

And, this often came at the cost of readability.īut now, FINALLY, the search giant’s algorithm has caught up.

The gap between technology and search behaviour created an opportunity - in the form of SEO - to get ahead of the competition. Yet its search algorithm wasn’t good enough to identify genuinely relevant and useful web pages, much less rank them higher. Google wanted content written for actual people, not search engines. Satisfy human users of search enginesįrom the beginning, its goal was to match queries (from actual humans) to the most relevant and complete results. Here’s the thing… Google exists to answer search queries.

Google’s purpose and its early limitations Over the years, Google has had to continually update its algorithm to combat low-quality shit in its SERP and black hat SEO. As a result, irrelevant and rubbish content often made it to the top of the search engine results page (SERP), while legitimate results got pushed to the bottom. This prompted website owners to manipulate keyword density and buy backlinks. The two prominent ones were keyword density (the number of keywords on a web page) and backlinks from external websites. Google search engine ranking page (SERP) manipulated In the beginning, Google relied on a few factors to rank web pages. Problem: How did SEO efforts affect readability? Bottom line - optimize content for humans not search engines.#7 Existence of Google’s readability formula (to test content complexity).#6 Social signals are correlated with rankings.#5 Dwell time has an impact on rankings.#4 Content relevance (proof terms + relevant terms) is rising in importance.#3 Keyword density has lost its importance (and overuse is penalised).#2 Respun, duplicate, and shallow web pages are penalised.#1 Easy-to-read pages are correlated with higher search rankings.7 reasons why readability is important as a ranking factor (backed by real data).The current state of Google’s algorithm - Hummingbird.Why does online content need to be even more readable?.Google’s purpose and its early limitations.Problem: How did SEO efforts affect readability?.
