Google gave everyone an early New Year’s present as they did an update which will greatly help sites adhering to their Terms of Use. If you have been following our advice, especially over the last six months, you should see a nice jump in the number of back links Google recognizes for your site.
Google’s first big change is they are giving more relevancy to internal linked pages. This is apparent by the large increase in back links for the domains that we track: 28%. This is the largest single increase we have seen in more than two years. As we have been discussing all year, with solid content, a focus on your business plan, and an easy to crawl internal linking structure, your site will be successful in Google. This has been a better option than optimizing your pages for Google directly.
It is clear. Research the right keywords for your target audience, build a compelling site with content that pinpoints a problem and offers a solution, and ensure your site is Google-friendly. That’s it. No hidden text, cloaking, proprietary technology, etc. Focus on giving the customer what they want, and nine times out of ten it will be what Google wants as well. Because Google changes their criteria every 3-4 weeks, by the time the new criteria can be properly tested, implemented, and then your site re-spidered, it can be two weeks or longer. This allow for your site to only be in full “Google compliance” for 1-2 weeks per month. Take our advice, think and build long-term. This is how we gained our top ten ranking for “web marketing”.
The Update
True to their form when they did an update on New Year’s Day 2003, they are using the New Year to launch a new set of criteria. While you will not see a major shift in your rankings with this change, you will become more competitive online. More back links means a higher PageRank, and with more internal links counting as back links, your site will begin to gain serious momentum through Q1 2004.
Google Update: Ginger
As is Google’s schedule, they introduce an algorithm change first, then follow it with an update of back links and PageRank information. Since they did the algorithm change recently, this is the update that was to follow.
With Google’s new criteria of treating internal pages with more importance, this makes “Page Saturation” even more valuable. The more pages you have in Google’s index, the higher your link reputation will be.
From everyone at Web Marketing Now, we wish you a happy and safe New Year!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.