Legal Internet Marketing Blog
Are you wondering why your traffic and website rankings dropped suddenly? Well, aside from the fact that slight shifts in traffic and site rankings occur on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis, Google recently updated the way it ranks web pages with the Farmer Update.
By changing its algorithm, which seems to have mostly affected lower quality sites, content farms, and even some article directories, Google has made its message loud and clear that high quality sites hold the most search engine strength. Why is this the case? Because these are the websites that actually help people. Search engine users are looking for relevant results for the information and/or help that they need.
So how can you arm your website now to ensure that traffic and rankings don’t plummet the next time Google updates its algorithm? Here are five tips.
- Nothing’s Set in Stone – The first thing you need to know is that you can’t control what Google does and you certainly can’t fool Google either. And even if you do succeed in fooling Google, such actions usually are short-lived and result in penalties.
- Be Original – Duplicate or plagiarized content will get you nowhere fast. Google crawls websites looking for the most relevant and updated content. If your website has material that another website has, not only will your rankings and visitors decrease, but your site could be penalized.
- Provide Something Irresistible – If your website doesn’t provide any valuable, informative, unique, or helpful information, no one is going to stay longer than a few seconds. The most recent Google algorithm update stemmed from user complaints about low quality and irrelevant sites showing up with high search results. That is why, for the most part, these sites no longer have successful results.
- Fit the Profile – Google is looking for websites that have original, informative content. As we have experienced with our own Legal Internet marketing website and those of our clients, high quality websites that contain in-depth reports, research, thoughtful analysis, and content that is useful to visitors will continue to see their search engine rankings maintain their positions or even jump.
- Stay True to Yourself – It may seem tempting to follow advice from your neighbor or friend about why you should post content to content farms or include a lot of hidden links on your website, but these tactics will hurt your rankings in the long run. Regurgitating information and over-optimizing may seem like the easy way out, but beware … these things won’t take you anywhere.
To sum it all up, if you write and add quality content to your website, it’s very likely that your high search engine rankings will stick or even increase. Google will update its algorithm again. But the odds that Google will change it to favor low quality sites with duplicate, over-optimized, or irrelevant content are slim to none.
If you think your website contains low quality content, there is no better time than now to change that. Call us today to see how we can help you “turn up the heat” on your search engine rankings.