How Google ranks sites, and how to stop fearing updates

New trends and promotional strategies keep appearing in SEO. Professionals in search optimisation follow the innovations and apply them so that their clients' sites stay at the top of the results. 

New trends in SEO arise because Google changes how it judges sites and builds the search results. 

Google's algorithms: how they work and what happens when they are updated 

Google's search algorithms are a set of criteria by which Google judges pages and distributes places in the search results. Judging by algorithms and numerous signals helps Google build the most relevant answers to users' queries on the search engine results pages (SERPs). 

In the first few years of its history Google changed its algorithms once a year or even less often. Now things are different: the algorithms change more than 3200 times a year. 

The SearchEngineJournal site has gathered information on every core algorithm updatethat most strongly affected the results. 

Having analysed dozens of publications and colleagues' experience, we concluded: 

• in most cases updates come down to reweighting the roles of different factors;

• there are SEO strategies and techniques that never go out of date;

• sites can be promoted successfully even amid uncertainty. 

How do you promote sites when everything is so changeable? 

Let us split the answer into three parts: 

• Which methods no longer work? 

• What matters in 2021?

• What will always matter?
  
  

What does not work for SEO? 

There are methods that in 2021 are finally out of date, or too risky to use. What are they? 

Buying links in bulk from link exchanges 

Backlinks remain one of the important ranking factors. But there is no need to buy them by the hundred with no regard for the quality and relevance of the site. At best you will waste your money. At worst the site will fall foul of the search engines' filters. 

Every SEO blog has been writing about this for several years, yet many webmasters and SEO specialists still work as though it were the early 2000s. 

Link exchanges and publication placement services can still be useful. But working with them calls for a few rules: 

• Choose services that offer manual placement with the chance to check and correct the publications. 

• Pick the sites carefully, by subject, traffic and the geography of their audience. 

• Try to buy links through exchanges only from top sites with high traffic and strong trust metrics. 

• To earn links, place interesting expert content on donor sites that covers the subject deeply. 

Not everyone follows these recommendations, which is why buying links does more harm than good. 

Web 2.0, registering subdomains, Blogspot and Typepad 

Web 2.0 means sites on free platforms consisting of several pages, which the site owner and visitors can fill with content. The tempting idea arises of getting a practically unlimited number of links at a very low price. But Google has long since noticed such tricks. Sites with too many links from Web 2.0 will almost certainly come under sanctions. 

Such platforms can be used, but the effect of creating and running them will most likely not justify the time spent. 

Crowd marketing from spammy platforms 

Everything here is straightforward: forums as a type of site are receding into the past. Those still working are either hard to reach or have extremely poor SEO metrics. Links from such platforms will drag any promoted site to the bottom. 

And a link from a genuinely authoritative forum is better obtained through outreach or content distribution. 

Networks of sites and blogs (PBN) 

PBNs count as a grey method of search engine promotion. Building a Private Blog Network with links to the site being promoted can work when other methods no longer give the effect you need. 

Domains for PBN sites are bought from registrars or through expired-domain services. The sites themselves are administered and filled by SEO agencies. 

This way of getting links is effective, but it has very serious drawbacks: 

• Risk. Google analyses link profiles looking for PBNs and recognises such networks by dozens of characteristics. Having found a network of sites, Google will almost certainly demote the resource they point to. Very few SEO specialists know how to work in a way that does not harm the client's site.  

• Complexity. Creating and running a PBN calls for controlling dozens of metrics and running many sites instead of one. A network may hold dozens or even hundreds of platforms. 

• Expense. Creating and maintaining PBNs costs a great deal, and for most sites it is simply not justified. The traffic gained will be too expensive, and the conversions will still need work. 

The conclusion suggests itself: better not to use a PBN for promoting your site. The probability of making SEO unprofitable and harming the site is too high. 

SEO trends in 2021 and the promotional techniques that work

What should you do for a site to rise in the results? Below we describe the techniques and tools that work in 2021, and those that will always matter. 

SEO during the pandemic: what changed? 

The pandemic affected the state of business around the world, and new requirements appeared for sites that marketers have to take into account. Mostly that touched the areas that moved from offline to online. 

• Restaurants, cafés, delivery. A great deal changed in this field: for most establishments a side service became the main one. An advantage here can be a bonus scheme and convenient, prompt delivery straight from the establishment. Promotion through SEO will bring such businesses the customers who prefer delivery. On top of that, the establishment gains a reputation as progressive and attentive to customers' needs. 

• Takeaway. For this niche, creating pages for ordering food to take away is recommended. Add the option of paying for orders online, and set up a counter at the point of sale for collecting online orders. 

• Consultations. Business in this niche is the easiest to move online, and promotion online brings several benefits at once. First, the customer base widens noticeably. Second, thanks to local SEO it becomes easier to gather reviews and to receive more requests for offline consultations. 

• Property. During the pandemic, companies selling property began making more active use of video tours. 3D galleries appeared on many sites — a more vivid, if expensive, option. Interactive content has a positive effect on a site's behaviour signals and its positions in the results.  

Conversion matters more than the number of visitors 

Marketers and SEO specialists are not responsible for the number of sales. But they can certainly affect the conversion of visitors into leads, and an SEO specialist can and should improve the quality of traffic to a site. 

A site that gets 1000 visits a month at 15% conversion is better off than one with 2000 visits and 5% conversion into enquiries. 

It matters to set goals correctly and choose KPIs for them. That is how you build an online marketing strategy that produces results. 

The E-A-T principle

In 2020 Google named the E-A-T principle (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) one of the key factors in ranking content published on behalf of a company. The same applies to the authors whose content appears on corporate blogs. 

In 2021 E-A-T's role will hold and even grow. How the factor will work after that is hard to forecast for now. 

With the arrival of E-A-T it became harder to rank for YMYL queries — those connected with users' lives, health and financial wellbeing. 

Why does keeping to E-A-T matter? 

Google has an interest in users finding complete, current and trustworthy information in the system. Otherwise they will simply move to other search engines. Several factors raise any site's E-A-T: 

• A filled-in page with information about the company. It should carry information about what the company does, brief details of its history, the business's mission and its strategic goals. 

• A reviews page on the site, and a way to add a review. 

• Positive reviews and recommendations on other resources.

• Backlinks from other resources with high E-A-T. 

• Licences, certificates and other documents confirming expertise. 

• Pages about the blog's authors, with information on them. 

Optimising for voice search 

The voice search function lets you put a query to Google by speaking, which saves the user a lot of time. But for a site to appear in the results of a voice query, changes have to be made to its pages. 

According to Search Engine Land data , about 20% of searches were already being made by voice back in 2016, and the figure will keep growing. So what has to change for Google to show your site as high as possible in voice search results? 

• Speed the site up. Voice queries are usually put on the move, so Google will show sites that load quickly in voice search results. 

• Get the site into the answer blocks. This part of the results holds a brief answer to the user's query, along with the URL and the site's name. 

• Statistically such blocks appear for about 30% of queries. Sometimes a featured snippet holds a great deal of text, and Google then shows a Read more button that takes the user straight to the site. Videos from YouTube can appear in position zero as well. 

• Create an FAQ on the site. Pages with frequently asked questions stand a good chance of appearing in voice search results. 

• Make the site responsive and optimise it for mobile devices. Everything here is simple: voice queries are put from mobile devices, so the site has to render correctly on a smartphone.   

What will always be in fashion? 

The third part of our analysis: the promotional methods that will always matter. 

Well-built semantics for a site 

A site's semantic core is the basis for building an effective site structure and optimising pages for the greatest possible number of queries. The quantity and quality of a site's traffic depend on how complete the semantics are. 

Most SEO specialists use a practically identical set of services. Most often those are: 

• Ahrefs;

• Serpstat;

• Key Collector. 

The Ubersuggest tool from Neil Patel can be added to that set. This service is paid as well, and gives fuller information about search volumes.

The next step is clustering the semantics. Properly grouped queries help build an effective site structure. Analysing a site's semantics can reveal hidden opportunities for traffic growth: in some cases reassembled semantics will raise traffic two to four times over. 

To get the most from your semantics, use data from several sources, adding Google's own search suggestions to the list you obtain. 

Quality content that answers the user's queries and needs 

Everything on a site should work towards satisfying the user's queries and needs. Product photographs should be of the highest quality, good enough to judge quality and size from. Descriptions of services and categories should carry real advantages that matter to the buyer. 

Content should remove the objections that stop someone buying, 

Only then will you get more reviews, more traffic and higher conversion. And all of that will in the end lift the site in the results. 

Good content and its proper distribution raise a site's positions and turn it into a machine for generating leads and profit. 

Technical SEO 

Google will always place sites free of technical errors higher in the results. And that is not only about fast loading. 

A site should have no duplicate pages carrying the same content at different URLs. That leads to Google simply not knowing which page to index for the main query. 

Indexing problems can arise for other reasons too. Sites are often overloaded with third-party scripts, plugins and large images. Such errors need removing as quickly as possible. 

Broken links on a site also reduce its traffic considerably. Broken URLs can be found with Screaming Frog, Serpstat, Ahrefs and other technical audit tools. 

Working on CTR 

We have written already that conversion plays a growing role in SEO. One of the main ways to raise the conversion of impressions into clicks is optimising CTR. The ratio of impressions to clicks depends on how a page's title and description are composed — in most cases the search engine builds the snippet from them. 

Conclusions   

Google changes its requirements for sites continuously. But most often that comes down to reweighting individual factors. To depend less on algorithm updates, work through your site's semantics thoroughly, fill it with content and earn links from quality, authoritative sites. Make sure the content is created by authoritative, qualified specialists. 

It also matters to fix every technical error on the site, keeping it fast and rendering correctly on mobile devices. 

Resources that meet those requirements may still lose traffic during an update, but they will quickly regain the positions they lost.