Eventually it’s your quality of content that saves the day no matter what changes take place in various search engine algorithms. Take for instance the recent changes at Google, code named “Penguin”: many websites have gone off the search engine’s radar and have been relegated to back pages from top 10 results in a matter of a few hours.
After the update broadly there are 4 categories of people/websites:
- Those who have been adversely affected by the update losing rankings for some or all keywords
- Those who have experienced no effect whatsoever
- Those who have been favorably affected and hence experienced a marked improvement in their search engine rankings
- Those who are not at all concerned whether Google favors them or not
Regarding the first category either they have been found to violate Google’s guidelines or they have gotten trapped in the loop of “collateral damage”.
People belonging to the second category must have consciously or unconsciously followed Google guidelines.
The third category people might be those who were following all Google guidelines but somehow weren’t getting the sort of attention they deserved.
The fourth category, is quite indicative.
Whatever category you may belong to, the key is, knowing, vis-a-vis, your content and its organization, where you are and where you want to be.
Mainly depending on search engines can be a tricky business. They can be quite whimsical, big companies as they are, and they will do whatever suits them – and it’s fair enough.
The answer of course is creating content that is highly valuable, relevant and helpful. Focus on your readers rather than your search engine rankings. Keep in mind that whenever you tailor your content according to search engine guidelines your rankings are going to go topsy-turvy the moment they change their guidelines. I mean, who can guarantee that Google is not going to change its guidelines in the next couple of years.
So the best thing to do is, build your traffic on the strength of your content. Create content in such a manner that neither search engines nor people can ignore it.
This is a topic that I have tried to cover in my guest blog post at the Content Marketing Institute blog titled “How to Survive the Google Penguin Update With Effective Content Writing”.