Should You Care About Google Updates?

It depends! The Google updates are designed to remove spam from their search engines. If you’re using shady black-hat SEO tactics to rank on Google, then yes, you should be worried every time Google announces a new update.

I’m never worried when Google announces a new update because it doesn’t matter. If your website is relevant to what people are searching for, and you’re not building back-links from based on some new SEO “trick” you read on a forum, then you should be fine.

SEO is Simple

SEO is very simple. You have on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On page SEO is the most importantbecause if your website is optimized correctly, you’ll outrank another website that has more back-links than you. Back-links are important, but not as important as relevancy.

When it comes to back-links, create back-links from reputable websites that are trusted. But if you decide to pay somebody $5 to blast 100,000 comments pointing back to your website, then once again you should be worried. 100 authority back-links are better than 100,000 back-links from a website that gets spammed daily.

Realistically, you should have back-links coming from multiple places..naturally. That means you should have some bad back-links, good back-links, d0-follow, no-follow, forums, blogs, blog comments, articles, social networks, and more!

SEO and Back-links

Sometimes you might not have to build that many back-links at all because your competition is probably doing something that’s going them sand-boxed anyways. There’s no SEO tactic that Google doesn’t know about and/or won’t find out about.

Google literally employs rocket scientist and mathematicians to help create complex algorithms for their search engines, and I can guarantee you that your local “Joe Blow” SEO specialist hasn’t found a top secret formula to hack Google. Some SEO guys find a temporary loop-hole, but once everybody starts to exploit the same loop-hole, that’s when Google updates their search engine.

SEO Tactics and Algorithms 

As mentioned earlier, the search engines are updating their algorithms to remove junk websites that are using “tactics” to get on the front page instead good business. So you have two choices:

1.) You can try some shady tricks to get on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing and PRAY that you’re website doesn’t get de-indexed.

2.) You can optimize your website and run a proper business that people will want to naturally link to which will get you on the first page regardless of any updates.

Black-hat SEO might get you on the first page of search engines really fast, but your success will be short lived. White-hat SEO will take 60-90 days to get you ranked on the first page, but you’ll stay there because your competition is usually doing things that’s going to get their website removed not only from the first page, but from the entire search engine.

SEO for Yahoo and Bing

It’s also important to note that everybody tries to optimize for Google, but they forget about Yahoo and Bing. A lot of people use all 3 of these search engines to get 2nd and 3rd opinions. Sometimes the Google search results aren’t that great, so people search elsewhere. So you should optimize for ALL search engines in general, and not just Google.

You could already rank on the first page of Yahoo and Bing, so why would you change things around on your website to meet some new Google update based on some free article you read online? The changes you make to your website might cause you to lose your #1 position on Yahoo and Bing, and now suddenly you don’t rank with any of the search engines.

Contact us for more information about our SEO services in Los Angeles.