Google has recently gone through an update which has seen manywebsites that had previously held strong rankings vanish fromview. There are a few aspects this latest update has focused on.Part 1 focuses on "Reciprocal Linking" and the impact this hashad from a search engine positioning perspective.
With many of the updates in the past, site rankings havesomewhat fluctuated, but with the most recent Jagger Update,many website owners may still feel stressed, wondering wheretheir websites have vanished to!
Firstly, let me explain why Google has regular updates.
A Google update is a change to the way Google determinesrankings of websites listed within its search engine database.The latest update is referred to as the "Jagger Update".
Google's main focus has always been to ensure relevance in thereturn of search engine results. To achieve this, Googleperiodically makes algorithmic changes to the way it returnsresults from its search index keeping them as accurate aspossible.
The reason Google does this is due to:
- Technology changes and the type of websites created usingthese technologies.
- Unethical manipulation of search engine rankings by websiteowners or SEO specialists.
In the latest Jagger update, a few areas have been targeted toimprove search engine results.
I will cover these in subsequent articles. The first of these isReciprocal Link Building.
Reciprocal Link Building
Reciprocal Link Building is where two websites place an externallink to each other's site,
i.e. Website A points to website B. Website B links to website A.
Google has always placed a lot of weight on is the popularity ofone website linking to another. The reasoning behind this isthat if a particular website has many links from differentdomains pointing to it, then this website must be important.This concept is behind Google Page Rank. In essence, thisconcept is a good measure for determining the relevance of awebsite, because website owners will often provide a relevantlink from their website to different websites they feel wouldbenefit their visitors.
Many website owners and SEO specialists would (and still do) usethe Reciprocal Linking method to inflate a website's ranking.
The problem with this being such an important measure inGoogle's eyes is that this was not difficult to manipulate. Manycompanies offer "reciprocal link building" as a method toimprove a website's rankings. One of the major problems has beenthat many of the links added in the Reciprocal Link buildingschemes have no relevance to the websites they are linking fromor to, e.g. a Search Engine Positioning Company swapping linkswith a Pet Food Distributor.
Google still rightly maintains that external website linking isa good measure of popularity, and has focused algorithmicchanges around ensuring their rankings are not so easilymanipulated.
Some of the changes include:
- Relevance of the link from website A, to website B, i.e.Website A is a Beauty Therapist, and links to website B whichoffers skin care products.
- Anchor text* in the link, and the relevance of that textassociated with the website that the link is pointing to, aswell as the page it derives from. *Anchor text is the text youview within a link, i.e. WebDesign Sydney
- The age of a link on a particular web page.
- How many links are on a web page, as well as the age of thelinks weighed against the web page they are linked from.
- The rate at which links appear or disappear from a web pageover time.
One thing these changes prove, is that manipulating searchengine rankings through unnatural or unethical methods will onlycause websites to vanish very quickly like many websites in themost recent Jagger Update
The latest Jagger Update continues to have components associatedwith aging delay, which cements the fact that SEO is no longer ashort term solution, but one that will gain benefits over time(providing it is done properly).
About the author:Andrew Seidel - SEO Specialist and Search Engine MarketingConsultant for Quantum Web Solutions in Sydney, Australia.
