“SEO is like accounting,” according to Burr Reedy. “For the complicated stuff, you should hire a professional.”

While search engines are getting better at crawling, indexing and understanding information, they are not perfect.

And if, for some reason, they have a hard time figuring out what your website is all about or if you have what searchers want, they’ll move on.

“SEO is like accounting,” according to Burr Reedy. “For the complicated stuff, you should hire a professional.”

While search engines are getting better at crawling, indexing and understanding information, they are not perfect.

And if, for some reason, they have a hard time figuring out what your website is all about or if you have what searchers want, they’ll move on.

Search engines work by crawling billions of pages on the Internet using their own web crawlers, aka search bots. A search engine navigates the web by downloading web pages and following links on these pages to discover new pages that have been made available. The bots are also sometimes referred to as spiders as they almost literally crawl around a web as they follow one link to the next.

The web pages that they discover are then added into a complex data structure called an index. The index includes all the discovered URLs along with a number of relevant key signals about the contents of each URL, such as:

The keywords discovered within the page’s content – what topics does the page cover?

The type of content that is being crawled (using microdata called Schema) – what is included on the page?

The freshness of the page – how recently was it updated?

The previous user engagement of the page and/or domain – how do people interact with the page?

These, however, are just a few of the factors that are taken into consideration when ranking these pages. According to Google, they take over 200 different things into consideration within their algorithms, although what all of those are is a reasonably closely guarded secret.

An algorithm, in general, is a detailed series of instructions for carrying out an operation or solving a problem.

To put it in non-technical terms, we use algorithms in everyday tasks, such as a recipe to bake a cake or a do-it-yourself handbook.

Google uses algorithms to present you with those search results, and as we have just mentioned, there are more than 200 things that are being taken into account, so to say that search engine algorithms are complicated is quite an understatement.  

The one thing that you need to know is that search engine algorithms are not static. They are changing all the time. As the Internet, and the way people use it, changes so do these complex calculations. And that is just what makes SEO such an art form.

Trying to figure out how to best ‘please’ these algorithms at all times, something that is made even more complicated because Google and lesser search engines like Bing and Yahoo! are so very secretive about what they really are. They will issue warnings, and a little advice, and from there and SEO practitioner has to determine the best strategies for themselves.

In August of 2018, Google released one of the most sweeping algorithm updates that it had for some time. Dubbed ‘Google Medic’ by the SEO community (not Google) it affected even high ranking, ‘big name’ sites.

Google, when asked what could be done to repair any damage, or avoid falling foul of this new algorithm in the future, was as vague as ever.

However, those people who spend their days going over and over what Google does, like the highly respected folks at MOZ and SEM Rush, are suggesting that sites need to improve their EAT ratings. What are those? That stands for expertise, authority, and trust.

What does that mean in real terms? It includes:

• Bolstering your company’s about page and individual authors’ bio pages to include details on credentials and expertise.
• Adding more client reviews and testimonials for products and services.
• Building up your company’s authority on its other platforms, such as  LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Adding contact information on every page, or at the very least have a robust Contact Us page with a phone number, email address, physical address, etc.
• Getting favourable press coverage in reputable outlets, and getting blog authors bylined in other high-authority publications.

These are theories, of course, but they are also big elements the Google of Google’s, Quality Rater Guidelines. Danny Sullivan ( a former SEO himself as the founder of Search Engine Land and now public Search Liaison for Google) has made suggestions via Twitter that webmasters carefully review and adhere to that in the wake of the latest update.

To answer this question, let’s turn again to Google themselves. According to Google, via their Search Console Help Pages: “Google doesn’t require you to take any special steps to appear in search results, but you can help us find new or changed pages faster by letting us know when you make changes.”

How do you do that? There’s no 1-800 GOOGLE LIST ME number to call. What you can do first is submit a detailed sitemap to them via the Google Search Console – this is essential – and keep submitting new ones as the site changes. Google makes no guarantees about how fast they’ll ‘dispatch’ their little bots to do so – or even that they will – but in our current experience it varies, it seems to take as little as 4 days and up to 6 months for a site to be crawled by Google and for them to attribute authority to the domain.

This is all very simplistic, of course, and there are many more ways you can nudge Google to come and ‘take a look’ at your site. If you want to learn more about them give us a call, we’ll be happy to go through some more.

Remember, we said that Google’s Algorithm changes all the time? It does. Sometimes in very small, subtle ways, and sometimes via larger system-wide updates. And it is these updates that can throw the whole SEO world in a panic.

You may have heard of the names of some of the biggest that have impacted the SERPS over the years. Google Panda. Google Penguin. Google Hummingbird. RankBrain. Mobilegeddon.

Slightly crazy names, but big updates like these can change the rankings of your site – sometimes in a positive way, sometimes in a negative way – in a matter of days.

Google has always said they try to ‘do good’. And to do so they punish sites – and site owners – that do what they consider to be bad with penalties. Those penalties reduce a site’s visibility in search, and, if very severe, take it out of the results altogether.

Penalties can be automatic or manual. With manual penalties, you’ll probably be told by Google, via a message in your Google Search Console. But it’s hard to know for sure that you know you’ve been targeted if the cause is algorithmic. Those penalties may take even the most experienced SEO professionals by surprise. But then it becomes the responsibility of an SEO working with a site to backtrack, figure out what’s going on and start to put it right.

That is a very complex issue. Sites are penalized for many different reasons, and therefore the remedies for a Google Penalty are very varied.

At Pearl Lemon we have a team that – as boring as it sounds – spends hours scouring the web, reading, learning and analyzing all of the ‘crumbs’ that Google does leave so that in the event that clients are penalized, they can come to us, and we will provide them with the best possible opportunities to put things right.

The text-HTML ratio is a way to tell Google that we have a good amount of content, and we are not a thin content site, which is made only for search engines. And Google does not penalize the website if the site has a low text HTML ratio. But good HTML-text ratio helps in SEO.

Google uses this metric to view the actual relevancy of a page (low ratio may cause confusion for crawlers as they won’t have enough information about a particular web page).

This ratio may also be an indication of an HTML heavy page which can affect users’ experience and loading speed. Big size of a page, too many image tags, and new link here and there can all indicate that you need to work on your HTML and CSS.