Ah, for the good old days when Google announced updates and gave them cute names like “Penguin” and “Panda.” But those days are gone, and it was only after webmaster noticed changes in site rankings, and speculated about a new update, that Google announced (via Twitter in fact), that they had actually carried out a “broad core algorithm update” at the beginning of this month.
Regular Updates
According to their announcement, these updates are designed to improve their results, and are carried out several times a year. They also said that there isn’t anything that website owners can do to recover rankings if they have dropped, other than the ubiquitous “building great content.”
They also said that if a site experienced a drop in rankings, it wasn’t necessarily because there was anything wrong with the site. Instead, the changes were benefiting pages that had been “under-rewarded” in the past.
Winning At SEO
As always, the way to ensure that your SEO is as effective as possible is to build a good site, with a sensible structure and detailed content that is good at answering the questions people have about your products or services.
If you follow best practices, and write great content, your site can almost be self-optimising. If you rely on SEO tricks though, you’re only an algorithm update from search engine obscurity.