The search landscape has shifted significantly over the past year. Google released Panda, and then more recently, the Penguin update and these changes have had a major impact on business marketing. With each update Google is trying to reduce spam and bring the most relevant pages to your search terms. Is the algorithm always doing the best job? Of course not. With each update there seems to be a large group of disgruntled webmasters who used to rank well for certain phrases that are longer in contention for the top spots.

These changes are forcing business owners and SEO companies to re-think their marketing campaigns. These SEO teams have had to go back to the drawing board in some instances where well-ranking websites have all but dropped off the radar. In the past, webmasters focused on keyword density and the volume of back-links to their pages. With this update keyword stuffing and back-links were both affected. Some data suggests domains which had a similar keyword as anchor from various sources were adversely affected. This would suggest that using varied anchor text from reliable sources in the way to go.

These changes also centered on quality content. Unique and meaningful content is becoming more and more important to Google’s approach. Cheap article creation aimed solely at back-links is not going to work going forward. Business owners and SEO specialists alike need to focus on well-written articles that create back-links the natural way. Creating great content is going to be the best way to garner attention from both the Google search algorithm and readers who want to consume what you’ve created and pass it along to others.

It seems Google’s is also focused Social Media activity. Their new dashboard provides more meaningful traffic analysis and a new set of social reports that help you measure the impact of your social marketing campaigns and evaluate the effect those social media activities have on your overall goals. These four new reports aggregate specific data points to ensure you see the entire scheme of how social media marketing affects your business. It makes sense that social media is a great way to promote links and company branding naturally.

This year has already shown to be major year for search engine results. The search marketing community will take a while to normalize again. We can hope that spammers were the worst bunch of people hit and the web is a better place as a result. We can also hope that they don’t reverse engineer the update and circumvent these changes. Google has stated that they intend on continuing these types of changes to further reduce spam and improve search accuracy. We can expect that search results will continue to move around a bit in the coming months as a result. We can hope that quality organic SEO with minimal spam is the wave of the future.

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