Google's recent rankings shake-up clarified, you need to know...

Last week Google finally confirmed that changes to the way they rank websites on search results has been adjusted, after speculation this was the case earlier this month due to significant changes in site rankings...

It’s not your imagination. Google’s results have changed since the beginning of this month, and Google has announced that this is due to how Google now assesses content quality.

We are calling it “The Quality Update,” if you will.

We initially thought Google had released a Panda Update, or perhaps a new update, but Google has denied this.

Since then, more reports have come in, with the change even being dubbed the “Phantom Update” because something did indeed seem to have happened, even if Google wasn’t acknowledging it.

Now Google has acknowledged that an update has been done.

After more follow-up this week, Google has announced that while no spam-related update had happened, there were changes to its core ranking algorithm in terms of how it processes quality signals.

Google wouldn’t provide specifics about how quality is now being assessed. We know from past statements by Google that quality for a particular page or site is determined by a wide range of individual factors. It could be that Google is now weighting some of those factors more and others less.

As usual with a major update, it’s those who have been harmed with less visibility by the update that have spoken up.

It is not all bad news, in fact we noticed one of our client's sites had a spike in rankings this month (making us think that Google is perhaps classifying it as 'valuable content'). Great news! But it is worth every site assessing their recent rankings and whether it has changed at all within the last month.

We would like to clarify that the update didn’t go after any particular class of sites or any particular sites. It was an update to the overall ranking algorithm itself.

If you saw ranking changes earlier this month, you are not alone. We do not have any specific details to provide as Google is not announcing any details about their update.

More-over Google have confirmed that they will no longer be announcing details of their updates to ranking algorithms and they will be implementing them monthly from the looks of things. From our opinion, if Google continue to rank sites with high quality and relevant content better - this is perfect and the way it should be.

We firmly believe in designing and building sites that are highly relevant and user-friendly for customers and truly add-value. (after-all this is what customers expect these days and without you will be ignored!)

We recommend all our clients to keep focused on building and evolving a better web site, aimed at your users and overall quality and relevance of that content rather than trying to 'follow' or 'tick all the boxes' of google's latest algorithms of search rank results.

Feel free to contact us if you would like to discuss how your site is ranking on Google and/or what strategies we have that can combat this and get your site ranking better!