Google Updates and PageRank | Consult Blogs

Over the last few months, webmasters have discovered that great and content management come to nothing when Google software itself is the problem. After Google’s update in March, the community was on fire with complaints about loss of ranking that thousands of websites had experienced.

The obvious conclusion is that some elements of the update have tipped sites off their previous ranking. The frustrating thing for most website owners has been the impossibility of knowing exactly how their websites have been affected, and how to fix this. There have been lots of discussions on the subject in forums within the community, but most threads have concluded with ‘this seems to be some sort of glitch, and I don’t know how you will fix it.’

The situation has continued to affect websites over the last few months. Although most people noticed a drop in rankings around the same time as the update, some sites took months for the purge to show. This has caused a lot of confusion – understandably, as Google isn’t the first culprit that comes to mind after a sudden drop in your site’s rank, particularly when their update was a little while ago.

If your site has had a sudden change in search engine ranking, and you’re having trouble spotting the problem, it’s worthwhile asking a professional company such as Andy Stats for advice. The consultants at Andy Stats are also a great resource when you want to develop a strategy to deal with a Google update.

Another problem websites in the United Kingdom have faced is a reversion by Google to US language in Google UK. At one point, US websites sat in 77% of the top 100 for some keywords. Some watchful webmasters also noticed that Google UK automatically corrected UK spellings on keywords, indicating that the engine is now searching in ‘American English’. Due to the timing, it seems that the Google algorithm update is again the culprit.

One piece of good news is that customers searching for a service or web content within the UK will usually look beyond any US results in Google. Hopefully, this may be changed back in time.

The update has placed even more importance on the relationships between related keywords and page ranking. The search engine has increased its focus on relationships between keywords on a page, so multi-word queries have results that include more related words. Multi-word queries also rank pages higher when they have related links, so that a page might rank well that has only two of the query terms but links to others. This means that well-thought-out and well-related content is now valued more than keyword saturation.

It is more important than ever to choose related keywords and link and re-link them throughout your content. The related keywords should be in your anchor text, both internally and externally. Write up meta-descriptions with as many related keywords as possible and correctly label on page content so that tags are marked up correctly.