Google’s New Algorithm Update: Learn How to Create Content That Ranks

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Google has just announced a new algorithm update, with planned implementation in September 2024. For now, Google is looking to improve the quality of results by taking into account content that is genuinely quality content over content that is made just to perform well in search engines.

So what prompted this core update? One of the primary reasons stems from the feedback Google received following the September 2023 algorithm update, which notably affected small and independent publishers. Responding to these concerns, Google has introduced new guidelines to help creators produce content that is both unique and, most importantly, valuable for their users.

To give you a clearer idea of how to craft such content, here are some key recommendations from our SEO expert on ScaledOn, Claudio Deimundo, about Google’s latest update:

• To audit your content, review it for clarity, relevance, and engagement. Identify missteps like unclear messaging, outdated information, or lack of audience connection. Gather feedback, analyze performance metrics, and refine your approach. This process helps you enhance your content’s impact and ensures it resonates with your audience.
• Ask these critical questions to evaluate and fine-tune your content:
  •  Is the content original and comprehensive? 
  • Does it offer insightful analysis or captivate readers?
  • Is the title engaging and accurately reflective of the topic? 
  • Would you share this content with friends or colleagues? 
    

Asking yourself these four guiding questions can help you refine your approach. Don’t forget, there’s really no limit to how thoroughly you can evaluate your content.

• Review the expert sources cited in your content. Content backed by credible, clear, and verifiable data will significantly enhance its impact and trustworthiness.
• Create content for people. This is probably the most important factor of all. Focus on delivering useful, shareable information that offers solutions or imparts valuable lessons to your readers. For example: Imagine you run a sustainable clothing brand and consider creating content on the optimal care of garments made from natural fibers. Offering tips on how to maintain your clothing for a lower environmental impact can be a great way to provide valuable, audience-centered content. In essence, design your content with people in mind, not just the machine.

Google’s Algorithm Update: A journey to explore search engine updates 🔎

Google has firmly established itself as a leader in the digital landscape, thanks to its advances in search technologies, cloud computing, online advertising, and artificial intelligence. With the capability to process over 1 billion search requests globally every day, Google operates at an astonishing pace, shaping the way information is accessed and consumed.

Given this dominance, it’s no wonder that countless brands, content creators, and businesses closely monitor Google’s updates, striving to deliver quality content that ranks high in search results. While many focus on achieving top rankings, Google has recently emphasized that content must prioritize quality and user experience. The August 2024 update reinforces this, highlighting the importance of creating valuable, unique, and engaging content.

Exploring Google’s journey not only provides insight into its ongoing improvements but also presents brands with an opportunity to align their strategies toward a common goal: delivering a superior user experience.

Essential insights and a brief background behind Google’s most recent algorithm update

As the most prominent search engine in history, Google constantly updates its algorithm to improve the quality of results for users. This in turn impacts the SEO strategies of brands seeking to rank among the top search results. Knowing the most important algorithm changes will help you understand Google’s evolution and improve your plan to achieve the best possible results.

1. Google Panda (2011)
   Panda was introduced with the intention of penalizing sites with low-quality, superficial, or duplicate content. The mission? Promote content that is useful, valuable, and well-researched, ensuring users are served with original and useful information.
   
   With the arrival of Panda, “content farm” type content (mass-generated information for traffic attraction), experienced drops in positioning. On the contrary, sites that offered valuable and well-written information began to experience improvements in searches.
   
   Nowadays, the recommendation is to offer useful, interesting, well-structured, and researched content to keep users visiting your site.
   
   
2. Google Penguin (2012)
   After the first steps to improve the content, Google introduced Penguin algorithm update to fight link spam and manipulative SEO practices, like your favorite superhero. 
   
   This algorithm penalized sites that featured link techniques considered unethical, such as link buying and excessive use of keywords in anchor text. It also focused on link-building practices that attempted to manipulate site ranking, rather than manual link-building.
   
   What was the impact of Penguin on SEO strategies? Simply put, sites using the questionable tactics we mentioned earlier saw their rankings plummet. On the other hand, pages with naturally earned, organic links enjoyed a boost in their rankings.
   
   Building natural links from relevant sites with well-structured and quality information will make a big difference in the positioning you are looking for in your brand.
   
   
3. Google Hummingbird (2013)
   Hummingbird made its debut with a mission: to better understand user queries and deliver results that truly match their intentions. This algorithm shifted the focus to semantic search, considering the context and meaning of words rather than just looking for exact keyword matches.
   
   A major impact was the improved ranking of those sites that offered clearer content and answered contextually complex queries for users. Hummingbird highlighted the importance of the user and how they should be considered for content creation with thorough research.
   
   
4. Google Mobile-Friendly Update (2015).
   So far, we have seen three fundamental changes to the algorithm that required brands to create content with good structure without errors, with manual link work and to relevant sites and of quality; and consideration of user intent, through analysis of context and keyword meaning.
   
   The Google Mobile-Friendly Update was all about enhancing the search experience on mobile devices. It prioritized sites that offered a mobile-friendly experience in search results, ensuring users could easily navigate and interact with content on their smartphones and tablets.
   
   “Mobilegeddon” was the update that hit sites hard if they weren’t optimized for mobile devices. But there was a silver lining because Google rewarded sites with responsive, mobile-friendly designs by pushing them to the top of search results.
   
   Do you want to be successful with this algorithm update? Your site must be fast and with an intuitive and easy-to-read design. Constant auditing is key to ensuring that your users will have an optimal experience.
   
   
5. Google RankBrain
   According to Google, RankBrain is one of the most important ranking factors, so a good understanding of how it works will guarantee that your site will be among the top search results. This algorithm, which, by the way, is also part of Hummingbird, incorporates a type of machine learning to improve the interpretation of search queries made by users.
   
   On the flip side, while the exact formula behind these changes remains a mystery, it’s clear that artificial intelligence plays a key role in emphasizing content relevance and understanding its connection to user behavior.
   
   To be successful, optimize your content to make it relevant and useful. Achieve this by keeping an eye on the behavioral metrics of your potential users and, if necessary, improving the content to ensure happy visitors.
   
   
6. Google Medic (2018)
   Medic is a crucial algorithm update that focuses on enhancing the quality and credibility of results in the health, wellness, and other YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) areas. Why the name? It’s because it significantly impacted health and medical sites, ensuring that only the most reliable and trustworthy information rises to the top.
   
   The algorithm update emphasized the importance of providing a robust user experience through authoritative and credible content and a clean, easy-to-navigate design. The introduction of EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) became essential for showcasing content that not only demonstrated high levels of subject expertise but also earned recognition for its reliability and trustworthiness.
   
   Let’s take a look at the impact of SEO, which has two aspects:
   
   – Pages with health content made by experts such as doctors and professionals in the field were highlighted as trustworthy and accurate.
   
   – For YMYL sites that dealt with financial, legal, or deemed to affect users’ lives, the algorithm update emphasized the need for reliable, serious, and well-researched content.
   
   
7. Google Bert (2019).
   With Bert (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), Google is looking to go a bit further in terms of interpreting the context of words that are part of search queries. In short, this is to better understand complex queries.
   
   By emphasizing the importance of words used in their natural context, search results became more valuable and relevant. Similarly, sites that tailored their SEO strategies to provide content that truly understood and addressed the context of user queries saw a notable boost in their rankings.
   
   Panda, Hummingbird, and RankBrain were the pioneers in moving beyond simple keyword matching to tackle the complexities of search. This evolution continued with BERT, which takes it a step further by grasping the subtle nuances in user queries, leading to even more precise and relevant search results.
   
   Bert 2.0
   BERT 2.0, the algorithm update to the original BERT, brought several key enhancements that made contextual understanding even more effective. This version refined how the algorithm interprets word meanings based on context, capturing the subtleties of idiomatic and conversational language. It also improved the handling of long queries, ensuring they receive clear and concise responses.
   
   The key to success is… Focus on providing your content with natural language and attractive structure for your visitors. Remember this: Quality content with rich and well-explained descriptions will make a big difference in your SEO results.
   
    
8. Google Page Experience Update (2021)
   Since 2017, there have been several changes to Google’s core algorithm, though details remain limited. SEO experts haven’t reached a definitive conclusion about these updates, but some clues suggest that the focus has shifted more toward enhancing user experience. This includes an emphasis on specific metrics like Core Web Vitals, which measure how well a site performs in terms of user experience.
   
   These metrics evaluate the visitor experience from several viewpoints, Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. They consider loading speed, interactivity with the user, and the stability of the graphical elements found on the site.
   
   Adequate visual stability and interactivity are some of the elements that you should take into account so that your site can skyrocket to the first place in the ranking.
   
   
9. Google Helpful Content Algorithm Update (2022)
   This update emphasizes content that is crafted to truly meet visitors’ needs. It’s not just about optimizing information anymore; providing a valuable and high-quality user experience has become equally crucial.
   
   This change led to penalties for content created solely to game Google’s rankings. Instead, sites that provide genuine solutions, high-quality information, and thorough research are now rewarded with top positions in the search results.
   
   It is worth mentioning that there are a couple of elements that are also part of the most recent algorithm updates, which are:
   
   -Voice search and conversational SEO: There has been an increase in voice searches, so Google has started to prioritize content capable of answering questions naturally and conversationally. Even the use of colloquial language can be beneficial if you plan to establish this in your strategy. Another trick to be more successful in voice searches? Use questions in your content, and you will see the difference. 
   
   -Specialized and authoritative content tends to rank better. Information from credible, expert sources is more likely to earn higher rankings. For example, if you’re providing content on financial habits, involving field specialists can boost your credibility and enhance trust with your audience.
   
   
10. Google MUM (Multitask Unified Model) (2023)
    This model marks a major advancement in the search engine’s capabilities, designed to handle multiple tasks at once and deliver highly accurate, relevant search results. It also includes two intriguing features:
    
    -Multilingual Understanding: The algorithm can understand information in different languages to provide better answers, even if the sources are in another language.
    
    -Improved Contextual Understanding: MUM builds on BERT’s contextual understanding but goes further by integrating other data such as those found in text, images, videos, etc. That’s why the results are much richer and more precise.
    
    The central goal of MUM is to enhance the search experience by making it more intuitive and enjoyable. It achieves this by better understanding and addressing complex queries, reflecting ongoing efforts to improve how users interact with search.

Why does Google change its search algorithm? 🤔

The algorithm update from 2011 set the stage for today’s SEO practices, leading to content that is now more reliable, authoritative, and well-organized than ever. For businesses, these updates pose a significant challenge, as even the smallest detail can make the difference between maintaining top rankings or losing ground and needing to rethink strategies. Staying up-to-date is essential for adapting seamlessly and avoiding major setbacks. So, why did these updates take place? Let’s explore some key reasons:

1. To fight spam and manipulative SEO practices. By ensuring safe spaces and ethical practices, you can guarantee quality and trustworthy content.
2. Improvement and quality of the content offered. A clear objective was to provide users with results that were useful and relevant.
3. Encourage ethical, natural, and organic SEO practices. Previously, many sites were burdened with meaningless, unstructured content, errors, and unreliable information. The updates shifted the focus to promoting ethical and merit-based strategies, leading to a more trustworthy and effective approach to SEO.
4. Increase authority and trust. By supporting top-ranked sites and major brands, trusted and recognized sources were prioritized to improve the user experience.
5. Providing up-to-date information is crucial in today’s fast-paced world. Websites must offer fresh and current content to ensure an optimal user experience.

These are the best SEO practices businesses can implement, according to the recent Google’s algorithm update

Staying up to day with algorithm changes is highly beneficial for creating content that ranks. But there are also some handy tricks you can use which can also be highly effective in shaping your SEO approach.

• Quality Content Remains Top Priority: Ensure your information is always useful, relevant, and well-researched. Incorporate the EAT principles, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, into your content. Demonstrating these qualities, especially with the support of experts and credible sources, will showcase your content’s reliability and authority.
• User Experience Optimization (UX): User experience is another aspect you should cover. This includes loading speed and ease of navigation on the site. For this, you can use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to identify improvements to be made. Remember: users want to find information quickly.
• Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals metrics are critical to understanding aspects such as page experience, loading speed, and visual stability. Make sure to optimize the content of your home page, and avoid unexpected changes in your visual design. Make sure that the proportions of your graphic elements remain the same.
• High-Quality Backlinks: Links of this type have always been important throughout the updates explained above, but Google continues to improve its ability to evaluate them to ensure their relevance. Focus on obtaining links from reliable, high-quality pages to protect your ranking.

A look into the future of content optimization 🚀

SEO continues to be a crucial tool for crafting content that resonates with the millions of users who turn to search engines daily. Preparing for the future means staying ahead of evolving trends. Here are three emerging areas shaping the SEO landscape:

Technical SEO: delves into the behind-the-scenes elements of websites. A key focus here is working with Google Core Web Vitals, which assesses user experience through performance and functionality metrics. Essential tasks include optimizing load times, securing the site with HTTPS, and ensuring a logical and clear site structure with proper use of headers, tags, and sitemaps.

Visual SEO: extends beyond written content to encompass graphics as well. Optimizing images, graphics, and videos is essential for improving search results. With Google Lens highlighting the importance of visual content, using accurate ALT descriptions and appropriate file names is crucial. Besides, creating high-resolution videos for platforms like YouTube with detailed descriptions and transcriptions can enhance visibility. Implementing structured data to facilitate the classification of visual content will also prepare your site for the rise of visual searches.

Local SEO: Users increasingly use their mobile devices to find products and services quickly, which is why businesses are directing their strategies to attract customers in their geographical area. Google has emphasized updating its Pigeon algorithm to offer precision in local searches. So, what impact will this have on your SEO strategies? It will be necessary to ensure your company information is updated, with recent photos and clear hours; encourage positive reviews; proactively manage comments; and use location-specific terms to improve search relevance.

Success in these areas hinges on one crucial task: staying informed about the latest developments. It’s also important to continuously adjust your strategies and methods to stay competitive and relevant for your clients. Overwhelmed by the endless updates? Let our expert 24/7 team handle it for you, so you can focus on what you do best!

FAQs