The latest Google update, nicknamed “Jagger”, threw many people for a spin. Many sites who had top rankings were bumped down for some reason, while others began to see great improvements with little work.
Now with this “new Google”, a few things have changed for SEOs, at least accroding to Dave Davies, owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. According to Davies, there are three main elements that have changed with the update:
- The history of your web pages
- The way backlinks are counted
- Site content & structure
“The history of your website and in fact, the individual pages within it are playing an increasingly important role in your site’s ability to rank well.The longer your site has been online the better your chances of ranking highly.Further, the longer a specific internal page has been live the better it will rank for additional phrases.”
“Similar to the history of your site, the history of the links to your site have gained importance.As was noted in Google’s patent application #20050071741 titled, “Information retrieval based on historical data,” links, like sites, gain weight over time.This point was further clarified in the latest update as sites with longstanding links gained strength while sites with many new links did not see significant ground gained.”
“The optimal keyword density doesn’t appear to have changed but rather appears to have declined in value altogether.Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.”
Now I’m not sure yet if this is accurate, but at least it’s a starting point in figuring out Google… again.