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An explanantion of the latest Google update codenamed Jagger and what it means for your business!

Google updates have names. A Google update is a change to the way Google determines its rankings. Google makes these changes to its algarithms every so often, and they're universally feared because they can impact dramatically on a website's ranking. The latest update is called Jagger, and it has search engine optimization companies (SEOs) all around the world in a state of panic.

Why was Jagger such a fearful update? Simple... With Jagger, Google once again outsmarted huge numbers of SEOs. You see, many SEOs spend their time (and their clients' money) trying to trick Google into thinking that their websites are more relevant and important than they really are. They do this mostly by swapping links, buying cheap links, and placing links on free directories. While there's nothing wrong with these sorts of links (i.e. they're not considered 'black-hat'), they don't really show that the site is relevant or important. All they really show is that the site owner has made a deal with another site owner. In these deals, the incentive for the linking site owner is a reciprocal link, money, or increased link volume. Google much prefers it when the linking site adds the link simply to enhance the value of their content or to increase their own credibility and authority.

In other words, Google wants its search results to contain relevant, important sites, not sites that merely appear to be relevant and important. To this end, Google invests millions of dollars and employs the world's smartest mathematicians to create algorithms which identify sites that are trying to trick them. And that's exactly what Jagger did; and when it find those sites, it simply adjusted their ranking to more accurately reflect their true importance.

From a technical standpoint, Jagger was well described by Ken Webster in his article, Google's Jagger Update - Dust Begins To Settle?. To summarize, Jagger:

1) Increased importance placed on Inbound Links Relevancy?
2) Increased importance placed on Outbound Links Relevancy?
3) Promotion of relevant Niche Directories (related to #1 & #2)?
4) More weight thrown back to PR @ top domain?
5) Increased importance on AdSense placement relevancy?
6) Possible introduction of CSS Spam filtering?
7) Overall Blog demotions?
8) New and unresolved "canonical" issues?

Some more interesting effects were reported by WG Moore in his Jagger article. Mr Moore runs a number of test sites for SEO purposes. By monitoring the links to his test sites as reported by Google, he established that:

"all reciprocal links had vanished. We think that this is because Google is down-grading or eliminating reciprocal links as a measure of popularity. This does make sense, actually. Reciprocal links are a method of falsifying popularity. Sort of a cheap method of buying a link, if you want to think of it that way... During the second week of the Jagger Update, a few of our reciprocal links did come back up. However, we also noticed that these were from places where we had highly relevant content. They came from articles where we discussed our area of expertise: Web Analytics, or from forums where we had relevant threads. So we feel that these links came back because of content, not linking.

The other group that came back up was one-way inbound text links, regardless of the originating web site. These links also had strong relevance to our web analytics business. In other words, they contained keywords and/or phrases related to our site and its business."

In short, Jagger undid the hard work of thousands - if not millions - of people! As a result, hard-won high rankings and revenues plummeted.

Other Search Engine Optimizarion Articles you might find of interest:

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+ 5 Simple, Effective On Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques
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An explanantion of the latest Google update codenamed Jagger and what it means for your business!

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