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Ten years ago ranking a website was incredibly simple. Doorways pages were single page websites that targeted specific keywords and if you over-optimized your page content on that page you had a very good shot at ranking strongly. Meta tags (Title, Description and Keyword) were also very useful for building quick ranking strength. As time went on search algorithms changed to place a greater focus on inbound links to your site. Early on it wasn't really about the quality of the links but rather the quantity of them, the more the better. Many SEO experts back then would use directory submissions and article directories that included one or more links back to their URLs. They often did reciprocal or 3 ways links with other website owners. Really any method site owners could use to build links to the sites were used. As time progressed, it became more about the relevancy of the links. Over the past 10 years another metrics that has become increasingly important is the density of your keywords in your copy. Basically, this is the number of targeted keywords on any particular page divided by the overall number of words on your site. Much has changed since then. Starting in 2011 we started seeing sites that had previously ranked very strongly get impacted harshly by Google updates. At three points during 2011 Google launched separate updates to their Panda algorithm change. Panda targeted things like duplicate content, keyword stuffing, stale content and sites that simple did not have a great enough number of high quality signals to their URLs. These now include links from social media properties. If you weren't able to meet their quality criteria then you were definitely going to see a negative impact to your rankings. There were many updates during that year to Google's algorithm but there were three that were the main ones. Another issue that became more common during 2011 was personalized search results. Each person using a search engine these days will get varying results based upon a variety of their preferences. This is strongly related to your search history with Google and others. This can make it difficult for webmasters to know exactly how their site is performing for various keywords. However, there are a number of tools you can use to help you here. One of the best is Google's Webmaster Tools service. This is a free service and will show you all of your average ranking number for your various keywords over a chosen time period. Another issue that was raised in 2011 were Google's motives. In the early days of Google it seemed pretty obvious that they were out to support small business owners, however as time went on and with the major changes that came in in 2011 many smaller businesses and smaller websites were heavily penalized in search results. In turn, more highly branded sites began to experience more favorable rankings. Was this an effort on Google's part to force these smaller businesses to use a PPC system like their Adwords program? Some would say yes. What happened in 2012? It was a lot more of the same, except on April 24th they released their Penguin, or web spam, update. This update reviewed inbound links to a site in greater detail and if those links were considered to be of very low quality, non relevant and in great quantity the site owner was in trouble. Their rankings probably fell dramatically within days. For years site owners had been using link building service such as Build My Rank (which I don't think exists any longer) to prop up their link profile. In a nutshell their was too much artificial influence of Google algorithms based on little more than building what seemed to be a lot of relevant linking but for the most part it was now considered by Google to be spam. A large misconception about the Penguin update is that it included a component of devaluation as well. What might have appeared as a penalty might have not been but rather the result of Google simply devaluing the weight of your existing inbound links from directories, article submissions etc. Also in 2012 Google started to be a bit more transparent and they started sending notifications to website owners through their Webmaster Tools account. Often these notifications had to do with untrusted links coming into your site. Basically they are helpful insights into how your site might be violating a quality guideline Google has set. If acted upon they can be extremely helpful and without them site owners would be left quite in the dark as to what happened to their previously high ranking results. Once the issue is addressed you can now file a simple reconsideration request with Google and quite often if the issue is dealt with properly you are able to regain your ranking. You can review more about what to look for in an SEO package read about modern web design options and read our website blog at Arious Media.
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