posted a huge article about Google Panda, that’s really worth a look. It was vetted by people on Google’s webmaster team, and …

We quite often find sites that have become a victim of Google Panda’s algorithm, or run the risk of getting “Pandalized”. A site runs the risk of being hit by Panda when it has a lot of low quality pages. In this post I want to give you some quick insights into what Google Panda is and …

At Yoast, we’re all really busy in the preparation for YoastCon next Wednesday, as you will understand. When us SEO people are really busy focussing on other stuff, Google tends to ‘surprise’ the online community with breaking news, algorithm updates or other developments that really need our attention as well. How is that, you might …