by Matt McGee
One World Telecommunications
posted: April 18, 2006
(continued from SEO
in 2006, Part 1: Search engine visibility = bloodsport)
As search engine visibility became a bloodsport
in recent years, and "web spam" started
to overtake many legitimate web sites and businesses
in the SERPs, the search engines had to fight
back. Their goal was (and is) to maintain quality
SERPs; they want to list the best and most relevant
web pages for every search a user performs. Here's
how they fought back:
Late 2003: Florida
In November, 2003, Google made a major change in
how it ranks web pages. This was called the "Florida"
update in the SEO/SEM industry, and it hurt many
web sites across different industries. The outcry
was loud for months, and SEOs and web site owners
everywhere had all kinds of theories about how
Google's ranking methodology had changed. Google,
of course, didn't reveal anything.
While many view "Florida" and other updates
as unique and separate events, I believe "Florida"
was the first step in a continuing series of
actions taken by Google to combat web spam
in all its forms.
A few examples:
2004: After Florida came
the so-called "Google Sandbox," which
appears to penalize brand new sites. There's still
plenty of debate about this in SEO circles, but
the bottom line is that some new sites -- or,
in some cases, old sites that get redesigned --
are unable to rank well in Google's SERPs for
many months after launch. These new (or changed)
web sites are now considered guilty until proven
innocent, at least by Google. Why? Because
of all the spam techniques mentioned above, new
web sites don't have enough trust to rank well.
Early 2005: Google became
an accredited domain registrar -- not so they
could sell domain registrations, but so they could
have access to domain registration records and
use that information to help rank web pages. Knowing
how long a domain has been registered and knowing
how long it's been owned by the same person or
company helps measure a domain's trust. Being
a domain registrar also gives Google an easier
way to connect the dots on those "spam networks"
mentioned above, by seeing ownership and DNS information
for all registered domains.
Spring 2005: After that
came Google's well-known search
patent application, which offered many hints
at how Google's algorithm might work (then, or
in the future), and perhaps most specifically,
the many ways in which Google could identify spam
(and combat it). The patent application described
in some detail how Google could measure the trustworthiness
of domains, web pages, links, and more.
But what about other search engines?, you ask.
Are they making these same changes?
Yes and no. Google was always the search engine
that relied most heavily on measuring links to
determine a web page's ranking. So Google is most
affected by all the spammy, unnatural methods
that have been developed to make a web page look
like it has a lot of incoming links. Plus, Google
is the most popular search engine, so it's the
one where more people are desperate to get high
rankings.
Yahoo is making changes, too, but in a different
direction than Google. Yahoo believes "social
search" and personalized search is the way
of the future. Yahoo has introduced tools that
allow its users to influence the SERPs. Their
"MyWeb" feature lets you save or block
web sites in the SERPs. They've also recently
purchased Flickr
and del.icio.us,
two web sites where the user community can apply
"tags" to help determine the most interesting
content on those sites. (Google also has some
"personal search" tools in its arsenal,
but development and implementation is way behind
what Yahoo is doing.)
MSN, for its part, is just lagging way behind the
others. Their search engine is barely a year old,
the SERPs aren't very good on the whole, and they
don't seem to have figured out how to fight spam
just yet.
So, now that you know where we are now and how
we got to this point, we get to the main reason
for reading this far --
What is a web site owner to do in
2006 to get search engine visibility?
That's the subject of our next article:
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