How a Smart Google Changed the SEO Game in 2013

In the past, ranking high on Google meant nothing more than researching choice phrases used by searchers and then stuffing an article with those phrases. It was called search engine optimizing, or SEO, and it was considered key to any company's online success. When Google released the Penguin 2.0 update in May of 2013 and tweaked its Panda algorithm at the same time, however, much of the old rules regarding SEO flew right out the window. In fact, some experts suggest that SEO techniques will never be the same, now that the metrics that underplay Google have become so much more sophisticated.

An article in the Search Engine Journal suggests that Google has become much "smarter," meaning that the site seems to have the ability to distinguish between content that's full of spam and content that's full of value. There are a variety of different ways in which Google makes this distinction, and many of them have to do with links and keywords, but some of the change has to do with the quality of the writing itself.

Google has a vested interest in ensuring that clients find the sites they want to find at the click of a button. After all, as Investopedia points out, the site makes 96 percent of its revenues from ads, and the companies paying for those ads might not make a repeat purchase if people flee the site and head to Bing or Yahoo due to higher-quality search results. Keeping customer loyalty means delivering what the customers want when they want it. By focusing on issues of quality, Google may be able to do just that.

Representatives of Google have said, on record, that solid content leads to higher page rank on Google. If a site has good content that's free of spam and is updated regularly, that's the kind of site a user might bookmark and visit over and over again. That's the kind of site that gives Google a good reputation, if it can be found in a click or two. It's also the kind of site that isn't created with a bot with hundreds of thousands of keywords to use. It is the kind of site that's written by real people with actual information to share. They keywords play a minor role in this scenario.

At this point, it's hard to tell if Penguin 2.0 and Panda before it have met all of the objectives of Google's developers. In an analysis by SearchMetrics, researchers found that porn sites and game sites seemed to suffer most under the new system, possibly because they didn't have word-based content that was updated regularly. But even large companies like the Salvation Army failed under the new system. If writing good content is key, even large companies might need to revise their techniques.

Admittedly, creating solid content that people might want to read is much more difficult than stringing together packets of keywords with a bit of punctuation thrown in for good measure. Valuable writing takes time, and it's not for everyone. But under the clear gaze of the Google Penguins and Pandas, poor writing is penalized and the companies that produce these sites might fall to the bottom of the heap. Looks like some CEOs might be spending their weekends in Writing 101 class.