SEO post Jagger
Jeremy L. Knauff
A lot has changed in the search engine optimization industry
over the years, but it's been a while since such a drastic
change has occurred in such a short period of time. For some
time now, people have known that inbound links play a large role
in the ranking of a web page and as a result various schemes
have been developed and implemented to take advantage of this.
Recently, Google flipped the switch on an updated index called
Jagger that rivals even the infamous "Florida" update. After
this update, many people saw their positions in the SERPs
(search engine results pages) take a sudden and vicious plunge,
Greg Louganis style.
Did Google's engineers fail to plan out the possible
implications to legitimate web sites as a result of this update?
Did they become overzealous in their efforts to remove spam web
sites from their index? The short answer is one that many people
probably won't like. Most of the web sites that were adversely
effected by this update were optimized improperly - even those
optimized by so called "search engine optimization" firms.
The Jagger update more accurately analyzes the linking patterns
of a web page to determine if there have been efforts to
artificially improve it's ranking for particular keyword
phrases. A majority of the web sites that suffered had a large
portion (or all) of their inbound links consisting of:
* Reciporical links from non-relevant web sites
* Purchased links from non-relevant web sites
* Site-wide links
* Signature links in forums
* Spam links such as blog comments, guest book entries and forum
posts
Some uneducated people in the SEO industry would like to have
you belive that these types of links, or a mythical technique
called Google bowling will hurt
your web site. The fact of the matter is that a web site can not
be hurt by any type of inbound links. The web sites that
suffered after the most recent update were simply relying on
poor or unethical search engine optimization techniques which
accounted for most, if not all of their search engine
optimization campaign. After Google filtered out the spam links,
these web sites had nothing left and as a result, lost their
position in the SERPs.
So how do we properly optimize a web site so that it has a
better chance of maintaining or improving in the SERPs? The
first and most effective way is to avoid any of the techniques
listed above. By building your search engine optimization
campaign from a solid foundation you won't have to worry about
loosing your footing. Building a web site with a substantial
amount of quality content combined with an effective link building campaign will take time but in the
end you will see far better results that are sustainable.
About the author:
Jeremy L. Knauff is the founder of Wildfire Marketing Group,
a Guerilla Marketing Firm offering a variety of online &
offline marketing services that enable smaller companies to
compete with larger companies and win.
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