Honest SEO Tactics Prevail
Over the past month the SEO world has been abuzz and industry tacticians have been watching closely to determine how recent changes to the Google algorithm will shape search results. We have noticed significant changes to our clients’ rankings over the past month, which are discussed below.
One of the major changes Google rolled out involve websites that “scrape” content from original source websites and post that original content on their sites. This is done to artificially rank themselves high on the search engines. Unfortunately several well-known, trusted websites found these scraping websites were ranking higher than they did for their target phrases, even though the scraping sites were taking their original content and simply pasting it on their sites. The latest changes by Google seem to have significantly addressed this issue.
Google also addressed website hacking with their latest changes. Hackers infiltrate websites and paste code into those websites that creates backlinks to websites they are trying to artificially rank. Again, it seems the latest updates by Google have significantly addressed this issue.
Finally, the latest changes by Google target the copious amounts of “content farms” that have popped up online over the past few years. These websites contain low-quality, often poorly written content that is simply produced to create backlinks to websites and artificially increase their rankings. The proliferation of these types of websites has created a ton of space junk in the online universe. Once again it appears Google engineers have successfully made a huge dent in dropping the rankings of websites associated with these content farms.
While we have seen a huge uproar online of SEO companies complaining about these changes, we have actually been really happy about them. Across the board, all of our SEO clients have seen significant increases in their rankings. We have seen our clients jump between 20-80 spots for keywords and phrases we are targeting for their campaigns. We have even spoken to clients who have not been investing in an SEO campaign who have noticed their rankings have increased.
We have always advocated doing things the “right” way when it comes to developing and optimizing websites, and we know that there are a lot of scammers in our industry who try to sell their clients on “super-secret methods”. We have continually reminded our clients that at the end of the day the people who try to scam the system will be left in the dust. Our SEO campaign strategies are deployed with the intention of protecting our client’s long-term interests, not to portray short-term gains by using tactics built on a house of cards.