There have always been those who say that SEO is a one time only deal and is not needed consistently to maintain rankings or even prospective clients who ask “Why do I need to pay a monthly SEO fee?”. Of course those who actually provide SEO understand that consistent search engine optimization is needed in order to improve or maintain rankings, especially when there are many websites competing for the same search terms. The main reason that constant SEO is needed is because of the number of times Google is updating their algorithms, which in turn changes the search results and order of rankings that web users see when conducting a search query. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in 2010 that number was over 500 times. That’s a lot of algo updates so naturally Google search users will see ranking go up and down pretty regularly. Especially if you mix in personalized search results.
Schmidt will be answering claims that Google’s business practices are anti-competitive today at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington, DC. Just as all witnesses are required to do, he has something written that was submitted to the subcommittee prior to his appearance today. The subcommittee has released that PDF document , which contains interesting details about how Google tests those algorithm changes.
As quoted from Schmidt’s document:
“To give you a sense of the scale of the changes that Google considers, in 2010 we conducted 13,311 precision evaluations to see whether proposed algorithm changes improved the quality of its search results, 8,157 side-by-side experiments where it presented two sets of search results to a panel of human testers and had the evaluators rank which set of results was better, and 2,800 click evaluations to see how a small sample of real-life Google users responded to the change. Ultimately, the process resulted in 516 changes that were determined to be useful to users based on the data and, therefore, were made to Google’s algorithm. Most of these changes are imperceptible to users and affect a very small percentage of websites, but each one of them is implemented only if we believe the change will benefit our users.”
This kind of testing is a part of the reason that Google’s quality of search results are so much better than the other engines out there. It’s also why we can continue to expect more and more algorithm updates from Google going forward.
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