Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 09/12/2024

Most online shoppers start their shopping journey using Google. Therefore, Google’s algorithm ultimately determines what results, in terms of which businesses, appear on the first page (SERP’s).

 

Google’s algorithm

It’s widely reported that the globally popular search engine Google has more than 80% of the market share. As a matter of fact, from our experience, our clients are only interested in optimising the company website for Google’s algorithm.

Therefore, you can appreciate why SEO professionals spend hundreds of hours each year learning how Google’s algorithm changes and evolves.

 

How exactly does the Google algorithm work?

 

How the inner workings of Google’s algorithms work is a top-secret and highly guarded by owner Alphabet (A.KA Google).
For those who don’t know, Alphabet is the company that owns Google.

It’s understandable why they don’t explain how Google’s complex algorithm works.
Alphabet or Google doesn’t explain how the algorithm works for good reason: otherwise, businesses would cheat, cut corners, and try to “game” the algorithm.

Therefore, Google wants the best, most detailed, helpful answers possible on the first page of the SERP’s. You wouldn’t be able to do this if businesses could spam and publish low-quality pages that were able to rank high on Google. Therefore, algorithms are constantly being perfected and fine-tuned, to remove spam.

 

What is Google’s index?

You have to think of Google’s index as a bit like a giant library. Google wants to include the best possible answers, and provide the best possible information, and be as helpful as possible within its library (a.k.a the index).

That’s exactly what Google’s index is all about. It’s like a giant library—a library of websites where the index is organised to offer the best possible answer. The books that offer the best possible answer are placed in the library and the pages which are spam, or not quality, well they are not indexed at all.

Can you break down how the search process and how Google works?

Crawling

It all starts with the Google bot, which crawls a company website. Therefore, you can either manually request that the Google bot crawl and index your website, or the Google bot will find the page on its own accord by following backlinks which lead to your website.
Then, it’s the Google bot’s job to read the content marketing on your website, assessing whether it’s quality information and whether it should be indexed or not.

 

 

What is indexation?

Indexation is the next stage after Google bot has crawled your company website.

Its widely thought by SEO professionals, at this stage, the algorithm is assessing whether the work is of good quality or not- basically whether it should get indexed.

Therefore, its at this stage Google makes the decision whether the work get indexed or not.
Or if the page or blog post is deemed as spam and low quality, therefore its not indexed and rejected.

 

Ranking
At this stage, Google’s algorithm deciphers where the page and content marketing should rank in Google’s index, therefore the SERP’s.

For example, if Google deems the work as excellent, they might rank in the top three on Google’s results. Google’s algorithm will, therefore, decide that the page is fantastic and provides a quality answer to the question or not.
On the other hand, if Google considers the work spam or low quality, it might not place it in the index at all and might place the page 10 of

Google; where it will get no organic traffic at all.

Therefore, it’s at this stage, the ranking stage, this is where a page is initially ranked within the Google’s index.

However, if you write a piece of content marketing but put a massive amount of effort into writing it until you are blue in the face, and you have put so much effort you put into it. Yet, then Google algorithm is placed the page on page 7 of Google, despite your best writing efforts, well don’t be deterred.

That’s often because this page has not accumulated enough backlinks or data from shoppers to determine how good that page is just yet. If it’s a new page, Google’s algorithm will want to decipher how good it is.

However, in a year, let’s say, when Google has accumulated a lot of backlinks, the dwell time is extremely high, well this page is likely to rank on the first page of Google.

How does Google’s algorithm work?

What factors does Google take into account when ranking a page?

How good is the content marketing?

So, we’ve been helping businesses to get on page 1 for over 10 years. During that time we have learnt how to improve our clients on-page SEO and content marketing substantially.

For businesses to succeed in terms of improving their organic SEO, you must provide top-quality answers, so you must therefore write helpful content marketing.

 

Relevance

It’s essential to write content marketing that is relevant and that all visitors will find helpful. We always tell our clients to think about the sort of questions that your customers often ask.

Then, just as a matter of writing content marketing in a way that best addresses their questions and their concerns.
Content marketing should, therefore, be relevant; don’t talk about things off-topic too much.

 

You will have seen many of our articles talking about Google E-EAT. It was a massive Google update, which means that Google algorithms now look for real-life experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness when determining how good and well written the content marketing is.

Why SEO constantly needs work

Think just for a second about a series of bar charts, and then times that by 200.

We say this because it’s widely believed that the Google algorithm uses over 200 totally different and separate ranking factors in order to work out how strong or weak your businesses search engine optimisation is.

Now “ranking factors”, well they can be anything from backlinks to determining how fast your company website is. This is why SEO requires constant work, effort, and perseverance to improve the ranking factors. That’s because, your competitors will be doing the same, beavering away working on improving theirs to give them the edge. This is why seo, well it never really comes to a stop.

 

Algorithm updates
Understandably highly experienced SEO professionals will spend a lot of time assessing algorithm updates’ and their impact on their clients websites Sometimes, algorithm updates cause minor tremors; however, sometimes, a massive, colossal “core algorithm update”, well that can cause seismic movements in terms of where a business, is ranked on Google.

SEO professionals, therefore, constantly use various SEO tools to assess where their clients’ websites are moving to. During an algorithm update, major movements in terms of where your business moves in the SERP’s is called “ranking flux”.
Generally speaking after the ranking flux, the initial shake-up of the ranking positions, things settle down, however you do tend to be in a different place.

Sometimes, the SEO strategy will need to be adapted and changed if it’s not going according to plan.

 

How exactly does Google eliminate spam and low-quality pages?

Google has a constant fight on its hands, that’s to eliminate spam from its index. It doesn’t want to have rubbish quality answers to questions on its first page results.

So, just as good seo professionals are always thinking of how they can get their clients to rank higher on Google, well there’s on the other hand people looking to fool the algorthims.

Whether it be through cloaking, spun content or simply copied content marketing, it doesn’t work. This approach doesn’t work, and will most likely result in a Google penalty.

Google Panda update

 

If businesses publish helpful, original, high-quality content marketing, this will rank much higher than low-quality, spa, content marketing, which is say “content thin”.

It was the Google Panda update, which penalised businesses that had pages that used spam content marketing.

For example, pages with spun content would have incurred a massive drop in organic traffic. The Google Panda update was released in 2011 but is still part of the Google core algorithm today.

 

The Google Penguin update

 

The Google Penguin update was first released back in 2012. The Google Penguin update was mostly focused on the quality of the backlinks leading to your website.

So if a business were spam links, and the business was using what are “called manipulative back practices”, such as purchasing spam links to try and improve the SEO, then the business will have been hit by this penalty.

 

 

The Google Pirate Update

 

This is another important update. The update penalised websites by giving them negative ranking if that business that receive too many DMC takedown requests. Therefore, code business owners must publish original content and abide by copyright laws internationally.

The Google Pigeon update of 2014

The Google Pigeon update of 2014 improved local SEO by allowing shoppers to find businesses closer to where they are.
Rather than focusing on the centroid, that’s a fixed location in each city.

After the Google Pigeon update, 2014, shoppers started to see results based closer to where they are.

The Google Hummingbird update
Create a picture the Google Hummingbird update

This critical update, it was rolled out in 2013, allows the algorithm to understand conversational language better.
So, for example, conversational language is like what you’d have with a friend when you’re chatting about, let’s say, a football match that was last night.

The Google Hummingbird update allows Google to offer precise and accurate results, even for longtail keywords.

 

The Google RankBrain update

Back in 2015, Google first introduced the RankBrain update.

This basically incorporated machine learning into the algorithm; the update allowed, Google to better understand the shopper’s intent.

Therefore, artificial intelligence and machine learning offered pages that best answered that query in the past.

 

The Google Bert update

The Google Bert update introduced natural language processing into the algorithm, this is so basically Google’s algorithm better understands more complex queries such as longtail keywords.

 

The Google Page Experience Update

The user experience was first introduced as a ranking factor in the Google algorithm; for example, if pages were fast they would see uplift in terms of where they ranked on Google. Also, it is widely thought the pages with a high dwell time and low bounce rates would have improved their SEO because of this important update.

 

Google Helpful Content Update

This update was rolled out to promote further and rank higher pages which offer high-quality content marketing and, at the same time, penalised businesses with low-quality content, such as spun content.

 

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