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Google has been rolling out updates to it’s search engine faster than ever. There were a couple notable updates that happened in the first quarter of 2012, which we’ll go over here. These updates affected:

1. Sites that are “top heavy” with ads. You may have come across websites like this – tons of ads above the fold, and very little content or content that’s not readily visible. These kinds of sites are now being penalized and will rank lower in search results.
2. Links from blog networks. There were several “blog networks” that were not only penalized, but all websites that were linked to in those networks have be de-indexed by Google, meaning they will not show up in any searches. To clarify, a blog network is a network of blogs all linked together by topic. They allow a person to post an article and have it show up on many blog sites at once, all linking back to their website. These networks have generally been used in order to gain more links and therefore higher search engine rankings for their own website.

The tried and proven way to survive most any update Google makes is to keep your site as natural as possible. You can’t go wrong with good content, links from a variety of sources and in general have a website that people find useful or entertaining.