Community News C BE AWARE OF GOOGLE’S ALGORITHM UPDATES
By Dean Swanson, volunteer Certified SCORE Mentor and former SCORE Chapter Chair, District Director, and Regional Vice President for the North West Region I t’s a given that all small businesses—no matter their size or industry—must have a website. That’s how most consumers discover businesses—by searching for them on one of the search engines. Realistically, Google dominates searches, with an 87.8% share. So it’s also a given that when Google updates its algorithms (called core updates), it can wreak havoc on your search rankings. As Search Engine Journal says, “Google’s acknowledgment of core updates is always vague and doesn’t provide much detail other than to say the update occurred.” Rieva Lesonsky, one of SCORE’s content partners and also President and CEO of GrowBiz Media, recently reported some important information on the topic of search engine operations that are very important for websites. As Google itself explains, “We confirm broad core updates because they typically produce some widely notable effects. Some sites may note drops or gains during them. We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix, and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things. Moreover, there might not be anything to fix at all.” There may have been a core update in January that impacted your business. So, what does it all mean? To get the answers, Lesonsky talked to Chris Rodgers, CEO and founder of Colorado SEO Pros. So many business owners don’t know about Google’s core updates and the potentially devastating effect they can have on their businesses. What does this all actually mean? Chris Rodgers: Google’s core updates generally affect large portions of websites in Google’s index, and often, the changes in SEO performance resulting from these updates are significant. Whenever we see large-scale changes in search results, there will be both winners and losers, but the fallout for marketers and businesses on the losing
side can be a huge deal depending on how much business revenue they generate from SEO. How often (typically) does Google drop these updates? Is there a schedule? Rodgers: There is not a schedule, but typically Google will release a few of these each year. Last year we had three core algorithm updates, plus many other major updates and countless minor updates throughout the year. Rodgers: Google will typically confirm core algorithm updates, as well as some other targeted updates after they happen. There are, however, countless updates that Google does not confirm. SEO industry professionals communicate and share data to understand how the update is affecting websites and use this information to navigate strategy. One big benefit SEO agencies have is that they typically have a collection of sites they manage, so they have direct insight into how the
update affects different clients’ websites. To read more, visit SCORE’s website at https://bit.ly/3lC7k6d
| Advantage Magazine 20
April 2022
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