Giant SEO Video Blog Series

Over on our YouTube channel we’ve just started a new Giant SEO video blog series. We’re going to be answering some commonly asked questions.

The first video in the series answers the question “What is an algorithm?”

In the context of SEO and search marketing, an algorithm is a series of calculations the search engine uses in order to try to understand how good your website is and how accurately it’s going to match what someone has searched for.

Essentially the algorithm is a quality control mechanism that’s employed by the search engines to try to get rid of the low quality websites that are there to potentially spam or basically don’t add any value or answer any questions. The purpose of the algorithm is also to try and make sure the best quality websites rise to the top and the people using the search engine get the best user experience.

So in the context of Google, which probably has the most complicated algorithm out of all the different search engines’, looks at over 200 (they say “over 200″ but no-one really knows) different factors related to your website and linking back to your website to try to determine how they should rank your site for different search terms.

You’ve probably heard that algorithms are changing all the time. Now what happens is, basically, we consume information in different ways (people search in different ways, mobile devices have been developed) so the consumer is changing all the time and you’ll find that search engines will also have to update their algorithms to try to improve their service to meet the needs of their consumer.

Another factor that’s influencing the change of algorithms is the fact that people, sadly, manipulate their websites to try to better match the search engine’s algorithm and therefore Google has to keep updating its algorithm to try to make sure that it stays ahead of those people who are manipulating their website to try to rank. So again, any sort of clever tricks and loopholes you find are probably going to be useless in six to seven months when Google gets hold of it.

Google also code names its algorithms so you’ve probably heard of Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, and Pigeon (the latest one).These are just names Google uses to describe different algorithms, and each one looks at different factors, again to try and improve how it ranks different websites based on the quality of them.

Watch the video:

If you have any questions, drop us a line below!