We’ve said it so many times that we probably sound like a broken record. Or in modern parlance, a YouTube ad? (We’ll have to give that some thought.) The best way to improve your search engine ranking is to produce good, relevant content. You might think Google can’t recognize what a human searcher will find relevant or good. Well, to a certain extent, you can judge for yourself. Google made its manual for “Search Quality Rating Guidelines” available to the public as a PDF that is frequently updated.
Google actually uses real people to improve its rating ability… but perhaps not in the way you might think. A Google engineer will develop an improvement to the algorithm, and then a large group of testers will run searches that are based on the original and the new algorithm and rate various sites as spam, or good content, and so on. If the new algorithm produces more results that are well ranked, that algorithm may be adopted.
Some of the most important takeaways:
Keyword Stuffing and Keyword Density are Over
Back in the beginning of the internet, spammers would load a page with keywords, often in a tiny font the same color as the page background. Primitive search engines would pick up the keywords, though humans couldn’t see them. Search engines quickly evolved to make that practice obsolete, and then people writing for the web switched to “keyword density.” Keyword density has been dead for quite some time too, as it encourages content written for search engine robots, not people.
If you’re using an SEO plugin like Yoast, you’ll still see a running measure of your keyword density. You should watch to make sure you’re not going overboard, and if you are, use synonyms. The main goal of your text should be to answer a question in an effective and fresh new way.
Google Knows When Your Layout Favors Ads
Remember About.com, the scourge of the internet? Its pages teemed with ads, making it impossible to find any meaningful answers. Fortunately, About.com is dead, and Google now uses a page layout algorithm to detect whether a site shows so many ads that you have to scroll before you get to the real content.
Google has also developed techniques for detecting annoying popups and other techniques. Our prediction: Google is going to come for lightbox ads (also known as modal windows) soon. You know, the ones that take over your screen and ask if you want to subscribe to a newsletter or get 10% off? Those are the ones. To improve your Search Quality Rating, make sure your page layout works well for your users.
Is Your Site Speedy and Mobile?
Did you know Google’s ideal page load time is 2 to 3 seconds? It’s rare for Google mouthpieces to give a hard number like that, so we do take it seriously. At this point, there’s little evidence that Google weighs page load time heavily when determining your website’s page ranking. But page load time does matter a lot to your users. Think about how aggravated you get when it takes more than a few seconds for a webpage to load… especially when you’re on a mobile device on a 3G network. And what matters to users matters to Google ultimately. While it may not be taken into account directly, a fast-loading site that answers a user’s question more elegantly than yours may earn a better Search Quality Rating.
We’ve also written before about Google awarding better ranks to sites with a responsive layout, so we won’t belabor the point here. But ultimately it’s just like the speed factor. Users prefer sites that work well on their mobile devices, and while your site may not be dinged, another site may have better Search Quality Rating and get the spot you would have occupied.
So, does anyone know what the 2017 equivalent of a broken record would be? Comment below with your suggestions.
