It has come to my attention that Google recently made changes to its Algorithm once again on July 5th and probably continued making updates throughout the week. If you noticed clients rankings either soaring up the charts or plummeting to the depths of despair don’t get too excited either way. After analyzing the current SEO intelligence it seems more changes are coming.
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1 Josh // Jul 18, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Rick passed along this article by Dave Davis of Beanstalk published last week … Google Algo Update Analysis
Overall, it sounds like Google is doing its famous dance, maybe better described as a super boring, dialectical waltz: one step forward, one step back, one step to the side and repeat. Painfully slow - almost like plate tectonics - if you try to watch it closely or for too long, but the basic idea is that Google proceeds very cautiously by deploying a new “filter” into it’s Black Box, collecting data on the new filter’s impact on SERPs, and identifying any new problems and biases introduced into search results. Then their engineers “pull back” on the new filter or even reset the algo to the way it was. Next comes a bunch of quantitative analysis of the effect of their little (or not so little) experiment on SERPs and “user experience,” which is used to might model and design a new filter. Start the process all over again! Somewhere along the way of all this trial and error experimentation, permanent changes are patched into the black box, usually in a more refined, minimally-impacting way than they had in their original form.
Of course the issues and questions surrounding the weight of various factors which shape Google rankings are a source of constant fascination and speculation by professional marketers and amateurs alike. There are good reasons for this - beyond the standard “pack of ravenous hyenas” phenomenon that accurately describes the behavior of the SEO “community” going after scraps of Google wisdom - which has to do with the fact that the underlying problems that Google is trying to solve are both real and very tricky.
How much weight should be given to domain name longevity, for example? If a domain name with intrinsic commercial value has been around for 6 or 7 years, does its survival indicate that the site provides value to visitors and its owners and is therefore a successful fulfillment of the promise intrinsic to the keywords in its domain name?
According to Davis’s article, Google appears to giving even more weight to the domain name longevity factor recently, and furthermore he argues that this is both good and bad. He suggests that on the whole, the algo seems too skewed towards favoring older sites at this point, and on that issue I have to say that I agree with him.
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