Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird: Updates and what they mean for your SEO strategy

Are you feeling lost with your Brisbane SEO strategy? When we talk about search engines, we are really just talking about Google. With this company owning a massive 67% of the market, the remainder, when split between competitors, pales in comparison. Google is forever changing. It continually makes subtle tweaks to its algorithms to improve the consumer experience. It saw that black hat tactics were finding their way into the higher spots and sought to put a stop to that. Each update seeks to attack certain techniques that promote inferior content.

However, no matter how many bad tactics are banished, it doesn't take long for spam content to find new loopholes in any version, which is why these ongoing updates are necessary. These updates can be confusing for those that don't understand them, which is why there is much debate surrounding how to best adapt an SEO strategy to accommodate these changes. Google never releases a full report of all the changes made, which means there is an art to understanding what is new and what it means for businesses. This is where the SEO experts come in.

The Panda update occurred in early 2011 and put a stop to some increasingly popular black hat techniques including article spinning, where supposedly new content is automatically generated from other sources. It seems Penguin, which came out in 2012, has impacted partial match anchor text surprisingly more than exact match anchor text. While not going to be penalised if they are earned naturally, beware of SEO strategists who seek to increase their partial anchor text links. This update also punished those who use irrelevant back links. Hummingbird rolled out in late 2013 and favours natural, correct content. That is, it cares more about semantics. It seeks to increase the overall quality of written content by only ranking that which is grammatically flawless. This update more than any other aimed to bring content back to the human world.

With Google being in charge of so much content, it can obviously not iron out every single issue, only those that are most concerning or threatening to their goals. As such, many shady strategies are still going unpunished, but you can be assured that it will only be a matter of time before they are hit. SEO fads that offer a quick solution soon gain popularity and before long have been targetted by an update. Unfortunately, the illegal practice of site hacking has not been properly addressed by any of the updates. Low quality guest posting purely for the purposes of SEO is expected to be hit with a new update either this year or next.

So, how can we make the most of these updates? The answer is to embed videos and continually post new content. Youtube is owned by Google, and so you can be confident that your videos are going ot be more highly valued. Google is a leader in technology and modernity, and always strives to bring the latest to its consumers, which is why you will be rewarded for blogging upwards of three times per week. Of course keep your content interesting and lead by a purpose; you cannot simple write for the sake of it. For a professional SEO company in Brisbane that will craft the perfect strategy for your business, call Zibmedia today.