As I announced in January, Google made some hefty changes on 17th January.  They denied making one big change, but their official announcement came almost a week later. Google announced Panda #24 update.

It was important not to have a knee jerk reaction to the changes. Now the dust has indeed settles and the picture is much clearer.

New tactics are being adopted but it appears that many SEO companies are continuing to use the old strategies. These include directory listings for example. This will no longer work, in fact will have a detrimental effect on your rankings.  Whilst many offshore SEO outsourcing companies, offer ethical manual link building, still believe that high quantity directory link building is the right thing to do. It isn’t.

When choosing an SEO firm, ask what happened in January 2013, how they build links, and on what type of sites. Finally and as I always state, if the company guarantees a first page position, steer clear. It is impossible to make such a promise.

Content is king and above all else your content should be unique, interesting and targeting the website visitor. Anchor text links containing keywords need not be used, but “click here” “read more” is deemed to give a better user experience.

SEO should form a crucial part of the marketing strategy. For more info call me, Suzy Powell on 01422 230202.

Google have denied the recent update in algorithm by making a sweeping statement that they make over 500 changes a year.

As a company who are monitoring 24/7 we can safely say that there was a pretty major update which came affected rankings on 17th January 2013.

If your SERPS have disappeared for your keywords this is why. Of course as always there will be winners and losers.

When the dust has settled our SEO team have had chance to gather data and analyse it we will be able to shed more light on it.