The Truth About Google’s Recent Core Algorithm Changes

The New Year is off to a flying start and things are already warming up in the world of SEO. Can you believe it’s almost February!? Google has big things prepared for 2016 and has already revealed some upcoming changes, some have already dropped - and to the trained eye are having a visible impact. There are some key insights I hope to provide with my posts this year that will highlight some of the changes SEO marketers need to be focusing on.

Over the past month or so, webmasters may have seen some notable changes in the traffic to their websites. While it's simple to chalk up any shift in visitor behaviour to the holiday season, it turns out that what we were seeing were brand-new algorithm updates coming into effect.

A couple of weeks back, a number of executives from Google verified that the world's most popular search engine had a major core algorithm upgrade. "I asked Google for confirmation, and on Twitter they confirmed it was a core ranking algorithm update," wrote Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land. "Google rarely confirms core algorithm updates. They did confirm one back in May 2015 for us, but it is rare that they confirm these. So it is a big thing for Google to go on record that this update webmasters were seeing was related to the core update.”

Other than these recent comments, Google have slipped back to their default setting of keeping their cards pretty close to their chest. It’s always interesting to watch, however, when Google amends the webmaster guidelines, we know that one of the changes was to make Google Panda a part of the core search algorithm.

Google Panda is the set of algorithms Google utilises to measure the quality of sites and the various media they index. Essentially, Google Panda can change search rankings based on quality. Furthermore, Google Panda can find content spam and determine black hat SEO techniques. In an online guide for Google that was vetted by the Google Public Relations group, Jennifer Slegg made the remark that Panda was now part of the core algorithm.

"Panda is an algorithm that's applied to sites overall and has become one of our core ranking signals," she wrote in the Panda guide. "It measures the quality of a site, which you can read more about in our guidelines. Panda allows Google to take quality into account and adjust ranking accordingly."

The statement was later verified by Google. The changes are notable because:

1. Initially, as was pointed out at the start, the modification to the core algorithm has lead to some shuffling of rankings and changes in web traffic for site owners in 2015/2016.
2. More importantly - let’s be clear on what people think this update was, but actually isn’t. Confused yet? Many SEO online marketers assumed the variations they were seeing were the outcome of an approaching Penguin upgrade. That upgrade hasn't occurred yet, and is still planned for the near future. This change is big, but even bigger things are on the boil at Google when it comes to search.