For those of you paying attention to the latest changes Google has been making you may be wondering what’s been going on. Some have speculated that they’ve been cracking down on paid link exchanges for high page rank sites. That may be part of the change but it certainly isn’t all of it. Besides updating page ranks they’ve also modified the weight they give to external links. For a while they were giving huge weight to good internal linking structures so everyone starting having really good internal linking. Now they’ve shifted their focus again to increase the weight of external links to your site. This might not be a direct algorithm change but could be a side effect of a page rank update. I’m thinking that as the page ranks become stale the weights on external links diminishes because they are less certain of the reliability of those external links. When the do a page rank update those external links count more. A natural side effect of a page rank update. They count more because they just updated them so they’re much more valid than they will be four to five months from now prior to another pr update. So if your ranking dropped as a result of the latest changes (but PR stayed the same) then I suggest you focus on building some better external links into your site. If your ranking increased, don’t just sit pretty and smile at yourself because you’re getting more traffic. You need to start solidifying your position by creating more content and continue working on your internal linking strategy. If your ranking pretty much stayed the same then you need a magic 8 ball because I have no answers for you.
On a side note, from my analysis of current traffic and ranking on many different sites it appears as if Yahoo’s rankings have also been adjusted. This is less than a week after Google’s latest update. It seems odd to me that Yahoo rankings are adjusted along with Google’s. I’ve seen sites who’s page rank go up yet Google traffic go down while at the same time Yahoo traffic increases. Could this be some sort of link between Yahoo rankings and Google rankings? What purpose would Yahoo have in learning from Google ranks? Well, if they had a method to their madness then certainly they could combine learning from Google ranks with what they believe to be good and bad sites to improve their own algorithm. Search engines are always trying to improve and filter out spammy sites. Yahoo does a much better job than Google when it comes to this. Their index is slow but steady. Google freaks out over every minor change you make to your site. Put a page up and a day later you take it down? Google flips out and tosses you into the 404 trash bin of junk sites. Yahoo is much calmer and collective when it comes to their index. It takes longer to get into it but when you are in you don’t have to worry about Yahoo freaking out because your site has a 404 or two every now and then. Its one of the biggest things that upsets me about Google’s index. The web is dynamic not static. If I put a page up today and take it down tomorrow it doesn’t mean my site is junk or isn’t worthy of high rankings. It means I’m adaptable. Some things work. Some things don’t. That’s how you develop a good site. You find out what works. With Google index though, if you publish something you better be damn sure that you want it to be online forever or else.
Another note, the proper way to remove a page from the net without Google pissing on you is to first remove all links to the page. Wait a few weeks. Even though some people claim Google updates their index continuously it isn’t true. They cache pages and base their indexing off of those cached pages. You need to wait weeks before Google goes through and updates all the cached pages it has for your site. It may continuously update its index based on a tiny subset of its index (say your main page to get the latest blog) but if you remove a deeply linked page it will take a while for it to work its way out of the system. Next, you’ll want to submit a url removal request with Google using their webmaster tools. Finally, once you’ve waited long enough you can remove the page. This procedure is completely ridiculous by modern standards. Google has some serious catching up to do with other search engines in my opinion. Their indexing is inherently flawed and their results are littered with junk spammy sites. Oddly enough as far as search results go Yahoo has much more relevant results and has a much more reliable algorithm than Google could ever hope for. Google needs to take a lesson from Yahoo on search. They seem to have focused on everything but search since their IPO. Its time to get back to your roots Google and fix the problems with your search that we’ve known for some time. They’re lagging and leaving the door completely open for a rival to move in. Someone just needs a better algorithm and enough momentum.
