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Starting in June Google rankings started going crazy. We used to call this an Update or “Google Dance.” It was the period when Google updated it’s algorithm and rolled it out to all of it’s Data Centers, so for a week or so it would appear that your site was bouncing back in forth in the rankings, when really you were just at the new position or old postion, depending on which data center you hit, and whether or not it was updated with the new algorithm yet. Google updates are more incremental nowadays, and every change seems to be implemented a little differently than the last. That, of course, is pure speculation, because what Google is actually doing at any given time is a closely held secret. Back in March, Google rolled out a tweak to their algorithm and called it Vince. This update gave big brands a boost in the relevant searches. So if Company X was the biggest thing in blue widgets, but were lame at the search engine optimization (SEO) of their website, Google started giving them a pass, so they could rank highly in a seach for "blue widgets," and remain lame at SEO. As I mentioned, back in June the (search engine resultes pages) SERPS starting going wild. This continued for most of the month, and well into July. Now, a month later there still appears to be some movement, but they may finally be settling down. What are some possible factors that could have caused your site to rise or plunge in the rankings? - On June 19th Google began indexing Flash sites that use ActionScript 3. Even if your site doesn’t use flash, perhaps other sites that do have started to enter the SERPS, or maybe backlinks are being counted that weren’t counted before.
- It has been postulated that low-quality, irrelevant backlinks are getting more of a negative hit. So if you were ranking highly, but had a lot of backlinks from forums, social networking sites, blogs, or link directories, your link authority may have taken a big hit on this update.
- Another possible change, that I have noticed myself, is that Google seems to be taking a closer look at the backlinking page for overall releveance, not just the anchor text, title tag and text immediately before and after. Pages that I would consider being keyword stuffed appear to be making some progress.
The sad part about all of this is, the results do not look any more relevant after this update. Google results have been getting more irrelevant over the past couple of years, and whatever they are doing to adjust their algorithm doesn’t seem to be geared toward fixing that problem. Personally, I have been using Yahoo and Bing more than ever recently, out of sheer necessity.
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