What is a Google Algorithm Change?

There are a lot of searches that are done every day on Google – over 80,000 a second, in fact – and whilst around 17% of those have never been searched for before, there are many that we go back to time after time.

If you’re repeating a search and it isn’t for a brand name, you might find that you get slightly different results from the last time you looked; potentially very different results if it has been a while since you searched last.

But if you haven’t changed what you are looking for, why have your results changed?

Well, there are frankly myriad reasons why.

The site that was number one before might not be online anymore, so it won’t be there.

There’s personalisation to consider as well, as if you’ve been on a site a few times but are still searching for the same thing, Google might think you’re not getting the answers you want there and so stop offering it.

The list of reasons why goes on and on and on, but one thing that could definitely have an impact, and something which happens quite often, is that Google has changed their algorithm and that means that the way it decides how to show your results is different.

Whilst the question might be the same, the judging criteria have changed, so the answer won’t be what you got before.

How often does Google change the algorithm?

As Google is quite a secretive place, particularly when it comes to how things rank organically, they don’t really tell us how often they change things; they’ll only let us know when something a bit bigger happens, which is rather sporting of them.

The long and the short of it is, they change the algorithm quite a lot. It’s a cliché in our industry to say that Google changes it a couple of times a day, but it’s a cliché because it is pretty much true. We can predict that there will be at least 600 changes to the algorithm this year, much like any other year.

Are all the changes big changes?

Not at all.

In fact, most of them are quite small and go almost unnoticed, unless it happens to have an impact on you. It’s a bit like the development of a Formula One car. McLaren bring a new or upgraded part to their car every 23 minutes on average throughout the season.

Very few of those parts will make the car noticeably faster but added together they make a huge difference. A new front wing could bring a 0.3 second improvement itself – a huge gain in F1 terms – and it would probably be noticed by most that it was new; the team might even point it out as a major upgrade.

Most, however, are smaller improvements that help through the principle of incremental gains. By the end of the year, if you were to take the car back to the first track of the season, it would be in the region of 3-5 seconds a lap faster than when that first race took place. But of course, they never do this, so you can’t see the improvement as clearly.

The Google algorithm is very much the same.

Sometimes they make a big change and they’ll announce it.

Most of the changes are smaller and have less impact themselves, but compare it to the start of the year and you’ll see how it’s affected the performance of your website in search. 99 times out of 100, you won’t know that a change has been made at the time that it happens.

Are all big changes the same?

Put simply, no. There tends to be two main types of big update, which come in the forms of Core Algorithm Updates and Named Updates. At least, that’s how we have a propensity to refer to them.

Core Algorithm Updates tend to happen every 2-4 months, but there isn’t a set pattern to when they land.

These ones tweak a lot of things by a little but all at once; that’s why they call it a ‘Core’ update as it’s not one element that gets changed, but rather changing the weighting of each ingredient in the recipe.

As such, we never really know with these ones if there’s a particular element that has taken more of role in the algorithm than before, or what has changed or been targeted.

Named Updates are a little different, and no two tend to be the same. These generally focus on a specific issue that Google wants to address and amends the algorithm accordingly.

Google sometimes gives them their names, and other times the SEO industry gives them a nickname if there isn’t a name to it already, but it has had a particular impact. Historic Named Updates include ‘Panda’, which targeted poor quality and duplicated content, and ‘Penguin’, which went after sites spamming links to manipulate the search engine.

More recently, there’s been the ‘Medic Update’ which had a huge impact on medical sites (hence the nickname) and YMYL sites – Your Money, Your Life.

These Named Updates give us a better idea of what Google’s objectives are and what they might have done to get there – and more importantly, what we might need to do if we’ve had a slump in rankings and traffic after one gets rolled out.

How do we know that a big change has happened?

There’re a few ways to tell that something on the larger scale has happened.

Here at Footprint Digital, we’re in a decent position to see if there is a lot of change going on as we’re tracking around 15,000 individual keywords for the ranking of about 60 websites, so if something big happens we can normally see it pretty quickly.

Your Search Console can help give an indication of if you’ve been affected too. There are also tools out there which measure the ‘temperature’ of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) to see if there is a lot of flux going on – places like SERP Metrics and SEMrush – so this helps us know if something is going down.

Likewise, as a community, SEOers do like to chat to each other, so there will always be a buzz on some niche (and quite nerdy) forums, too.

However, the best way to know if there has been a larger algorithm change is the fact that Google will actually tell us.

It always used to be that they would tell us after the fact, but for some types of update they have started letting us know a day or two beforehand – although the first time they did that it did cause a bit of scare, as no-one was expecting it so everyone feared the worst!

Danny Sullivan is Google’s guy for telling us things, courtesy of the Twitter account Google Search Liaison.

This sounds fantastic because it sounds like it’s a way to get more information from Google about organic stuff – famously there’s a number to call and reasonably decent support if you’ve got an issue with your paid ads but not a sausage for the organic stuff.

Well, this is definitely a step forwards, but just because we know there has been an update doesn’t always mean we know what it is or what it has done. But it’s a start at least.

What does Google tell us?

Honestly? Not as much as we’d like.

They’ll tell us that the change has happened, and if it’s a Named Update there’ll be a little bit of information about what and why, but not a huge amount to go by. But still, the fact that we get told is a big help, because then we know to look at things.

What should we do after an update?

Most of the time, the best thing to do is to wait and ride out the storm, and then see where things lie. It sometimes takes a few days for the update to get rolled out, especially if it’s a global update, and like with an earthquake there’s an aftershock quite often, a week or two after the update.

Even once it’s live, it can still be tweaked and played with, so things might change a bit again fairly quickly. There is always flux in the search results, so it’s important to make sure that you are reasonably certain that you’re being affected by the change and it isn’t something else. Sometimes the next update will partially rollback the last one too.

But if you have been impacted, the type of update will make a difference to what your next steps should be.

If it is a Named Update, there will be some clues to go by. After Penguin, for example, we knew that we needed to review backlinks, get rid of any that were spammy, and focus of getting high quality ones in to replace them. The focus of the Named Update will give you an idea of what to work on.

If it’s a Core Algorithm Update that has dropped you, then that is a different matter. Google is really vague about these ones and say that there isn’t one thing; in fact, the likelihood is that there is nothing wrong with your site, it’s just there are better ones that have been overlooked before and this is trying to redress that.

What can we do to fix it? It doesn’t really help us, but at least it means we don’t have to feel hard done by or that Google is punishing/picking on us. Google tells us that we should do what they’ve always told us – focus on the user – and provide the best experience for those who use the site.

What does ‘Focus on the User’ actually mean?

Google’s advice has always been and probably always will be ‘Focus on the User and everything else will follow’, which is lovely but very fluffy and doesn’t really tell us much. Basically, they are saying don’t try and build your website for the algorithm, as it’s not actually them that use it, but people.

They want the users to come back to them over and over again rather than a rival search engine (because then they get the advertisers who spend money with them) and so want people to get the best results and best experience. But you can focus on both.

A big thing for Google at the moment, other than mobile, is what they call EAT – Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

They want to send users to sites with good EAT. A simple way of boosting your EAT is making sure that every blog and article on your site has an author and that there is information about them somewhere on the site – either on the blog or on the Team page.

You want to know that the information you’re getting is the both reliable and the best. Updates that work on YMYL are big on EAT, as it is Money and Life/Health where we need these three elements more than anywhere else.

It’s reassuring when you go to the doctor and in her office, there are all these framed certificates on the wall. The office itself is clean, the waiting room is tidy, and Radio 2 is playing gently in the background. They’ve even managed to keep their plants alive, which is a good sign. The doctor is kind and comforting, clearly very knowledgeable, and she takes the time to explain everything to you.

You can’t read a single word of the prescription because her handwriting is terrible. Every single aspect of your visit has reassured you of the expertise and authority of your healthcare professional, and as a result you pop down to the chemist with full trust in the pills that she has told you take two of every morning for the next three weeks.

Compare that with going to see your lawyer the next day.

The door to his office is next to the bins round the back of Sainsbury’s and once you’re inside, you aren’t sure you really want to sit on any of the surfaces.

On the wall there are framed photographs of Piers Morgan. The plants look dead, which is somewhat impressive as they are clearly plastic.

He appears in t-shirt and flip-flops, with a half-eaten meatball sub in his hand, and what looks like most of the other half down his front.

Papers are strewn all across the office, which looks like there haven’t been any cleaning products brought into the room, let alone used. It smells. Would you trust him to give you advice ahead of that big merger at work which will either make or break your career?

Google wants to send users to people like the first of these two, not the second.

EAT is a big thing for them at the moment, so do what you can to showcase your expertise, authority, and trust in everything you do online. Yes, there are other things to do as well and this isn’t a one-fix-solves-all kinda thing, but it’s hot on Google’s list at the moment so make sure you build this up. Content is king – another cliché but for a reason – so start there.

We’ve made it out of the algorithm okay – is it all plain sailing from here?

That would be lovely, but no-one is ever really out of the woods.

This change might have been good for you, but the next one may not be so kind. There’s no way of telling what the next update might bring, so don’t rest on your laurels. There’s always more to be done and the stronger you can make your website, the better chance you have of surviving the algorithm changes of the future, too.

The other thing to look at is making sure you’ve got a range of traffic sources. If 80% of your traffic is coming organically from Google and the next algorithm change wipes you out, that’s going to have a pretty bad impact on your business.

If it’s about 30% organic, with paid ads, emails, social media, and other campaigns all bringing in traffic as well, then it’s obviously not great, but you’ve still got things happening whilst you work on improving your rankings again. A healthy mix helps you ride out any problems with algorithm changes.

Sounds like a lot going on with Google Algorithms and SEO…

There certainly is, and it’s not going to stop.

As we said before, Google doesn’t really like us knowing too much, so we have to work it all out ourselves.

There’s a code – the algorithm – that keeps changing but holds the secret to how the SERPs get their order. If we can crack that, we can appear higher in the rankings and make more money online. That is the game we’re playing with Google every day.

If you’ve found that things have dropped off after a recent algorithm change, or you just generally want to be a bit higher up those Google results, get in touch and let’s see how we can get you where you want to be, together.