How Google slowly killing an Industry

From SEO to SEC – Google slowly killing an Industry

Is Search Algorithms updates are more for promoting other Google Products ?

Digital Dosa: Search giant Google is famous for its periodic search engine algorithm updates. From famous Caffeine in 2009 to recent Hummingbird update, Google keep on drumming the heartbeat of the entire search based web industry with its undisclosed algorithmic changes.

With Caffeine update, Google emphasized on delivering more relevant results to the users with speed crawling & indexing of web content. Roll out of Caffeine stands Google to be more “relevant” in terms of search requirement, hence catching eyeing of a lot of marketers to use various techniques to rank their web pages as SERP.As name implies, “Caffeine” was intended to make user “addicted” to the usage of Google Search. 

In the year 2011, with its Panda update Google focused more on content with high quality (consumption value & relevancy). This update penalizes the websites (lower ranking or in some cases even un-indexing) with copied content, hefty advertisements & black hat SEO techniques like promotional re-directions. Thus, with Panda update, Content emerged as “King”.

The turning point to the industry came in 2012 when another update, this time in the name of “Penguin” hit the web industry. Google Penguin update focused more upon correct SEO practices thus penalizing over optimized websites (keyword stuffing). This update also performs the deep digging of websites with dubious links obtained through Black hat techniques like link exchange or link farming.

On September 2013, Google introduces the game changer update called as “Hummingbird” which is called to be for “fast & precision” results. Penguin was more focused on Conversational Search by evaluating the real essence of the query.

Example:

Before Hummingbird update - If you search for Android Phone dealers in Gurgaon, the search results may include online retailers selling & delivering Android phones in Gurgaon

Post Hummingbird update - If you search for Android Phone dealers in Gurgaon, the search results will mainly focus on Brick and Mortar Stores in Gurgaon (that too nearby areas, if location is shared) selling Android phones.

Conclusion – With successive search engine algorithm updates, Google leaving absolutely no space for black hat SEO techniques or any short cut method of ranking new / low quality website/s on SERP. Any malpractice may attract penalty for the website/s in the form of delayed crawling, un-indexing or even sandboxing. So, the only choice left with the Search Engine marketers / webmasters is just to comply with the Google’s Search Engine guidelines & keep on updating the website/s with regular, good quality & relevant content.

These updates can be seen from other aspects also. Google is offering fair chance to marketers to promote their website/s (without emphasizing much on quality) through its paid medium like Adwords.