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The Year Google Grew Up |
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It has been a full year since the infamous Florida Update rewrote
Google's rankings with a massive pre-Christmas purge of previously
well placed sites. The update, which caught virtually everyone by
surprise is assumed by most to be the introduction of semantic
contextualization software added to a variation of the Hilltop
Expert Document Algorithm. It took Google about six to eight weeks
to re-establish stable listings and they took a savage beating in
the SEO press during that period. For a short time it looked like
the shift was a failure with spammy sites and "big-box" stores
dominating the Top listings but after a while Google's listings
began to make sense again.
The inclusion of Hilltop added great weight to certain types of
links and as Mike Banks Valentine points out in today's WebProNews,
radically cut the value of reciprocal links. Incoming links were the
meat and potatoes of PageRank but five years of commercialization
had turned them into junk food. Googlebot needed a better diet and
direct one way reference links from "credible" and relevant sites is
considered much healthier spider-food than the junk peddled by
fast-link dealers or cooked up in kitchen-sink sites between
friends.
The Florida Update effected more than site rankings in the SEO
industry. New businesses sprang up finding, buying and selling links
as SEOs and site owners became obsessed with PageRank values and
link-building. Savvy site designers and a few SEOs began producing
instant expert sites, using them as "back-door leader-pages"
designed to drive spiders rather than attract them. Websites with
incoming links from "authority sites" such as news-sites, major
forums and other high PageRank properties started to rank better
than they had before, thus increasing the value and popularity of
these authority sites.
Perhaps the greatest effect of the Florida Update was the sudden
rise in the popularity of BLOGS. As explained in dozens of articles
over the past two months, Blogs have become big, primarily because
of their extraordinary effect on link-densities at Google. When a
thousand bloggers rapidly create links to a specific website or Blog
entry, that site or entry rapidly rises in the rankings. Proof of
this phenomena is found in the results of both Google Ranking
contests held earlier this year. The winner in both cases harnessed
the power of keyword enriched anchor text-links from thousands of
Blogs.
It is easy to speculate on Google's commercial interest in promoting
incoming links from Blogs and news-sites. Google owns the biggest
Blog software developer, Blogger, and has AdWords/AdSense being
displayed across many "authority sites". Google also controls the
world's most popular News-Search tools, Google-News. With the
pressures of becoming a publicly traded company, Google needs to
harness as many revenue sources as possible. When you control the
environment, forcing a change in user behaviours may be simpler in
the long run than waiting for change to happen organically. There
may be some merit to this view. The people working for Google
wouldn't be the geniuses they are if they didn't see the financial
angles but after a year has passed, it appears the shift was
motivated by much more complex changes happening at the Googleplex.
Google has a number of interesting features and has been busy
acquiring the means to develop others. Through direct purchase of
software (and often the companies that make it), innovative in-house
development and the massive infusion of energy spurred by the IPO,
Google has raced ahead of its competition in the past three months
and is seen to be leading in just about every facet of search. It is
rumoured to be developing a proprietary browser and may even be
working on a proprietary operating system. The introduction of a
semantic/context driven algorithm that values links from established
authoritative sites has improved Google's listings and provided the
stability needed to integrate Google's various features into a
branded base of products. That many of the most beneficial incoming
links originate from websites already involved with Google in one
way or another, (aside from their own listings), more likely stems
from chasing the brand as opposed to chasing the buck. Once the
brand is established, the bucks tend to follow.
Google has established one of the most popular brands that has ever
existed but that brand, in most consumer's eyes, only extends to its
search engine. Google's founders have always stated that
information-flow was their major focus. Information, is a bigger
word than search and requires a larger vision to articulate. One
year after the biggest shake-up in search engine history, Google is
positioning itself to surpass simple search and grow into branded
information provision.
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