Don’t Call it a Comeback..the Google Dance.
December 7, 2012
Just when you thought you could put those dancing shoes away, it seems like it is once again time to do the Google Dance. A term developed in 2002 to describe the extreme jump in a website’s placement on search page, this dance was caused each time Google developed a new formula to determine rankings aka, a new search algorithm. With major updates happening every few months, the SEO community soon began viewing them as the hurricanes of search engine optimization and even began naming them in a similar fashion ( remember the “Florida” update of 2003?).
Soon after the hard-hitting Florida, Google stopped with the major monthly updates, and instead made the small changes constantly. This caused the extreme change in rankings to cease and the Dance, just like the Macarena, was a thing of the past. And then along comes Panda…..
With a promise to target content that was stale and irrelevant, Google released the Panda update in early 2011. And to complicate matters more, another update, Penguin, was released earlier this year to target sites involved in spamming. In addition to the two new algorithm updates to be on the look-out for, Google confuses matters more by throwing even more updates into the dance floor, like Top-Heavy and Pirate Penalty. And just like that, dance continues.
With so many updates it can be frustrating to determine what a site needs to consider worthy of ranking, but the rules of the dance come to a simple few. Keep your content fresh and relevant, choose appropriate keywords, create quality links and avoid risky techniques. Of course, enlisting the help of an agency like SEOHaus doesn’t hurt either, where we handle all these updates Gangnam Style.