Author: Daniel Page

There was a time when a website’s content didn’t matter all that much. As long as the SEO expert responsible for marketing it played nice with Google’s algorithms, it ranked high. Those days, however, are now far behind us.

Today, Google is much more selective. It carefully chooses which sites rank highest. Furthermore, Google is far harsher on tactics it considers underhanded.

That means if you engage in black hat SEO, Google will penalize you. If you let too much spam appear on your site, Google will penalize you.

And if your site consists of low-quality, ‘thin’ content, Google will penalize you.

If you’re like most webmasters, you likely saw something troubling last month. Search engine rankings in your industry were all over the place.

Some websites completely tanked, others rose straight to the top; worse still, it all happened seemingly without rhyme or reason. Not surprisingly, SEOs quickly went wild with speculation.

What was Google doing?

It’s official: as of April 21, 2015, “mobile friendliness” is now a ranking factor. That means if your site isn’t optimized for mobile browsing, it won’t just leave you with dissatisfied users. It will also result in a ranking penalty.

Even if it’s a small penalty, there’s no point in getting hit with it if it’s easily avoided.

Right now, the thing that everyone’s buzzing about is semantic search. Search engines, we’re told, are getting smarter – better at providing us with precisely what we’re looking for. The prevailing slogan of this shift, trumpeted by the likes of Google, is “things, not strings.”

It’s pretty easy to see where all this stuff came from, too. Smartphones and tablets have become more or less ubiquitous in modern society.

With their spread, we’ve seen an increased focus on conversational search – on people asking questions of their devices rather than keying in a few search terms.

I suppose there’s a certain allure to algorithm chasing, really. You’re on the bleeding edge of search engine optimization; an expert that all other marketing professionals look to for advice on how they can game the system created by Google.

You’re constantly adapting, modifying, and re-working your strategies to adapt to the latest algorithmic change.

Thing is…that’s kind of an uphill battle. No one outside Google knows how its algorithms work. Also, search engines constantly change. This means new tactics soon become useless. As a result, a site’s search engine traffic often looks like a roller coaster.

The birth of Google’s Penguin algorithm – designed to cut down on link spam – had one rather unfortunate side effect. No, I’m not talking about all the webmasters claiming the algorithm unjustly penalized them. Rather, I’m talking about a new, underhanded tactic all the black hat search engine marketers are practicing.

It’s called Negative SEO. In lieu of properly optimizing their own site, certain individuals in the SEO community have taken to setting up link farms and spam sites designed exclusively to penalize their competitors.

The idea is that their actions will ‘fool’ Google’s algorithms into thinking their target has engaged in manipulative link building techniques.