It is now clear that the recent update of Google’s search results (nicknamed the Florida Update) was qualitatively different from any of its previous updates, and has upset thousands of site owners and designers.
The jury is still out on how it has affected searchers. Time will tell whether searchers believe they are getting better or worse results after the drastic action that Google has taken.
Of the various attempts to describe and analyse exactly what that action was (Google never discusses the exact details of changes to its search algorithms), the best I’ve read so far is Barry Lloyd’s article on SearchEngineGuide.com.
He describes the immediate aftermath of the update thus: “All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years ... In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories.”
But, says Lloyd, Google was acting in accordance to its own principles, and in defence of the measures that have been taken in recent years to “game” the search engine’s system for ranking and returning search results:
“Google has seen its search engine results manipulated by SEOs (Search Engine Optimisers) to a significant extent over the past few years. Its reliance on PageRank™ to grade the authority of pages has led to the wholesale trading and buying of links with the primary purpose of influencing rankings on Google rather than for natural linking reasons.
In some instances, people would not link to sites unless they thought it would not harm them or would benefit them for Google.
Google optimisation consisted mainly of ensuring your page had your primary search phrase placed in all appropriate places on your page and that your sought after phrase was inserted in the anchor text of any incoming links. Thousands of SEOs and webmasters followed these simple and basic rules and loved the fact that Google seemed to reward them by giving them top listings.
People forgot the fact that Google really wanted to give surfers the most ‘authoritive’ results. So someone looking for cheap computers found the site that had ‘earned’ a reputation for providing cheap computers - not just that a webmaster had optimised their site to make it look that way.
....
This update was an attempt to redress the balance and get back to the way Google thinks that results should be calculated.”
I agree wholeheartedly with Lloyd’s interpretation. SEOs’ power had grown significantly over the last 12 months, to the point where commentators such as Brett Tabke, expert “Google-watcher” and adminstrator of WebmasterWorld.com recently that SEOs had “got its number”.
It seems that Google heeded this advice and decided to get tough.
When the dust settles however, SEOs will pick up the pieces, lick their wounds, and start to reverse engineer the black box that is Google's search technology once again…
Comments
2 comments
Google seem to fool too many people.- The simple fact is that google have cross referenced those keyword terms that rank highly in their adword campaigns, and penalised 'major players' in the market. Then added a little randomisation to keep the optimistic guessing that it's some other reason.
Take a look at 'taxi insurance' 92 out of the top 100 have been dumped by google - see scroogle ( google watch ) - people pay circa $2 per click to be number one of 'taxi insurance' - my web site used to be very highly ranked, and still is on google's other less adword supported minor terms.
i.e dumped on "taxi insurance" but number one on "taxi insurance quote"
Please stop excusing google - they don't rule the internet, and the quicker that someone else becomes a viable alternative, the better.
I for my part will not present my site, or duplicate web content just for google, i'm still number two on several major engines.
Google are now producing very poor results, I suspect that in 2 to 3 months google will reverse its decision, perhaps very gradually.
google has taken ROI out of search engines... No commercial website can ever hope to get ranked high unless they have 500k or more to spend on marketing. adwords is the only option google now offers a small business wanting to get seen in their search engine. expect to make $25 for every $100 spent - that's the average roi of adwords. what is seen in google search after search? spam, spam, spam, and more spam. there are thousands of relevant results, but google chooses to show spam or sites with google adsense. Google algo penalizes sites who use SEO, leaving spammers free reign. SEO penalties do not effect spammers who have temporary domains and dynamically generated pages. spammers who use adsense get special treatment it seems - most top ranked sites on google oddly enough have google adsense ads on them - a biased standard by all counts. google likes low-end, text based sites and so therefore webmasters have degraded their designs and functionality to the point where most sites on google look like google (like they have been designed by a 8 yr old). Google has removed the ability to get traffic, therefore has greatly reduced the return on investment. because there are fewer profits to be made, less money is going into designing high-end, quality websites. google has essentially dumbed-down the web by their greed and bias google culture. it's rumored that if you put "we love google" on a web page, it will get high rank in their search. thats how ego-centric they are.