Google Says: Garbage out…Quality in
Over the last couple of years we have seen the most significant changes made to Google Search. It wasn’t that long ago when many of your search queries would result in being referred to a page that had malicious code. There are a couple reasons why the internet is a cleaner place now:
1) Web hosting companies are more educated and react quicker than ever before to hacking and servers being compromised.
2) Google provides education to webmasters using Google Webmaster tools. They may email you directly if your server was compromised.
Over the years, Google has been very proactive in drastically reducing the amount of garbage on the internet. In July 2011 Google wiped out 11 million websites from its index that were suspected of illegal phishing attacks. The Google Panda Update has also played a large role in cleaning up the web. You can be sure Google’s search engine is going to continue to improve its quality. If your website is old, stale, out-of-date and not updated often you may be seeing lost rankings. It’s nothing personal; Google's quality standards are constantly rising. If your website is not rising with the times you’ll want to understand more about the way search quality works:
Google Search Updating Process
- The Idea- Coming up with an idea
- Improved Performance- When a set of motivating searches are not performing, engineers create a hypothesis of what data could be integrated into the search algorithm to improve engagement
- Testing- The proposed changes are rigorously tested
- Human Review- Human readers that are trained to review result pages determine which set or SERPs are of the highest quality
- Sandbox- Live users are tested by diverting a small portion of Google Search traffic to a “sandbox”
- Evaluation Team- In 2010 Google conducted over 20,000 experiments. Once experiments run, a Google search analysts (Eval Analysts Team) looks at human and algorithmic data.
- Launch Decision Meeting- Engineers and the Google Search analysts work together in a launch decision meeting where implementation of proposed changes is decided
- Unity with Users- Alignment of Google users and the Google Tech team result in ongoing improvements to Google Search
- Global Change- Users around the world (all languages) see the effects of Google Search quality improvements.
You can see the team at Google is always tweaking and changing the way search works. Combining engineers with an evaluation team are the driving forces behind the finest source of information in the world. Make no mistake; Google is looking for quality content in its relentless pursuit of quality results for users. There are very few secrets that we need to know to now for ranking at Google...it all about quality. If you are feeling you have lost Google love, it’s not the end. You can take the necessary action to get right back where you belong. If you cannot figure it out, talk to a reputable search engine auditing company.
