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Google
and Jagger’s Aftermath
© 2005
Jason OConnor
Starting somewhere
between September 22 and November 17, 2005, Google launched a major
update to their search algorithm which shook up the search engine
optimization (SEO) community and millions of website rankings. The
update has been named Jagger and is apparently finished.
The keywords
that people used to find your site with in Google may not be producing
as many visits any more because the Jagger changes caused your rankings
to plummet. Of course many people have seen their rankings stay
the same or improve in Jagger's aftermath too.
If your site's
rankings have decreased, what can be done to get back to where you
were or better in the post-Jagger Google world?
There are still
a lot of questions to be sure, but there are some good beginnings
of answers as well. Since this update was rolled out over months
and in three distinct phases, it has been much more difficult to
determine what factors have been given more weight or less.
For instance,
IBL (inbound links to your site) have always been important to achieve
high rankings in Google. But there are many different kinds of IBL's.
Link trades, where you put my link on your site and I put your link
on my site may be less valuable than a one-way link. This has been
the case for a while, but is the importance of each changed now
since Jagger? Probably. I don't know all the answers, and I don't
think anyone knows all the answers save the people at the 'plex
(short for Google-plex).
What are some
theories? Here are some of the top ones, but I am not saying they
are necessarily true or false. And this is not a full list, there
are most likely numerous other factors that affect Google rankings
after Jagger that no one has recognized at all yet. The following
list consists of ideas I have read online, which I spend hours each
day doing, or some of our own hard-earned observations using the
large number of clients' websites in many different industries to
learn from. Read the following with a grain of salt, which is always
a good idea when reading any articles or forum posts about SEO or
Jagger.
Things
That Could Possibly HELP You More In Jagger's Aftermath
Aged Domains
- Sites with domains that are older rank better now - the older
the domain, the better its rankings with all other things being
equal. (This is probably true to some degree).
Very Relevant
Links - IBL (inbound links) and OBL (outbound links) relevancy is
more important after Jagger. This means that if you point to related
sites or you get links from other sites that are related to your
website, you may rank better after Jagger with all other things
being equal. (This is probably true to some degree as well).
Links From
Trusted Sites Help - TrustRank (or a similar concept) is more important
than ever after Jagger. TrustRank is a concept that says if you
get a link pointing to your site that is highly trusted by Google
(trusted either programmatically or by human editors), then you
will rank better with all other things being equal.
Variety of
Links - Links from .edu and .org websites are good for increasing
your rankings and are more important than ever. (It's vital to get
links form a wide variety of websites. Just like your investing,
you need to diversify your IBL’s. (This has probably been
true even before Jagger).
- Aged
Links - The older the link that points to your site, the
more weight it's given now. (This also has probably been true
even before Jagger).
- Embedded
Links - Links that are embedded in sentences and paragraphs
instead of stand-alone links are weighted more heavily now. (This
may be true soon if not already).
- Article
Links - Articles are what directories had been a year or
two ago for link building. Links from the author by-line or within
the article that point back to your site will positively affect
your rankings. (And this is one reason I've chosen to write this
article).
- Fresh
& Unique Content - Now, more than ever, regularly updated
and added ordinal content will help your rankings. (This is almost
definitely true.)
- Be
a Big Guy - If you are a big behemoth site like Wikipedia,
Yahoo, AOL, Ebay, Amazon, etc., you will rank better than you
did before Jagger.
- High
Traffic & Stickiness - User popularity statistics now,
or will soon, affect rankings. In other words, user actions on
your website, like how long they stay (stickiness), how many pages
they visit, and even how many people visit your site in a given
period, can all affect how Google ranks your site. (This may be
true soon if not already).
Things That
Could Possibly Not Help You Anymore, or May Even HURT You More In
Jagger's Aftermath
- Duplicate
Content
- Any kind of duplicate content can hurt your rankings. Some say
this only refers to other sites having the same content as you
while others say even duplicate content within your own site can
be bad. I find the latter hard to believe since all sites have
repeating slogans, phrases, checkout instructions, or any number
of other duplicate sentences within the same site. (Use http://www.copyscape.com/
to find people who are stealing your original written content
and publishing it on their site).
- Hidden
Text - Hidden text within your html, in <div> tags,
CSS, or comments, can negatively affect your rankings. (This is
something you should never do).
- Footer
Links – Some say links in the footer are disregarded
now. (This is one we have found no evidence for).
- Directory
Links - Links from directories are weighted less now. (This
is one we have found no evidence for, but is most likely true
or will be soon)
- Decreased
Rate of Link Building - The speed and volume of inbound
link creation to your site from other websites, if changed, can
negatively affect your rankings more so now. (This one is most
likely true too).
- Reciprocal
Links - Reciprocal link trades are worth less then they
were before or are worth nothing now. (It’s probably true
that they are at least worth less now).
- Linking
to Bad Neighborhoods - Reciprocal link trades hurt your
rankings when you link to sites that are considered 'bad neighborhoods'
by Google, such as link farms or sites that are banned by Google.
(This is most likely true and has been for a while).
- Link
Schemes - Participating in link schemes such as Co-ops
or Link Vault can hurt your ranking more than help them. (I have
not found any evidence of this so far for my client's sites, but
this could be true).
Again, I don't
think anyone outside Google knows which of these factors above are
true or false, and how each one affects a given keyword phrase's
ranking. In fact, that's the idea. Google doesn't want people 'gaming'
their system. There are so many variables that need to be considered
that it is very difficult to figure out which ones affect what.
So,
what do you do now if your site's ranking have dropped since Jagger?
If your site
was ranking well in the Google SERP's (search engine ranking position)
before Jagger, then it was nowhere to be found right after Jagger
hit, and now your site has still not bounced back at all, then you
probably tripped a filter, got penalized or even banned. You may
have duplicate content on another site, or someone copied a lot
of your content, or you may have canonical issue (where yoursite.com
and www.yoursite.com are considered two different sites by Google
causing it to look like duplicate content). You may have hidden
text, or keyword stuffed your pages or any number of other things.
You’re definitely going to need more knowledge than this article
can give you to get your rankings back.
Some say that
Google updates have happened before around the same time of year,
and many sites that tanked came back after the first of the year.
I don’t know if this is true, we'll just have to wait and
see. For those who have still not rebounded, this may be nice to
know.
Interestingly,
most of our clients' sites either stayed the same or improved after
Jagger. Our own company site improved. But unfortunately, a few
of our other clients saw some decreases in their rankings right
after Jagger, and have since rebounded, but not at quite the same
pre-Jagger levels. Here's what we did for them:
Scoured their
site for bad outgoing links and made sure that each site they linked
to was indexed by Google and was not trying to game Google. Any
questionable links were deleted immediately. But we did not get
rid of all our link partners, we just culled.
Determined the
ratio of the different types of incoming links to learn where improvements
were needed. In other words, we determined the percentage of links
to their site that were link trades, one-way links from related
sites, one-ways from unrelated sites, link advertisements, directory
links, forum signature links and more. We then advised them to increase
their one-way related inbound links that are embedded in sentences,
and not concentrate so much on link trades and stop getting one-way
unrelated link development altogether.
- Cleaned
up the HTML on every page, made sure all tags were closed and
that there was no extraneous code on any page. And we put CSS
and JavaScript’s in separate files.
- Took out
any inadvertent hidden text. One client had keywords in comment
tags in their HTML that we deleted.
- Decreased
file size of pages, by taking out old links and superfluous verbiage,
and by re-optimizing the .gif's and .jpg's.
- Wrote much
more succinct Meta descriptions and on-page verbiage.
- Made sure
that every title tag on every page within the site was different.
- Coached
them about the importance of continually developing good, quality,
original content.
- Brainstormed
ways in which their sites could entice other webmasters to link
to them because of what their site offers, such as good content,
free Web tools, articles and many other things. This is called
natural linking and what Google regards as the only legitimate
way to build links. Therefore, this is vital.
We tried to
look at the overall link development strategy, the value of their
site, and the quality of the site, both the content quality and
the html quality. A clean, simple, fast-loading site with natural
links pointing to it from a variety of other related websites, some
.org's and .edu's, others from trusted authority sites, and many
from small related websites, that adds fresh and unique content
daily, will rank well in Google over time and won't be affected
by any update, including Jagger.
The best way
for you to learn what to do in Jagger's aftermath is to read articles
like this, participate in forums that discuss these topics, and
most importantly, by experimenting with your own sites to see what
works. This takes time and patience. So does building quality sites
that have things to offer and that subsequently get natural links.
But it's all worth it.
Jason OConnor
Copyright 2005
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