Whenever you search something, Google uses your IP address as a ranking factor. In other words, your physical location plays a part in the results Google returns. For some searches, like say, Jurassic Park, your location is almost entirely irrelevant. If you perform this search in Rome, Italy, you’ll probably get very similar results to my searches in Wheaton, IL. The only difference might be that, whereas you’ll get a link to amazon.co.uk, you might get one to amazon.com.
Make Sense?
So, searching locally wherever you’re at, either on your mobile device or at your home computer will give you results close to wherever you are. It’s always nice to have Google Places by your side as well because you can put reviews from clients on there as well as pictures and video.
With all this being said, I’m getting to my point….(really I am). Google recently came out with Google Penguin in order to fight the good fight against spam in search results. This also fights the good fight against over optimization. What exactly is over optimization? Well, it’s not using Google Places, that’s for sure.
In a nutshell, Google checks for valid links within your site, that you’re not keyword stuffing in every sentence, using invisible keywords (yes, people it does happen), using not so authentic linking agencies who guarantee you page one on Google within 30 days if you pay them a ton of money every year, and you are using your own content and not stealing from others.
So, bottom line for people who want to write good web content and still stay in Google’s good ranking graces is that link building takes time. For a site to all of a sudden show 30 inbound links within two weeks will seem pretty fishy to Google, and enough fish for the Penguin to eat it.
Take the time to create web content that is relevant, informative and entertaining.
Was this informative? I hope so. See this nice little infographic from attachmedia that provides a visual for Google’s new algorithm.
If you have a website which all of a sudden seems to fall from page one to page three or four, you may want to re-evaluate the content of your website and fix what the Penguin doesn’t like before you fall deeper into the Google page abyss.
