Ground Report

The recent news of Google’s latest update has been getting website owners concerned about the effectiveness of their SEO strategies for their business websites. Because the update affects SEO services, Sydney business owners and globally are now looking to qualified professional SEO service providers to implement effective SEO strategies for their websites.

Despite this recent and controversial update, there are certain precautions website owners can take to minimize the likelihood of their sites receiving a penalty from Google while staying within the search engine’s guidelines.

Back in early March, Gary Illyes of Google stated that he does not envisage artificial intelligence and machine learning to completely replace Google’s algorithms created by humans any time soon. He claims that Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms would be too difficult to debug if this was the case. While there are already elements of machine learning in place such as RankBrain and more – Illyes wouldn’t divulge exactly what – it is highly unlikely that Google will be replacing hand coded algorithms entirely with their artificial intelligence counterparts.

This recent news has sparked debate among both the Sydney SEO services community and small business owners globally. Gary Illyes verified the newly implemented Fred algorithm on Twitter, stating that the algorithm was designed to target poor-quality content.

What does this all mean for small business owners looking to improve their SEO strategies?

Although Google have taken further action to penalize websites that continually publish low-quality content, there are precautions that can be made to significantly reduce the chances or receiving a penalty from Google.

These useful tips can help small business owners, who are not currently using a professional SEO services.

Avoid publishing low quality content

The Fred update has been put in place to target websites with content of little or no value to the reader. This includes pages only published with revenue generation in mind. Specifically, avoid using the following tactics when publishing content:

• Generating content automatically
• Partaking in link schemes
• Publishing pages with little or no unique content
• Cloaking
• Devious misdirects
• Concealed links or text
• Doorway pages
• Content that has been scraped
• Not adding value when partaking in affiliate programs
• Irrelevant keyword stuffing
• Generating pages with malicious intent, such as installing Trojans, viruses or other badware, or phishing
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending Google automated queries

Remove spam as soon as it appears

Signs of spam can reduce the overall user experience, so website owners should take good care to remove all signs of spam as soon as possible. This includes following good SEO practices such as regularly checking websites for signs of hacking, and removing any hacked content as soon as it shows up. Business owners should also monitor their sites for user-generated spam, removing it as soon as it appears and ideally taking precautions in preventing it.

By following these guidelines, small business owners stand a much higher chance of retaining a good search engine ranking, while reducing the chances of receiving a Google penalty. For further advice, small business owners can contact a Sydney SEO services professional to implement an effective SEO strategy for their websites.