google

There's a whole 'lot of shaking going on in the search engine world.

In late November, 2003 Google implemented what has been named the “Google Florida Update”. To some who have become intimately familiar with Google’s search engine behaviors, it may seem like it’s former algorithm was thrown out altogether. This is not the case, however, some of the practices commonly used to generate traffic and comply with Google’s rules for optimum rankings have changed due to the new features Google has implemented.

Why is Google so important to you?
Google accounts for 60% of online search results. Both AOL and Yahoo also use the Google index to drive searches.

Google’s new features include:

Stemming Technologies – Google now takes the root of a word and associating all variations of that word, increasing the number of results for keywords. If this is something that you would deem undesirable, there are ways to tell Google not to do this.

Plural Searches – Google now treats “artist print” and “artists prints” as the same, increasing the competition for such words.

LocalRank Implementation – This seems like a popularity contest. LocalRank technology takes the first 100 results the search engine identifies, looks to see if any of those sites have linked to you and ranks sites based on how many “popular” sites have linked to with a specific search term. This makes it important to be linking from sites that are related to yours.

Internal Links Discounted – Links within your site to specific pages do not count as much as they used to. Not worth reconstructing your site over, but worth keeping in mind.

Artificial Page Rank Diminished – No longer does 100 links from another website weighted as 100 individual links in the eyes of Google. 30 links from 30 different sites will insure better results than 30 links from the same site.

The Bottom Line . . .
Google really isn’t doing this to throw you off the track, but rather to improve the integrity of search results to sustain user satisfaction. Google is planning to offer it’s IPO this year afterall.

Overall good advice is to:

make your site user friendly and easy to navigate

entice others to link to you by offering some form of incentive

don't use the exact same phrase in your backlinks

give your pages good titles that explain what each page is about

By following good basic website optimization practices you may be able to endure search engine algorithm changes and continue focusing on growing your business!

Is this all greek to you?
Never fear, we’re here to help you with search engine strategies in any way we can.

Contact us if you are seeking professional assistance with your site's search engine performance or creating a search engine optimization strategy.