In mid-December, Google made a major update to its search algorithm. With the Hanukkah holiday then underway, it was given the name Maccabees and significantly affected the search process.
The Maccabees update and its impact on affiliate sites
The update improves the relevance of results, changes the ranking of individual links and the evaluation of overall content. Thus, it improves the position of relevant sources that users are organically interested in, while it disadvantages artificially pushed ones. The Maccabees thus particularly affected affiliate sites (i.e., sites that only link to business partners’ sites), doorway sites (fake landing pages programmed to trick search engines to boost their search rankings), and sites that excessively use similar keywords to attract the most visitors.
Of course, even a master carpenter makes mistakes sometimes! A curious mistake, according to experts, is that the update has also affected many official celebrity websites (for example, John Lennon’s official website appeared in ninth place after typing “John Lennon” into a search engine).
If you’re interested and how you can best comply with the algorithm and how much the update has affected your website, don’t hesitate to contact us – we’ll be happy to do an SEO analysis and advise you on how to improve your score on Google.