Google improves its ranking algorithm on an ongoing basis. During the last weeks, Google changed three things on the result pages that are visible to all Google users.
The changes are an improvement for searchers but they might be bad for your website.
Google recently filed a patent application that deals with the keywords that Google finds on your web pages. Google's new patent filing describes a way for website owners to view the top phrases that Google assigned to their website. The patent shows that Google finds the most important keywords on a website with a phrase-based indexing system and it describes a method that could allow website owners to add additional related keywords.
Google's sandbox is a filter that Google's search quality team created some years ago to fight spam in the search results. If you have a new website or if you made major changes on your website then Google's sandbox filter might be the reason why your website's rankings have dropped.
Google recently wrote in one of its official blogs that it is possible for spammers to take advantage of your website without ever setting a virtual foot in your server. Spammers can do this by abusing open redirects.
Many people who start a website think that it is possible to get high rankings on Google within a few days. Unfortunately, this is not possible. Competition on the Internet is fierce and there are several factors that influence how long it takes until Google lists your website.
Last week, I talked about how the economy will sort out winners and losers even faster. This week, a trio of news releases seems to confirm that search, and Google, in particular, will be a winner. Unfortunately, almost no one will recognize that they’ve won.
Many people think that Google searches the Internet when you perform a search on Google. That's not the case.
Google does not search the Internet when you search. Google uses a so-called robot to surf the Internet. This robot is a simple software program that parses all web pages that it finds on the Internet and then stores the information it finds in Google's database. When you search on Google, you're actually searching the database that has been collected by that robot.
A month ago yesterday, I was on stage in Park City, Utah at the Search Insider Summit with Danny Sullivan, Jeff Pruitt (SEMPO President/iCrossing) and John Tawadros (iProspect) talking about Google’s domination of the search space. Both Danny and I took Microsoft and Yahoo! to task for not mounting a more significant challenge to Google’s dominance. It could be my imagination, but it seemed that for the rest of the Summit, I felt a bit of a chill in the air between myself and the Yahoo! and Microsoft reps that ventured to Park City. I suspect the feeling was that as the emcee and moderator, I should have been less opinionated and more neutral. Fair enough, I guess, considering the root of the word moderator. But, with my first column of the New Year, I felt I should clear the air a little bit.
Considering that I’ve devoted the last 6 months to exploring the impact of brand in search in this column, I do have a bit of a backlog of other issues to deal with, so today I’d like to clear the decks on at least two issues. Last week, I was in Park City, Utah for the Search Insider Summit. As usual, a number of insight comments bubbled to the top over the 3 and a half days. This time, many of them were centered on the Google hegemony. In fact, on Day 2, we tackled that very question with Danny Sullivan, Jeff Pruitt, President of SEMPO (day job: iCrossing) and John Tawardros from iProspect. What did we resolve? Not very much, but that didn’t make the conversation any less interesting.
Quite recently, there was mayhem when top ranking websites suddenly lost their rankings, resulting in a considerable dip in traffic. To sum it up, Google SERPS began to display unacceptable websites with broken links, spammy content, and you name it. It’s nothing like what we can accept from Google.
Google couldn’t have chosen a better time to bring a bug into their system. Together with the economic meltdown, it was serious concern for webmasters. Well, they admitted that it was a bug in their algorithm that went away unnoticed and causing this huge shift in rankings. However, it’s all sorted now, and things are back to normal.