Over the last year, many people have been talking about Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates.
Because Google has such a large market share of searches, anything they do can be considered ‘seismic’ in the SEO world. ‘Panda and Penguin’ can be loosely described as the major search engine
paying more attention to social media interaction and integration/blogs/website updating/quality content/measured user activity.
What resources gave Google the information they needed? Google Analytics and Google Chrome.
Not too long ago (2006), Google began offering the free Google Analytics program which essentially measure’s a website’s performance. For millions, now they could better track user behavior without having to invest money in expensive 3rd party software programs. Google Analytics code can be easily installed within your website… and so on. For this post, know this: The visitor data is also reported back to Google, so they now know huge amounts of information about ‘how’ websites are performing.
The free Google Chrome browser was launched a few years after Google Analytics. Once again, millions of people were downloading it and it now holds a major share of the browser market. For this post, know this: Chrome sends this user data back to Google. Although they may only have 1/3 of the market, simple math projections can account for the remaining (unknown) 2/3 market– and they have a very accurate understanding of what visitors are doing when they browse the Internet.
In Summary: In an effort to better rank/rate websites, improve their search engine and further make SEO provider’s lives difficult (like me, lol), Google has made recent major changes to it’s algorithm and it has been aided by offering free software tools to the public.
About the Author: Rhett DeMille, the owner of PalmettoSoft, is a leading search engine optimization consultant located in the Charlotte NC and Charleston SC areas.
