How to NOT get destroyed by Google algorithm updates

My completely unscientific guess on to dodge Google’s seasonal algorithm “purge”.

It’s the same story I’ve seen every year now.

• Google makes new algorithm adjustment.
• Clients cry of lost traffic.
• Clients do more or less of the same shit.
• …repeat!

Here are a few tips to beat the vicious cycle:

Why you should listen to me

Although I don’t work for Google, don’t follow their algorithm updates, don’t even care about optimizing for them…my sites still have retained their ranking for over a decade. They do quite well and I’m never worried about algorithm updates. If anything, I almost welcome them.

Not only that but I also manage many clients, across many niches. I can see the same parallels in the ones that lose traffic and the ones that don’t. I bet if you could see my clients sites and their traffic numbers, it wouldn’t be hard to draw correlations either.

1. Stop spamming Amazon links

I think this right here is the most obvious way for Google to judge the quality of your site. What’s your ratio of pages with Amazon links to pages without? If virtually 100% of your pages have Amazon links…then yeah, you’re just asking for the ban-hammer!

• Let’s try 50/50?
• How about some philosophical pieces or anything other than the same old review and aff links template?

2. Stop writing ME-TOO content

Write some original shit off the top of your head, using an original title. Don’t do the keyword research thing. Or at least don’t do it for all your content.

• Don’t worry. Google is smart enough to read “human speak” and still show your site in related searches.
• I understand this is damn near impossible for some of you using contract writers to “research” and copy other sites. Tsk tsk…how do you ever hope to outrank the sites you copy?!

3. Make your site load fast in mobile

Let’s be clear…I don’t care about page scores, I care about how long your eyeballs wait before the content shows. 1 to 2 seconds is good. (Ideally, it really should be 1 second.) And if you have any stupid gimmicky effects that lag your site, get rid of that shit.

• Get a good webhost.
• Get rid of pagebuilders.
• Get rid of annoying page-lagging asset requests.

4. Write for social media

I hate how I said that. Maybe a better way was “write for a human audience”. My point is this…write your content for humans. Forget about the focus on SEO crawlers, word count and keyword density, blah blah.

• Write your shit to be entertaining and actually speaking from your heart…and YOUR personal point of view.
• Don’t do it like a 10th-grade essay assignment, where it’s comprehensive but lacks soul.
• And yes…I understand this requirement is hard if your writers are paid by the word, rather than by shares or engagement time.

5. Be unique, stop following the formula.

• Some pieces long. Some pieces short.
• Some are for information. Some are just for fun.
• Write something even if it don’t make you any money.

6. Stop worrying about Google algorithm updates.

This seems so against-the-grain, but it’s true. Every year, Google comes out with new supposed requirements for webmasters. And as always, they don’t take it as seriously as they claim to.

• One year they said no more link farms, yet link farms still got away with backlinking themselves.
• Another year they said they would penalize duplicate content, yet competitors that stole content sometimes ranked higher than the original.
• And now they say they care about website speed…yet MANY sites with horrible page scores are still dominating Google.

So what do the experts know now? Same thing they’ve always known. Google simply gives guidelines, but doesn’t adhere to them over other “hidden” metrics they consider to be of higher importance.