As 2015 comes to an end, it is essential that digital marketers review the many changes that Google made to its algorithm to help produce better search results. Sastry Rachakonda, CEO of data driven digital marketing company, iQuanti, shared his insights on what he believed were the biggest changes for Google. This will help digital marketers who are focused on SEO for their clients or managers.
Here are the four biggest changes made during 2015:
-One of the largest changes Google made in 2015 was their overhaul of how they rank mobile sites. As mobile searches have increased year over year, it has finally overtaken desktop searches. Google has separated mobile from desktop to ensure better results for the largest segment of searchers.
-The “phantom update” was a quality update that most affected rankings in editorials that had a lack of supporting content. Google has increased its effort in ensuring users get quality content by penalizing pages that have one page optimized for specific keywords without support from the rest of the site or external links.
-Panda 4.2 was implemented to clean up spam link farms and bad link profiles. The latest update impacted 2% to 3% of English language searches.
-Google launched RankBrain AI, which contributed to the third most influential ranking factor. This update is looking to improve search intent for search queries. Many search queries are completely new, but are looking for something that already exists. This will help the algorithm provide better search results.
