Know thy enemy is a very old phrase indeed, and often applies to any business activities. When it comes to search engine optimisation, your opponent is definitely the search engines. To be more specific, in a market where the majority has long since been held by one single company, your opponent is the search engine giant, Google.
Search engine optimization experts have been studying the ins and outs of Google for a long time now, with some success. The search engine’s algorithm still changes with too much frequency for SEO to be an exact science, but there are some things that are known, or at least strongly suspected, about Google. Here are a few things you need to know:
1. Google values your site’s history more than you do. It’s long been suspected that site history counts for a lot with Google, and since the leaking of an old patent this suspicion has been confirmed. It’s becoming apparent that history will matter even more to Google as time goes by, as site history is one of the quality factors that is very hard for a site to fake.
As history is so hard to fake, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Google can easily find out the ‘document inception’ date of your pages and your whole site. The best thing you can do is hold on to the sites you currently have, and invest in history when you buy domains.
2. Fresh content counts. Your search engine optimization consultant is likely to urge you to find a source of fresh content for your pages. Talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about SEO content. Fresh content has been important in the past, and it is going to be even more important in the future. As Google increases its drive for real-time results, the recent activity on your pages will count for even more. It has been shown that Google judges the freshness or staleness of a page by monitoring the amount of new content.
3. Old content counts. Google has come out saying that for some searches, older pages have the edge because the page has the weight of history behind it. For queries that are about a topic that doesn’t need constant updating, having an older page optimised and ready might be an advantage.
4. Google watches how your users behave. A lot of companies concentrate on what will appeal to the search engine web bots, without thinking about how their site users will react. Google has always had a focus on pleasing internet users. This focus has led to the development of methods to measure user satisfaction with your site. Google measures time on page, click-through rate and other factors in judging your site.
5. Slick moves don’t work for long. Google has a vested interest in preventing spam sites from appearing on its listings, and the spam detection methods the search engine employs are getting more and more sophisticated. Sudden shifts are likely to set off a filter.
