New SEO google source:http://www.evolt.org/node/60553 With this 3-part update Google has essentially changed many of the rules and have thrown the SEO community for a loop. The key areas that have been affected with this update are: * The history of your web pages * The way backlinks are counted * Site content & structure The History Of Your Web Pages - 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. The Way Backlinks Are Counted - your link building today won't create any substantial effect on your Google rankings until months down the road. - the relevancy of links to your site is still important however Google's ability to determine relevancy appears to have improved. Pages no longer have to containing the exact keyword phrases to be relevant but rather have to be from related industries. For example, a link to an SEO site from a web design site would be considered relevant even though the keywords on the page are not specifically related to SEO. - Natural links have gained weight over unnatural links. Creating hundreds of links with identical anchor text will quickly be detected as a link building effort (i.e. not natural) and thus will carry little weight. Different anchor text for your links will appear more natural and thus will have a more positive impact on your rankings. Site Content & Structure - 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. - While the importance of a specific keyword density on a page has declined, this has been countered by an increasing importance of relevancy throughout the site. conclusion: Building solid, natural links and creating a site with a lot of useful, relevant information will win out in the end though the aging delays on both domains and links mean you will have to be dedicated to the task. And this is the environment Google is hoping to attain, dedicated webmasters creating larger, more relevant sites with natural links. Mission accomplished.
Just noticed the date myself. Would love it if someone posted this kind of explanation for what's going on now. I can't figure it out at all!
I was going to dispute this article but now there's no point, because of the date, I can get my sites and pages into top 10 within one week - however I do have 100s of sites and pages with PR2 - PR5 to play with.