Introduction to Google Algorithm and its importance in Online Marketing

Search engines have become the best resource for finding any information out there. How are they so reliable? And what makes them so accurate? The list of questions does not stop here, but the answer for all these queries is Google Algorithm.

What is Google Algorithm for Online Marketing?

Online marketing is all about the promotion of brand, services or in other words, business over internet. So a Google algorithm comes into picture based on the path that is chosen for enhancing your business. In simple words, get penalized when you fail to provide quality services for your customers.

More about Google Algorithm

In the above section, we got an overview on why Google is such a reliable source for accessing valuable information. And in this section we will study about how Google Algorithm is affecting internet marketing. But before that let’s have an overview on Google algorithm.

Google Algorithm or the search algorithm is a set of rules that needs to be followed while structuring a website. The main agenda of these algorithms is to make sure that users are accessing quality information from the search engines. In general, internet marketing is all about reaching out the prospective customers through a medium. On the other hand, Google algorithms make sure that these customers get the best among the available resources.

Why regular updates in Google Algorithm?

Regular algorithm updates? It can surely hurt every strategy that an online marketer is developing out there. Conventionally speaking, an online marketing process involves both white and black hat SEO techniques. Considered a straight forward approach, white hat SEO technique is sometimes time-consuming. It deals with writing fresh content, adding relevant links and using structural markup.

On the other hand, a short cut resolution, the black hat SEO techniques are generally followed by online retailers to earn a favorable SEO rank in lesser amount of time. Keyword stuffing, irrelevant links, cloaking, spam blogs or adding doorway pages are some of the most common black hat SEO techniques.

And since this approach was completely affecting the user-end, Google started with search engine algorithms to deal with such back-door practices.

A New Change in SEO Landscape

Now with Google algorithms in picture, search engines became a difficult place for black-hat SEO practitioners. Initially it was keyword stuffing, then irrelevant Backlinks and finally content duplication, but the list does not stop here. And for every antic Google gave out algorithms with periodic updates, making them more sophisticated and dynamic.

Some of the most popular Google algorithms are explained below.

• Google Panda-
  • The future of content looked bleak before panda algorithm came into picture. Thin content, keyword stuffing or duplicate content, well websites with such composition were ranked higher in search engines. The webmaster’s guidelines were literally violated. What did panda algorithm do?
  • Google Panda effectively dealt with the low quality content of websites that were irrelevant to the users. Google started penalizing the websites that came under panda radar. Most of the highly SEO ranked websites were greatly affected compelling them to make effective changes.
• Google Penguin-
  • Like Panda, Google penguin deals with only one factor, which is the incoming link. Is it relevant for the subject? Are your incoming links unnatural? Well, inbound links may definitely help you with natural web traffic but Google will not entertain if it is hurting the users.
  • Paid Backlinks or link-trading schemes are examples of bad or unnatural inbound links. People who visit such websites may not find the relevancy or the information they are looking for. Unnatural or spammy links are to be removed effectively if you do not want your website to be penalized under Google Penguin.
• Google Hummingbird-
  • People do anything for an SEO rank, and every one will agree on this once they look into the number updates Google had made on its algorithms. A single algorithm with numerous versions or creating a whole new algorithm, well, this has been a constant activity of Google from past few years. The only message one can deduce is ‘Everything for users’, and it certainly looks touching.
  • The Hummingbird is a completely different algorithm, which does not carry any similarities to Panda or Penguin. The concept ‘Semantic Search’ came into existence because of the Hummingbird algorithm. Unlike previous two algorithms, this new addition of Google family gave importance to the user’s query.
  • Confused? Then let me explain the concept in layman terms, the Hummingbird algorithm provided much more precise results to its users through understanding the nature of their query. That is, each keyword or the phrase was individually analyzed to give out the best, relevant answers.
• Google Pigeon-
  • The main idea behind introducing Google Pigeon algorithm is to provide accurate local search results. But before moving further on this subject, we should know what a local search is?
  • Geographically limited searches, for example searches on city name, postal code, street address or information on latitude and longitude of a region. What’s more special about this new algorithm is it allows the use of Google Maps search and Google web search more efficiently.

On the whole, Google algorithms are not here to penalize your websites, but they want to make websites more user-friendly and relevant for the users. Also, online marketing can be less onerous if you stick with the webmaster’s guide.