The Google algorithm updates have two possible effects on your own website. Your site will either improve its rankings in the search results or it will be demoted,penalized or worse delisted all along. Nobody is exempt from these updates. There are even good websites that got hurt by the updates. Google has the best of intentions in rolling out these algorithm updates. They want what's best for their users and clients. However, as we mentioned, there are often negative consequences, the burden of which are often laid on clueless website owners. That said, it's highly recommended that you pay close attention to updates by Google and do everything you can to ensure that when the next update rolls out, you are not going to be negatively affected.

Here are some practical tips on how you can protect your website from future Google algorithm updates: 1. Create better quality and lengthier content. High quality content is king. You might have heard that quote a million times but it's still worth repeating as it holds true. At the end of the day, what makes or breaks a website is the quality of the content that it puts out. The goal of Google is to make sure that the best and most relevant content are the ones showing up on its search results. That's the number one reason why they keep on updating their algorithms. Creating valuable content is still the best and most effective way to protect your website from algorithm updates.

2. Improve the social media chatter surrounding your website. Social media sites now how direct impact on the way websites get ranked in Google. For instance, a page that gets a lot of Google pluses seems to rank higher than pages with less shares in Google Plus. That means only one thing and that is rankings are significantly affected by the social media interaction surrounding a website. That said, you need to connect your website to your social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

3. Follow the webmaster guidelines put out by Google. Although these webmaster guidelines are a bit vague sometimes, you still need to follow them to the letter to make sure that you are not breaking any rules that might cause Google to slap your website. It's better safe than sorry.

4. Minimize the number of advertisements you display in your website. Displaying too many advertisements in your website is never a good thing. Not only will your website look spammy, it will get you penalized by Google as well. With that said, you should always keep the ads in your site at a minimum. Don't make your site look like and ad site.

5. Improve the quality of backlinks pointing to your website. The era of aggressive backlinking is over. It's no longer the number of links that count but the quality of the links. A good high quality link has better effect than a hundred spammy links. Backlinks are among the major factors that Google look into when ranking a website. So you should be building good links from reputable sources.

6. Stay away from black hat SEO techniques. Engaging in black hat SEO is never a good thing. These techniques may get you results in the short term but they will hurt you bad in the long term. So stay away from using them. They're not worth the risk.

7. Eliminate duplicate content. A lot of the sites negatively affected by the Google algorithm updates are sites that have great amounts of duplicate content. This shows that regurgitating content is a bad thing, SEO-wise. So review your website and eliminate duplicate content.

You should implement all of these tips to protect your website from future Google algorithm updates.