Google Algorithm Update Guidance Update

Google Algorithm Update Guidance
Google has published official guidance on Core Updates that goes beyond anything published before. The guidance covers four areas of content and recommends becoming acquainted with Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines to learn how to judge your own content.

Google’s guidance on Core Algorithm Updates was authored by Danny Sullivan. Google’s guidance begins with a preamble advising there is nothing to fix. It then makes an analogy of the search results as being like a Top 100 Movie list and how that kind of list changes every years due to new movies and changing opinion. After which it lists four actionable areas to focus on.

The Search Engine Journal blog has posted a summary of these guidelines including Google’s Guidance on Areas to Focus On.

Danny Sullivan offers web publishers four kinds of questions to ask about your content when assessing if your content is good enough for Google’s search results.

Those four question areas are:

> Content and quality questions
> Expertise questions
> Presentation and production questions
> Comparative questions

Content and Quality Questions
This section offers eight areas to review. It advises content creators to be original, insightful and comprehensive. It also cautions against clickbait headlines that exaggerate the impact of the topic. Of particular interest is a section regarding the authoritativeness of the content. It suggests that the best kind of content is content that inspires being bookmarked and is good enough to be cited in print.

Expertise Questions
This section discusses expertise of the author and the content. It advises against being mysterious about the author credentials of the author or website.

Presentation and Production Questions
This section begins advising on style, presentation and against looking sloppy. Of particular interest are these two items:

> Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
> Does content display well for mobile devices when viewed on them?

Comparative Questions
The last section, Comparative Questions is about comparing your page quality against other pages in the search results.

> Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
> Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

To read the complete Search Engine Journal blog summary on the Google Algorithm Update Guidance posting visit this link.