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Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.

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Monday, July 16

Inside Google's Newest Algorithm Update

Buzz about another Google algorithm update started about 10 days ago when reports of serious changes to rankings surfaced. The dust should finally be settling on the update - so I've taken the opportunity to review the theories on the update.

Dave Davies was one of the first to post an analysis on the update, with his view shared by many across the internet. According to his review, three key areas were addressed in the update; namely Domain Age, Backlinks and PageRank.

Domain Age:
It appears that the Google Algorithm update has increased the importance placed on the age of a site's domain. While using domain age as a ranking factor helps to prevent spammy new websites from stealing top rankings, it tends to disadvantage legitimate sites that are just starting out. The importance of domain age should be a set-up on a sliding scale - with age becoming less important after a specified period, and other factors taking precedence.

Backlinks:
The new update seems to have unusually increased the importance on link volumes again which is ironic considering Google's public denouncement of paid links and unscrupulous linking strategies. So why then would Google reward sites with high volumes of irrelevant links? Many suspect this will be a temporary consequence, and I would expect to see a readjustment sooner rather than later.

PageRank:
It seems the little green bar and enigmatic Google PageRank score is playing a less significant role in weighting the value of links to a website. Many webmasters have become obsessed with getting high PageRank links, ignoring the importance of relevance. While the change is a good thing, it needs to be substituted with a better way of valuing links, which still isn't evident as yet. Perhaps the TrustRank measure which involves manual evaluation of core links will take its place.

All told, the latest Google update seems to have taken a step backwards as far improving the relevance of its SERPs. I'm fairly confident that any irrelevance generated from the update will be rectified by an algo tweak in the near future.

Tell us how the update has impacted your rankings and whether you think the key changes are for better or worse...

10 Comments

At 10:36 AM, The Head Coach said...: My three year old PR4 site dropped way down at about the time you mention. I was getting worried because my daily unique visitors dropped from 850 to around 300, but now it seems to be going back up again with search engine (mainly Google) traffic coming back.
My site is at Your Career Change
At 1:22 PM, Anonymous said...: My site, (www.photonic-products.com), online since 2001 with PR5, dropped from a top 10 site on my main keywords way way down to lower than 300 in an organic search. My visitors have dropped by 1000 a week, my google ads aren't getting the response they were and it has all been very traumatic!
At 2:29 PM, BeccaGirl said...: I've had my blog up and running for a while, it's been very active for months now and I still don't appear to have a Google PageRank at all!? If they are done with the update, why don't I have one?
http://www.beccagirlblogspot.blogspot.com/
At 3:20 PM, Karin said...: It turns out that none of my blogs have dropped down. They are still at PR4. My English blog My Recipes is quite new, but went from PR3 to PR4 recently.
At 4:17 PM, Catherine said...: My site rankings have been like a rollercoaster lately going from #10 to #24 to #13 in less than a week under our keywords "coastal vacations", which gets more traffic than any other keyword that would interest us. It's settling down now and we hope to be on the first page soon. Thanks for the great info. My site is www.absolutelycoastal.com.
At 6:03 PM, Anonymous said...: Always good to hear the input from the ineedhits team. I am glad to know that flucuations and better valuations will be considered for long-standing domains and real websites. Nothing worse than to see adsense websites above your listings.

My site is Biotech Jobs.
At 7:05 PM, Seferm said...: Informative article.
At 1:12 AM, dairy said...: I feel that google explicitly tells us the algorithm used in measuring the importnace of any site. i.e. pagerank. Age of the domain should not be given more importance and link relevance should be given weightage. My website is
Milk and Dairy Products
At 1:46 AM, Privacy-Rights-Act.com said...: Interesting,

It is always obvious when Google makes changes as my newer urls drop off the map, but my older urls don't move. Thanks for the updates.

www.NanoDetonator.com
At 6:00 PM, Valeria said...: Great help in understanding the Google changes. Thanks a million!