im just wondering if at any point ever, if the algorithm or the way google ranks the pages changes does that change become public? be it through say a press release or maybe an insider leak? i have been spending a lot of time reading up and researching for my new job and i have noticed that when these huge changes in pagerank happen it doesnt seem to ever get out as to why. any one have an idea?
Search engine algorithms, including pagerank (which is just one factor from thousands), change continuously. SEO is not about trying to find a secret answer to rank #1, if you think that's the case you will be wasting your time. SEO is about making your website search engine friendly. People will link to you naturally if your website is interesting, etc. Build quality unique content (in a search engine friendly way) and traffic, rankings will be yours EVENTUALLY
im not trying to find a secret trick to bring my pagerank up, im just curious as to the reasons for past drops in rank and if that information ever gets released. the company that i work for is yellow page city and the website is http://www.yellowpagecity.com, in the past we have had our share of the top rankings in searches and recently we have dropped out of those top few. i want to try and put two and two together and see if a recent change is the reason or if its another reason. the information would be useful for future drops or gains in rankings as well.
I know at least some of it is public. For example, they announced they are working with the program 'Adobe Flash' to be more Search Engine friendly. Some things can 'anger' the bots. As stupid as that sounds, lol. For example spamming meta tags in your source code, or constantly refreshing your website to bring up a false page-hit value, will lead to lower rankings in google search. (this happened to me once )
On rare ocassions you may get a hint at what Google is trying to do. The best thing to do is read Matt Cutts blog. Look in the Google/SEO category for info related to that. For the most part the search engines guard their technology rather well. It's the core of what makes them tick, so any detailed information regarding algorithms is very unlikely.
a site can get penalized by google - for having duplicate content or going against any of the published webmaster guidelines look into Google Sandbox too... that may help a little to. PR gets updated every 4-6 months, I believe.... but PR isn't as important as people tend to think - it doesn't determine where you're ranked for certain words. And the algorithm would never be released to the public - because it's what makes search engines unique...