Google’s New Algorithm and You

Google launched an update in the US to their search algorithm last week and the natural question is… how will my site’s traffic and rankings be affected? First, let’s dive into what Google said when they released the update:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

This all seems straight-forward so long as your site is considered “high quality” and not deemed “low quality” or “just not very useful.” Of course, how would you know that?

The Search Engine’s Challenge

It is always useful to start out with a reminder of how search engines work and what they are trying to accomplish.

The search engine’s ultimate goal is to answer a query on the first try. The typical user query in a search engine is between two to three words. The search engine is then expected to answer the question correctly. If the user needs to refine their search because their question was not answered, it is considered a bad user experience. The goal is to provide that correct answer on the first results page the user sees.

The resulting challenge for the search engine is three-fold:

• the user provides the search engines very little information (have you ever tried to answer a two-word question?)
• there are hundreds of billions (N00,000,000,000+) of web pages available to answer that question
• search engines need to process the question and return 10 accurate results in 0.05 to 0.010 seconds

When you consider the complexity, it is amazing that it works so often, right?

Two Key Factors Influencing Results

Whether your web pages rank or not depends on thousands (maybe more) of calculations that the search engine’s algorithms make to process all of the information it has gleaned from spidering the web. To simplify, we can categorize these calculations into two general categories – Relevancy and Authority.

For the most part, users are focused on how relevant the information provided is compared with their original intent. But users also want web pages that are trusted sources of information. In this way, users tend to blend relevancy and authority into one bucket. In other words, a response needs to be both on topic and from a trusted source in order to be deemed relevant from a user perspective.

However, the search engine does not work that way. Relevancy and Authority may be considered independently. The algorithm might score a page as relevant, but not authoritative. And it might score a page as authoritative, but not relevant.

In general, the search engines strive to present the most relevant and authoritative pages to the users. However, relevancy tends to trump authority in instances where both do not exist.

And this gets to the crux of the whole issue here. Google had an algorithm for determing authority. It did not match how users defined authority. Some business learned how to exploit that algorithm and the resulting user experience was impacted negatively. And now, Google is attempting to correct that discrepancy by right-aligning their algorithms definition of authority. It is a natural evolution.

Website authority and domain strength more important than ever

What this update has done is joined the Relevancy requirement a lot more closely to Authority. Both have existed as metrics for the past 10 years, but now it appears that authority is playing an even more important role in ranking. And what is authority? A lot of it comes back to domain strength (and in some ways the original PageRank concept that launched Google):

• Unique, unduplicated content
• Age of site
• Relevancy of inbound links
• Authority of inbound linking sites
• And the last one is purpose. Why does your site exist? Does it serve a unique purpose? Or is it similar to (or the same as) hundreds of other sites out there? This is probably the most important of all with regards to authority.

To get back to the goal of the search engine, they have one shot to answer the question correctly. To improve their accuracy, they are somewhat limiting the pool of potential answers by filtering out sites with less authority. This leads to more relevant answers for the users and helps the search engine achieve its goal.

For those marketers who have focused on building out sites with SEO best practices and businesses with unique selling propositions, there should be limited impact to your business. Google is trying to filter out the noise so that sites like yours can be found more easily. For those sites that have strayed, implementation of SEO best practices and clear articulation of a unique selling proposition will help get you back on track.

And if you’re not sure where you stand? Dig into your site analytics tool and look at pre/post traffic levels from organic search. The best way to know how your business is going to be affected will be measuring the data on an ongoing basis and learning what the traffic patterns are on your site.

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