Google’s Search Ranking Update

According to Laura Thieme, president and founder of marketing firm Bizresearch.com, her client’s Internet search ranking was completely wiped out after Google recently changed its search algorithm that ranks Web pages based on search queries. For the last 18 months, Thieme’s client, which sells board games, was ranked among the top 20 most popular sites for the search term “board games.”

But after the mid-November tweak, the ranking didn’t even make the top 800 listings. While the ranking fluctuated from time to time, it’s “unusual to completely lose your position,” Thieme said

According to some reports, many online retailing sites were so dependent on Google search engine listings for business, that they had to lay off many of their staff because of revenue lost from the new Google update- the ill result of one putting all of their Internet Marketing eggs into one basket.

After researching news and various reports, we have found that the following practices have effected the new Google update, and can result in a change in ranking, or in some cases overall dumping of one’s website from Google:

Irresponsible Linking

For the most part, such sites were retail oriented sites that have been using banned SEO techniques such as link farming, irrelevant site linking, spamming a site with loads of keywords and hidden site text to beat out their competition for top Google rankings.

Google has more or less always warned of this on their website and it looks like punishment for such practices have finally taken hold. Google lists these quality guidelines on their site:

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t send automated queries to Google.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Additionally, Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Quality, touched upon such “do not’s” in an interview with Traffick.com earlier in the month. According to the interview, Norvig stated that Google “attempts to give the correct value to a page.”

“We used to look at just links and keywords, but now we’re incorporating a lot of other stuff… looking for more and more signals and types of information on a page that attempts to determine or read a ‘real meaning’ or what a page is trying to provide,” continued Norvig.

In an exclusive interview with Garrett French of WebProWorld, Marissa Mayer, the Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, taught webmasters that “If you dropped in rankings, go back and look at who you linked to and who’s linking to you. If any of these people are using spam techniques, they’re the reason your site no longer appears on Google.” Mayer added “Have unique useful content. Have sitemaps. Make your site easy to reach with a text-based browser. Give your site a hierarchal structure. Have a single domain with mini-sites within, rather than having lots of sites.”

Google’s New Use of Stemming

According to Google “Google now uses stemming technology. Thus, when appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms. If you search for ‘pet lemur dietary needs’, Google will also search for ‘pet lemur diet needs’, and other related variations of your terms. Any variants of your terms that were searched for will be highlighted in the snippet of text accompanying each result.”

The addition of stemming is probably the largest change that searchers and search engine optimization people should take into consideration. According to SearchEngineWatch.com’s Danny Sullivan, during a new search on Google for “travel tips”, Google will look for such relevant terms as: travel, travelers, traveling, tips and tip

Stemming can be overridden. When you enter any search command, in front of a word, stemming is shut off for that word. So:[ travel +tips ] would only enable stemming on the word travel while [ +travel +tip ] would disable stemming on both terms.

Making Sense of the Google Dance

The more one looks into Google’s new update, the more it makes sense. Google is filtering out link spammers and style of the month search engine optimization techniques from its listings along with one pager affiliate marketing sites. Sure, the update is not perfect… but if we expect to be served results gathered via search engine spamming, why use Google in the first pace.

Google is for relevant results, not sites with engineered text to appear on certain terms. That’s why careful and planned search engine optimization is so important for companies. Tips to rank highly in Google’s “new” index:

* Optimize your site for the content and services you have.
* Instead of using a links page or multi linking campaigns on links only pages, try to get other sites to include their links to you within their content
* Don’t take Google page rank too seriously
* Don’t link to sites or request links from sites that have content which is not relevant to yours
* A couple of links and keywords on your site will not get you high rankings, your site must be relevant to the terms that you’d like to appear on. Content is king. Write, write, write.

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