In my original article about why online marketing drives me crazy, I mentioned several reasons why it’s such a challenge to get your business online. One of the biggest problems is that Google keeps changing the rule book on us. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

You’ve probably heard of Google Panda and Penguin. They’re cute, fuzzy animals, but the reality is that they’re code names for some of Google’s biggest rule changes. The truth is that Google changes the rules almost every day. Why?

When someone does a search on the search engines like Google, they’re looking for the answer to a problem of some sort:

  • Needing information on a destination
  • Solutions to fix something
  • Where to buy something
  • Etc.

Google’s sole job is to deliver quality and relevant results to those of us who search. If the results aren’t useful to us, we’ll go somewhere else to get the answers. So the engineers at Google are forever tweaking the way the search results come up, honing it so we get better, more relevant results. Some of the bigger rule book changes have names, like Panda and Penguin.

It used to be that search results were full of spammy, poor quality results because people figured out a way to cheat the system to get their pages up to the top. The first salvo was called Google Panda (actually named after an employee whose last name is Panda). This flushed a lot of the cheaters out of the system. Score 1 for the searchers. Google Penguin came along later to flush out all the folks who had spammy links coming to their pages.

Panda and Penguin have each gone through revisions so that Panda is now up to version 4.0. Again, they’re honing the blade to a razor sharp edge to cut out all the crap content.

So What Does This Have To Do With Us?

Every time Google comes out with a major update, a lot of people spend a lot of energy trying to figure out if it affected them directly, and what they can do to “overcome” the rule changes. The blogs and social media light up like crazy with all the reactionary messages on what to do to fix it.

The problem with this is that the rules are meant to pull the cheaters out of the system, so they don’t show up, and only legitimate content that isn’t cheating, gets higher relevance to the searchers.

In my book, if we are making an honest effort to play by the rules, we’re not trying to scam or spam the search engines into higher rankings, then there really isn’t anything we as online marketers need to do differently in our day-to-day lives. It’s a fairly simple recipe:

  1. Create great, useful content that others will read (or watch if it’s a video – or put your video in a blog)
  2. Apply your basic SEO rules to the page title and description
  3. Publish it on social media, especially Google+
  4. Rinse and repeat

Personally, I just can’t get that worked up about all the rule changes. I am not going to spend any effort to try to react to them, because I just flat out don’t have the time. I’m too busy creating more content that (hopefully) people are reading.

What are your thoughts? Tell me below.