Casey Meraz

GB7DEMRX3PFA How often do you read articles like this one?  If you are like me you probably see a few of these stories come out after any major Google update.  Each time the story is the same claiming that SEO is dead due to Google’s new updates and it has put tons of SEO companies out of business.  While the second half of that statement may have some truth to it, the fact remains that SEO is Not Dead nor will it be going anywhere anytime soon. Major search engines like Google launch literally hundreds of these updates a year, but they usually only publicize the big ones.  What do these updates do though?

 

These updates are planned for one reason and one reason only, to make the search results better for searcher’s.  Since their inception search engines have been spammed left and right with unethical people trying to manipulate them to rank for their keywords.  While it’s important for your business to rank in major search engines, it’s more important that the search engines deliver the searcher with the best quality result.  If my site sells high fat potato chips, I should not be ranking for “Healthy Potato Chips”.  It’s giving the searcher a result that he or she was likely not intending to see. That is what these updates are made to do is knock out the players who are tricking the search engines to rank for irrelevant keywords.  The most recent updates were successful in disabling some blog networks which were websites put up with thin content for the sole purpose of providing backlinks and boosting their main sites rankings.  Since these sites are dull with a limited amount of content most searcher’s would never want to see them as it would provide any benefit to them.  So who was hurt by the most recent updates?

 

The most recent updates came as a shock and surprise to most with the Panda 3.5 hitting and then the new Penguin update in the same week. It’s true that these updates did affect a number of sites and even SEO companies.  However the SEO companies who were affected by this are likely using unethical ranking techniques and should not be in the business as they are the ones trying to manipulate the search results.  All things considered SEO is still very much alive and well.  And like usual make sure you are using an Ethical SEO Company for your Search Engine Optimization projects.