The January 2008 Google update and how it will affect your website
Created on Thursday, 14 April 2011 20:30 Published Date Hits: 390
This current update is a little different as it is tweaking the SERPs. The search engine results page is an organic result which many webmasters work hard to get and any tweaks there always cause a lot of upset. It is still too early to tell what exactly the update is affecting but judging by the way test sites are performing across our network here are the conclusions:
1. Greater relevancy – Google is tweaking its algorithm in order to improve the relevancy of pages served in its organic results page as a response to search queries. One of the items is it looking at is a more natural percentage of keyword density. The acceptable range of keyword density in a given web page is 1% - 10%. The upper range however will get your site penalised as it is unnaturally high and reeks of spamming and keyword-staffing (let’s get logical here, when was the last time you saw a naturally-written page where one word in every ten was a keyword? – You see Google’s point). Google seems to be revising its keyword range downwards to bring up pages with a lower keyword density. This brings us to the interesting question, how will it decide they are not a page simply optimised to come up and bring traffic for a specific keyword?
2. Thematic linking – This answers the last question of the point above and looks at Google’s trend towards website thematic linking. This means that before Google decides to serve up a page on your website in a way that shows that page as a relevant answer to a search query it does two distinct but related things: It first checks to see how your page links in terms of theme to the rest of your website and it next looks to see how your website links to other sites in terms of both incoming and outgoing links. This is called thematic checking. Google needs to make sure that your page is not a spam page and your site is not a spam site.
3. Domain name and page title relevancy – Google is now beginning to pay greater attention to the domain name and page title than before, edging those which best meet the criteria towards the higher part of the search engine results page. This is natural because while content can be optimised many times and be changed to meet search demand the domain name and page title are harder to change and therefore items which tend to be of greater relevancy in determining the value of the page (and site) displayed in the search results.
These three tweaks will affect a great many websites which are not properly optimised to deal with them, dropping them from their natural place and promoting those which are optimised. It will also, automatically demote spam sites and those sites which offer no deep value and are, instead, optimised only so that they come high on the search results page.
Google’s changes so far are a clear trend towards the semantic web search which offers a search bot so clever that it picks out the relevant webpages without any optimisation whatsoever. While this is a webmaster’s dream come true (at least an honest webmaster’s) it is still far from happening but we are heading towards it.
