A year doesn’t pass without Google issuing a controversial, animal-named, algorithm update which shakes up the landscape. Naysayers accuse Google of engineering a more profitable scenario for themselves, while evangelists lament big G’s fearless push towards crafting the ultimate, socially-powered, personalised search engine on the planet.
Somewhere in between those opinions lies a set of objective measurements that remain untarnished by love or hate, and one of my favourite websites have brought together industry experts to determine and evaluate those measurements. You can see the fantastic full post here on Moz (formerly SEOMoz).
Below you can see the results of the report. You wouldn’t be wrong in going straight to the biggest positive changes and spending your time working out how this affects your digital presence – however I put this blog post online to draw your attention to the bottom of the table. Paid links, anchor text and exact match domains are out. It’s important to bear this in mind, not only to avoid wasting time on facets of a campaign which have no positive impact – but also be very aware of having already overdone those techniques. It could be worth auditing your site to see if it’s too optimized for links and anchor text, which could lead to a penalty in the long-term.
So while you focus your efforts on the improvement of social authority on your domain and a sprawling social dialogue, just remember to tone down some of the techniques that may be part of your legacy web development.
Credit – Moz.com