If you’ve been hearing the rumblings across the ‘Net about Google once again changing the way they rank your web pages, you’ve probably been wondering how it will effect you.
Google’s profitability stems in large part from being able to serve their search engine users with high quality results. Over the years Google has been in business, the parameters they use to judge the quality of a website for a given set of keywords has evolved.
Google is about to take another giant step in how they match a website’s relevance to a set of keywords… and it could have a profound effect on how your web pages rank.
The main criteria in use over the past few years has been Page Rank. The higher the Page Rank, the higher your web page would show on the Search Results Page (SERP).
Page Rank has served Google well, but inevitably, websites owners and developers have learned to exploit how Google sets Page Rank. Quite a few “black hat” techniques have been developed and used and Google feels, as always, that it is in their best interest to squash those using “black hat” methods.
At the same time, Google is trying to improve the experience of it’s users. These two goals are fully compatible from Google’s perspective. Those who resort to using “black hat” methods often do so because the quality of their content is not top notch.
So what is Googles latest strategy to improve user experience and the quality of their product?
If you are a user of, or are at least familiar with Google analytics, you know that Google is quite capable of logging an incredible amount of information about your website. This is accomplished through the cookies that are set in your web browser and follow every move you make on the Internet.
NOTE – Google Analytics is a free service that you can use to track all sorts of information and statistics about who visits your website, where they come from, what they do on your site, etc. It is a free service and all you have to do is sign up and place a snippet of code in the pages you’d like them to track.
Google can then use this information to try and determine the relative value of the information on your website by tracking how many visitors you have, but more importantly what those visitors do on your website, how many pages they visit, how long they stay on a page or the site, etc.
It’s a good bet that if your visitors view more pages on your website and stay longer on each one than those of a competing site, Google might consider that a sign that your content is more valuable to users and will probably rank you higher in the future.
So, what does this mean to you?
It means that content just graduated from “king” to “emperor.” It means you need more absorbing content, like audio and especially video, that holds visitors attention. It means that more than ever, having a large amount of high-quality content will serve you well.
The effects of this will kick in gradually through 2009 as Google tweaks the system to achieve their desired effects. It also means a rough time for those who have opted to use “black hat” SEO and other gimmicks to game the system. This has been called a “Google slap” and it is a pretty accurate description.
But if you provide your visitors with lots of high quality content, you’ll be just fine through this change and ones Google chooses to make in the future.
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