Search Engine Optimization Algorithms are the why and the how of search engine rankings.
An SEO algorithm is a set of rules, or a unique formula, that the search engine uses to determine the significance of a web page, in other words, a process by which you optimize content for search.
Here’s how it works. Once you click to search for any topic on the Internet, Google, or any search engine you’re using, has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet in a fraction of a second. The crawlers bring all this information back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.
SEO algorithms are constantly refining and updating themselves to return the most relevant results possible when a user enters a search query. So do keep a watch out for SEO algorithm updates. Here are the top Google algorithms in SEO that you should know about and keep in mind for optimizing your website: Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Pigeon, Mobile, RankBrain, Possum, Fred, and the latest update too, Phantom.
- Panda keeps a check on duplicate, plagiarized, user-generated spam; keyword stuffing by assigning a quality score to web pages; this score is then used as a ranking factor.
- Penguin’s objective is to down-rank sites whose links it deems manipulative.
- Hummingbird helps Google better interpret search queries and provide results that match searcher intent (as opposed to the individual terms within the query). Hummingbird makes it possible for a page to rank for a query even if it doesn’t contain the exact words the searcher entered.
- Pigeon aims to offer better local search results by rewarding local businesses that have a strong organic presence with better visibility in traditional search, similar to the visibility a business may have seen previously in Google Maps.
- Mobile (aka Mobilegeddon) ensures that mobile-friendly pages rank at the top of mobile search, while pages not optimized for mobile are filtered out from the SERPs (search engine result pages) or seriously down-ranked.
- RankBrain is a machine learning system that helps Google understand the meaning behind queries, and serve best-matching search results in response to those queries.
- Possum ensures that local results vary more depending on the searcher’s location: the closer you are to a business’s address, the more likely you are to see it among local results.
- Fred targets websites that violate Google’s webmaster guidelines, namely blogs with low-quality posts that appear to be created mostly for the purpose of generating ad revenue.
- Phantom or the Quality Update is the newest Google algorithm update that assesses quality signals. Websites with content quality issues as well as too many ads are impacted by this update.
As we can see, SEO algorithms play an integral role in optimizing a website. It is imperative to simply acknowledge the power that the Google algorithm or any SEO algorithm has and try to produce the best website possible. When people search for terms related to your brand, they’ll have a better chance of discovering your website and becoming a loyal customer. The quality of your website content can affect your site’s success greatly, in more ways than one.
As the old saying goes, ‘Content is King. So stay tuned and stay ahead of the game.