industry E-commerce A Retailer Guide to
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be tricky to navigate, with constant updates meaning that what worked for your website yesterday might shoot you in the foot today. SGB takes a look at the minefield that is Google algorithms, with help from market research agency toinfinity
formulas that take the user’s questions and turn them into answers. Today, when searching through online content, Google’s algorithms rely on more than two hundred unique signals or ‘clues’ that make it possible to guess whether the content is the content the searcher is looking for. These signals include things like the phrases and terms used on the website, the freshness of the content, the region of the searcher and the Page Rank, which determines a page's relevance or importance based on the number of other sites that link back to it. There are many components to the search process and the results page, and Google is constantly updating its technologies and systems to deliver better results. For sports retailers, the ranking of your website/online store in is key to keeping page view numbers up, attracting new site visitors and completing online sales. There are a number of strategies that sports retailers can use to
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ensure their site remains high in Google’s listings. Some are obvious, such ensuring you include highly searched and relevant terms and phrases in your website’s content, and ensuring that your content is regularly updated. Some, however, are harder to analyse, and even these simple ones can devastate the unwary as Google seeks to weed out genuinely high quality sites from those seeking to manipulate their algorithms. Whenever Google updates its algorithms, some websites are caught in the backlash and relegated far down the search rankings, or even blacklisted altogether. When updating their website content and SEO strategies, sports retailers need to ensure that they do not fall foul of a Google update.
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or a typical Google query, there are thousands, if not millions, of web pages with potentially relevant information. Algorithms are the computer processes and
What is Penguin? Introduced in April 2012, Penguin is the codename for an update to Google’s algorithm, designed to punish the old-school linking techniques that companies used to use to increase ranking in the search engines. Both currently and in the past, many websites use low quality, irrelevant sites to link back to their own site in an attempt to increase their PageRank. However, with the Penguin update, if known link farms are connected to your site, you can be penalised. There are two types of penalties, manual and automated. A manual penalty is where someone from within Google has manually reviewed your site and determined that it has breached one or more of their guidelines. An automatic, or algorithmic, penalty is where your site has tripped a filter or a safeguard that is built into Google’s algorithm. Sometimes the whole site is penalized, and sometimes just specific pages of it. If too many individual pages breach Google’s guidelines, it’s possible for every page on the site to be penalised as a consequence – even the pages that don’t breach any of the guidelines, so it is worth reviewing content and backlinks regularly. What’s more, penalties can be applied to changes made to your site months, or even years, ago. If you find that your website has suddenly dropped 10-100 places in Google’s search ranking, it is possible that the a change made to the site months ago is only now triggering a penalty in line with a Google algorithm update. Penguin updates can be devastating to sites which previously
appeared high in search rankings – sites that previously appeared high up on a Google search have been pushed to the dark regions (page 10 – 20) overnight. Sites can also be punished if they over optimise their content. This means using an excessive amount of relevant search terms, to the point that the clarity and quality of the content itself suffers. Generally, keyword density in the title, the headings, and the first paragraphs matters most.
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