Google just finished its 3-stage Jagger update, to much despair of many web developers and especially SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) experts. But what does this mean to normal webmasters? How will Google affect our nearby future?
So, Google just finished its 3-stage Jagger update yesterday. According to some sources (including the (in)famous Matt Cutts) Jagger was actually three different updates, which happened to follow each other in quick succession. Nevertheless, the updates were named Jagger1, Jagger2, and Jagger3.
Jagger killing Splogs / Spam Blogs
The 3-pronged approach from Google has been particularly aimed at spam in general, and splogs (Spam Blogs) in particular. Because of the way Google works, incoming links are seen as votes, and creating dozens (in some cases, thousands) of blogs that link to a particular page, then, is the internet version of ballot stuffing.
In order to clean up after these horribly annoying splogs, Google has developed new algorithms to kill them off, which was what we saw largely during Jagger1
In SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) circles, a crude theory was formulated: Perhaps Google is doing the only logical thing? Obviously, spam blogs are especially created to rank well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so if you don’t filter them out, they will float to the top. All you need to do then is to skim the crud off the top, and the rest is valid results. This would be concurrent with my earlier observation of Google being Broken.
Of course, what Google is doing is slightly more effective than that, and probably infinitely more complicated, but the current search results seem to have sorted out a lot of the worst spam results. It is expected that the technology will be tweaked further over the next few weeks, but it seems fair to say that the Internet is a better place for it.
What colour is your hat?
SEO is often split into a few different camps: White-hat, which is the people who play by the books, and try to their best to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find the websites. This is done by making pages that work well, and are easy to navigate. Of course, this frequently offers a double whammy: it is easier for the search engines, but it also makes it more accessible to people.
Black hat is naughty - these are the proper hard-core spammers (read more about them on Black hat SEO dot com) who use gateway domains, throw-away domains, cloaked pages, white-text-on-white-background, and any of dozens of other nasty tricks in their arsenal. You’ll often find that these are people promoting the same kind of products that spam your inbox to shreds, for stuff like viagra, body enhancements, etc.
There is also a middle-ground, jokingly referred to as gray-hat. These are the people who mix technology from both camps, and will be the bulk of savvy SEOs: Doing what you can with the “legal” ways of moving forward, and then adding other tricks to the mix, in order to try and get an edge in on the competition
Part 2 of the Jagger update triology means that Google is becoming cleverer at detecting a lot of the technologies used by black-hat species of SEO, in an attempt to clean up the results. The idea is to try and create SERPs that have valid information - a mixture of information sites, eCommerce sites, and the whole gradient in between, with as little Spam as possible.
The old are oldest
In order to try and separate the good from the bad, it is rumoured that Google is starting to take age of the domain in question into account in addition to all the other factors. This means that old domains are starting to grow in the listings - and may be the simple explanation why Kamps.org is doing quite well at present (first registered in April 2000, it is a relatively old domain, in Internet terms).
Of course, this is angering webmasters of genuine sites that are younger - as it seems as if some sites are being punished disproportionally for their youth, ranking below web sites that are less relevant. The second effect of this, of course, is a sudden market upflux for the market of buying old domains to side-step the issue.
A two-way street
Up until now, one of the staples of SEO has been reciprocal linking (that is, two-way linking: website A links to B, and B links to A). Similarly, many people put a lot of fate in inbound links: One way links.
One way to get inbound links in the past was to get listed in high-profile directories, such as the Open Directory Project (ODP/DMOZ), or in other link directories. In the case of DMOZ, this is a free service with a huge backlog (many sites report having waited 12 months, and still not being linked), and the ODP is frequently accused of corruption. Recently, for example, somebody tried to sell a DMOZ editor account on eBay. The auction was cancelled, but there is no reason for why this couldn’t happen in more hidden forms.
It appears that after the Jagger update, both reciprocal linking and one-way links from large link collections have been discredited a little, whereas inbound links from relevant sites are valued highly. In other words, if you run a website that sells running shoes, being linked from Nike.com is more valuable than being linked from Volkswagen.com.
So what does all of this mean to me?
It seems as if there are a lot of people who are hit quite hard, but there appears to be a correlation between how dark a shade of gray their SEO are, and how big a drop they have taken. This is all very new, so nothing is certain as of yet, but it seems as if the ones who decided to keep playing it safe (i.e white hat SEOs) are benefitting most from this reshuffle.
If you’ve taken a big drop, it may be worth asking yourself the question that my SEO friend posed to me: When you change something on your site, do you do it for the search engines, or for your visitors? If the answer is the latter, you should be fine.