Google and AI algorithms – The daily battle for bloggers and authors
In online marketing, there are always discussions about whether and how you can successfully integrate content marketing on your own blog or website. In this context, two Google algorithms keep popping up in the discussion: Panda and Hummingbird. Although these two algorithms belong to Google’s company secrets, Google itself repeatedly gives hints on how good (!) content can be written.
Google has wanted to bring about a change in thinking since 2013 (and even more so since 2017): Content should be of high quality, contain applicable knowledge instead of pure information and banish pure SEO-optimized texts and articles from search results. Of course, the keywords that specify and classify the article continue to play a significant role. But keywords and backlinks will lose importance soon. Google has also declared war on article spammers. Google has thus introduced further criteria so that the article quality – from Google’s point of view – increases. In this context, Google speaks of reader-specific criteria. With this specification, knowledge-oriented elements are to be integrated in posts, reports and articles that have an added value for the reader.
Optimization possibilities for Panda and other Google (AI) algorithms
However, some interesting optimization possibilities can already be worked out today, on the one hand through information provided by Google itself, and on the other hand through the experience of bloggers.
Make sure that your website is filled with informative and relevant high-quality content. Panda initiates a check for the absence of errors (links) and the quality of in-depth content). This means that today and, in the future, pure enumerations of product features with a high keyword density will be “bad” content for Google. Why In-Depth Content? Google explains that such articles contain a significantly higher half-time value of information than classically optimized articles and information. This means that these articles sometimes remain in the search results for a few years and thus remain on the decisive first page of the search results.
Google thus places an extraordinarily strong focus on editorially well-researched and edited articles with the above-mentioned criteria. Panda can thus reward the work of an editorial team based on a long-term strategy. If customers and readers of your content can rate it or share it socially, Panda will note this positively in its rating. This again raises the quality criteria of their content marketing. In the future, the provision of white papers and e-books will play a far greater role than is the case today. E-books will replace digital PDF documents.
Social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, can no longer be ignored today. The recommendation procedures of these social networks lead to viral information structures and rating systems. Make sure that there is a way to use this social distribution of your information. Panda 4.0 explains that with a high acceptance in these media, your brand value will also be communicated much better (quality criterion: brand value).
Critical evaluation of Google’s algorithms
Despite the criteria that have become known for improving the quality of information and Google’s striving to offer optimized content to all Internet users in the future, critical voices on Google’s information strategy remain rare or even go unheeded.
At this year’s Google I/O and developer conference, Google will once again present one of the main focuses of its research and development work over the next few years as the goal of implementing AI intelligence from Google globally on the Internet.
For this, Google naturally needs the free (!) help of all people who deal with information, knowledge and procedures of information and knowledge networking. It should also be critically noted that we as editors are increasingly following Google’s algorithms and not the writing and reading habits of people. Some critical editorial offices are therefore demanding that by disclosing the mechanisms of these algorithms by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others, it should be possible to distinguish the egoistic goals of these algorithms (see NSA affair) from truly objective methods.
I can only agree with this. We write for humans and not for AI algorithms and Big Data infrastructures.
- Category: Media and AI criticism
- Author: NeoNetWalker
- Published: October 2019
- Languages: Germany, English