Content, content, content

 

Google’s algorithm has always been a moving target. Two significant updates occurred in 2011 which majorly affected the rankings of many websites.

The first tweak to the algorithm was the “Panda update”. Panda was put in place to penalise sites with poor quality content. Google hasn’t keep it a secret that “content is king” for SEO, which many SEO’s took advantage of although most of the content had very little use to the user.

The rule of content is now to write unique, relevant and good quality content.

Google's Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, said that only around two percent of Search Engine Ranking Pages were affected.  The majority of those affected were simply due to scraping content (copying content) from other pages.

The second algorithm update of 2011 targetted content farms and pages with large amounts of advertisements compared to content. This tactic is often connected with content scraping.

This would normally involve content being lifted from a website and published on another, having ads stuffed in between the text. The pages obviously won’t beat the original post in terms of ranking but having these sorts of pages around the web isn’t very helpful for the user.

To avoid being penalised, you simply have to focus on writing good, unique content that will interest your visitors. If you do this not only will you rank well but you will avoid being penalised for any future algorithm changes.