1.9 The Algorithm Evolves

When Google first began in the late ’90s, it used two primary ranking factors. First, how many pages on the internet link to you? Second, how many times do you use the keyword? If you had a good number in both of those areas, it was very easy to rank high.

Google’s algorithm is drastically more complex today. To understand why, let’s imagine you owned a site in the late ’90s that you wanted to rank well, and you knew the way to do that was by saying the keyword a lot and by getting links. It’s easy to see that this system is simple enough to manipulate. To get your site ranking high and earn organic traffic, you only need to purchase links from other websites or build a bunch of websites that link back to your main site and then jam your main website full of keywords you want to rank for (referred to as keyword stuffing).

Because it was so easy to manipulate the algorithm, sites that weren’t very high quality began to rank. If we consider the fact that Google makes its money through ads when people use the search engine, we can see that low-quality sites ranking highly would become a problem for Google. If people use Google to find something, and nothing but low-quality, spammy websites rank, people will gradually stop using Google in favor of some other search engine.

So Google needed to evolve its algorithm, which it has over the past almost 25 years. They have released thousands of updates to their algorithm making it more complex and better able to find and rank quality content higher than spammy, low-quality content. The more Google serves its users, the more people will search, which means Google will profit more from ads.

Staying on top of algorithm updates can be difficult, because Google only occasionally sends notifications that an update has happened. Instead, the SEO industry as a group notices large fluctuations, and they begin to deduce what must have changed in the algorithm in order to cause the fluctuations in rankings.