Before you try to make sense of Google updates in 2017, let’s work on understanding what’s happening in the world of search. I will start with the most important point:
You need to work 100X harder at link building and guest posting.
Now all the experts are saying: But that’s not what Barry & Matt told us, they said we should STOP building links. We’re gonna tell Google you’re lying – this is fake news!
If I may answer that: Google is in the process of telling the world that it’s paid ads are “native”. With an annual revenue exceeding $80Billion mostly from ads, do you really think Google will tell you it’s OK to go and spend your ad dollars elsewhere? Not quite. But this is what is happening with real native ads, selected manually across quality sources:
- Organic SEM results of quality 3rd party sites writing about your business are stronger than ever before
- It is a safe strategy that protects you whenever your own rankings drop
- Tonnes of money is flowing into this right now because it WORKS!
Simply put, advertisers are balancing their budget allocations. PPC and programmatic will remain dominant but at least 30% should flow towards individually selected native advertising (involving content marketing).
Let’s take a deepdive and read between the lines on what is happening with links and content:
Starting with the easy part: If you’re in the business of buying tonnes of crap links, poorly written articles and anything to do with automated native ads that provides a permanent link – yes you need to stop that immediately because it does not work. More than that: It will attract penalties that becomes harder to remove these days. It’s easy for Google to detect that you’ve done this – and it’s easy and cheap for you to do it.
Now the harder part is this: Google has absolutely now way to detect which of your posts were “bought” or “earned” media. Right now it is trying to rely on FTC regulations that requests tagging to be done – but this is only applicable in the US, which no longer represents the majority of content. As far as you’re concerned, the hard part is deciding that I’m going to pay upwards of $100 or sometimes even up to $1000 for a credible piece of journalism that will result in the sort of PR that will rank well – as opposed to dishing out $20 for posts that aren’t going anywhere except into the Google sandbox, along with your domain.
As far as search itself is concerned, it is becoming more fragmented than ever before. People are searching in ways we previously thought they would not: This includes app-centric searches, community-centric searches (such as Amazon, Ask, Bing and various other longtail providers that often exceeds the sum total of Google). We already know Google organic results greatly reward high quality sources, but you want to make a bigger effort now to pick up online real estate from all the fragmented sources too.
Need solutions for native & content? You’d love this
Getting started with PPC? You’d love this
Oh, you’d probably like to undertake an in-depth study of Google updates that affect you? Here is the list. Feel free to take your time and read about Google Hummingbird, Google Mobile Friendly Update, Google Panda Update, Google Penguin Update, Google Pigeon Update, Google Payday Update, Google Pirate Update, Google EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update and Google Top Heavy Update.