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How Worried Should You Be About Google Updates?

If you’re doing business on the internet, you’re doing business with Google. And if you’re doing business with Google, you have to do business by Google’s rules, and you have to live with Google’s ever-changing algorithm updates. These updates, which happen almost continuously, range from the completely unnoticed to earth-shattering (Penguin, we’re looking at you).

But how worried should the average web publisher or casino affiliate be about Google updates? Given the capricious nature of the updates, that question can be a little tough to answer, but there are a few aspects of updates that worried content creators should keep in mind.

For starters, Google updates happen almost continuously but most of them are too small to notice. The big ones, like Penguin, are not as common as you might think. According to content marketing guru Neil Patel, the major updates happen less than twice a year. That’s not much comfort to those whose businesses were upended by Penguin, but it speaks to the frequency of major updates.

Of course not every site is completely reliant on Google for organic traffic. In the gambling industry, plenty of publishers have built their businesses around the fact that search engines have never been all that friendly to their businesses in the first place. If you get less than ten percent of your organic traffic from Google, you really don’t need to worry about updates much at all.

Another way to get yourself into the category of sites that don’t need to worry about Google updates is to follow the rules and avoid shortcuts. Anyone can find a loophole or two in Google’s massive algorithmic ecosystem that provides a short term search boost, but do you really think that’s a good long-term strategy?

After all, if some yahoo on a web forum has figured out how to game the system, do you think it’s going to be long before the brain trust at Google notices the same thing? Furthermore, we’ve seen time and time again that Google does not take kindly to publishers who bend or break their rules.

The bottom line here is that you should always try to play Google’s games by Google’s rules and, whenever possible, diversify your traffic sources as much as possible. Techniques like legitimate guest blogging and social media marketing can greatly reduce your overall reliance on Google for traffic and keep their updates from upending your business.