Google and Jagger’s Aftermath

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ZillionBits.com have come up with another good article that I think you will find interesting.

http://www.zillionbits.com/misc/google-and-jaggers-aftermath/

Starting somewhere between September 22 and November 17, 2005, Google launched a major update to their search algorithm which shook up the search engine optimization (SEO) community and millÃ¯ons of website rankings. The update has been named Jagger and is apparently finished.

The keywords that people used to find your site within Google may not be producing as many visits any more because the Jagger changes caused your rankings to plummet. Of course many people have seen their rankings stay the same or improve in Jaggerâ€™s aftermath too.

If your siteâ€™s rankings have decreased, what can be done to get back to where you were or better in the post-Jagger Google world?

There are still a lot of questÃ¯ons to be sure, but there are some good beginnings of answers as well. Since this update was rolled out over months and in three distinct phases, it has been much more difficult to determine what factors have been given more or less weÃ¯ght.

For instance, IBL (inbound links to your site) have always been important to achieve high rankings in Google. But, there are many different kinds of IBLâ€™s. Link trades, where you put my link on your site and I put your link on my site may be less valuable than a one-way link. This has been the case for a while, but is the importance of each changed since Jagger? Probably. I donâ€™t know all the answers, and I donâ€™t think anyone knows all the answers save the people at the â€˜plex (short for Google-plex).

What are some theories? HÃ«re are some of the top ones, but I am not saying they are necessarily true or false. And, this is not a full list; there are most likely numerous other factors that affect Google rankings after Jagger that no one has recognized at all yet. The following list consists of ideas I have read online, which I spend hours each day doing, or that are the result of some of our own hard-earned observations using the large number of clientsâ€™ websites in many different industries to learn from. Read the following with a grain of salt, which is always a good idea when reading any articles or forum posts about SEO or Jagger.

Things That Could Possibly HELP You More In Jaggerâ€™s Aftermath

Aged Domains - Sites with domains that are older rank better today - the older the domain, the better its rankings with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree).
Very Relevant Links - IBL (inbound links) and OBL (outbound links) relevancy is more important after Jagger. This means that if you point to related sites or you get links from other sites that are related to your website, you may rank better after Jagger with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree as well).
Links From Trusted Sites Help - TrustRank (or a similar concept) is more important than ever after Jagger. TrustRank is a concept that says if you get a link pointing to your site that is highly trusted by Google (trusted either programmatically or by human editors), then you will rank better with all other things being equal. (See http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF.
Variety of Links - Links from .edu and .org websites are good for increasing your rankings and are more important than ever. (Itâ€™s vital to get links fÃ¶rm a wide variety of websites. Just like your investing, you need to diversify your IBLâ€™s. (This has probably been true even before Jagger).
Aged Links - The older the link that points to your site, the more weÃ¯ght itâ€™s given. (This also has probably been true even before Jagger).
Embedded Links - Links that are embedded in sentences and paragraphs instead of stand-alone links are weighted more heavily. (This may be true soon if not already).
Article Links - Articles are what directories had been a year or two ago for link building. Links from the author by-line or within the article that point back to your site will positively affect your rankings. (And this is one reason Iâ€™ve chosen to write this article).
Fresh & Unique Content - NÃ¶w, more than ever, regularly updated and added ordinal content will help your rankings. (This is almost definitely true.)
Be a Big Guy - If you are a big behemoth site like Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL, Ebay, Amazon, etc., you will rank better than you did before Jagger.
High TraffÃ¯c & Stickiness - User popularity statistics nÃ¶w, or will soon, affect rankings. In other words, user actions on your website, like how long they stay (stickiness), how many pages they visit, and even how many people visit your site in a given period, can all affect how Google ranks your site. (This may be true soon if not already).
Things That Could Possibly Not Help You Anymore, or May Even HURT You More In Jaggerâ€™s Aftermath

Duplicate Content - Any kind of duplicate content can hurt your rankings. Some say this only refers to other sites having the same content as you while others say even duplicate content within your own site can be bad. I find the latter hard to believe since all sites have repeating slogans, phrases, checkout instructions, or any number of other duplicate sentences within the same site. (Use Copyscape.com to find people who are stealing your original written content and publishing it on their site).
Hidden Text - Hidden text within your html, in
tags, CSS, or comments, can negatively affect your rankings. (This is something you should nevÃ«r do).
Footer Links ï¿½ Some say links in the footer are currently disregarded. (This is one we have found no evidence for).
Directory Links - Links from directories are weighted less. (This is one we have found no evidence for, but is most likely true or will be soon)
Decreased Rate of Link Building - The speed and volume of inbound link creation to your site from other websites, if changed, can negatively affect your rankings more so nÃ¶w. (This one is most likely true too).
Reciprocal Links - Reciprocal link trades are worth less then they were before or are worth nothing. (Itâ€™s probably true that they are at least worth less today).
Linking to Bad Neighborhoods - Reciprocal link trades hurt your rankings when you link to sites that are considered â€˜bad neighborhoodsâ€™ by Google, such as link farms or sites that are banned by Google. (This is most likely true and has been for a while).
Link Schemes - Participating in link schemes such as Co-ops or Link Vault can hurt your ranking more than help them. (I have not found any evidence of this so far for my clientsâ€™ sites, but this could be true).
Again, I donâ€™t think anyone outside Google knows which of the above factors are true or false, and how each one affects a given keyword phraseâ€™s ranking. In fact, thatâ€™s the idea. Google doesnâ€™t want people â€˜gamingâ€™ their system. There are so many variables that need to be considered that it is very difficult to figure out which ones affect what.
So, what do you do if your siteâ€™s ranking has dropped since Jagger?

If your site was ranking well in the Google SERPâ€™s (search engine ranking position) before Jagger, then it was nowhere to be found right after Jagger hit, and your site has still not bounced back at all, then you probably tripped a filter, got penalized or even banned. You may have duplicate content on another site, or someone copied a lot of your content, or you may have a canonical issue (where yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com are considered two different sites by Google causing it to look like duplicate content). You may have hidden text, or keyword stuffed your pages or any number of other things. Youâ€™re definitely going to need more knowledge than this article can give you to get your rankings back.

Some say that Google updates have happened before around the same time of year, and many sites that tanked came back after the first of the year. I donâ€™t know if this is true, weâ€™ll just have to wait and see. For those who have still not rebounded, this may be nice to know.

Interestingly, most of our clientsâ€™ sites either stayed the same or improved after Jagger. Our own company site improved. But unfortunately, a few of our other clients saw some decreases in their rankings right after Jagger, and have since rebounded, but not at quite the same pre-Jagger levels. Hereâ€™s what we did for them:

Scoured their site for bad outgoing links and made sure that each site they linked to was indexed by Google and was not trying to game Google. Any questionable links were deleted immediately. But we did not get rid of all our link partners, we just culled.
Determined the ratio of the different types of incoming links to learn where improvements were needed. In other words, we determined the percentage of links to their site that were link trades, one-way links from related sites, one-ways from unrelated sites, link advertisements, directory links, forum signature links and more. We then advised them to increase their one-way related inbound links that are embedded in sentences, and not concentrate so much on link trades and stop getting one-way unrelated link development altogether.
Cleaned up the HTML on every page, made sure all tags were closed and that there was no extraneous code on any page. And we put CSS and JavaScriptâ€™s in separate files.
Took out any inadvertent hidden text. One client had keywords in comment tags in their HTML that we deleted.
Decreased file size of pages, by taking out old links and superfluous verbiage, and by re-optimizing the .gifâ€™s and .jpgâ€™s.
Wrote much more succinct Meta descriptions and on-page verbiage.
Made sure that every title tag on every page within the site was different.
Coached them about the importance of continually developing good, quality, original content.
Brainstormed ways in which their sites could entice other webmasters to link to them because of what their site offers, such as good content, frÃ«e Web tools, articles and many other things. This is called natural linking and what Google regards as the only legitÃ¯mate way to build links. Therefore, this is vital.
We tried to look at the overall link development strategy, the value of their site, and the quality of the site, both the content quality and the html quality. A clean, simple, fast-loading site with natural links pointing to it from a variety of other related websites, some .orgâ€™s and .eduâ€™s, others from trusted authority sites, and many from small related websites, that adds fresh and unique content daily, will rank well in Google over time and wonâ€™t be affected by any update, including Jagger.

The best way for you to learn what to do in Jaggerâ€™s aftermath is to read articles like this, participate in forums that discuss these topics, and most importantly, by experimenting with your own sites to see what works. This takes time and patience. So does building quality sites that have things to offer and that subsequently get natural links. But itâ€™s all worth it.

Originally by Jason OConnor president of Oak Web Works, LLC, a full-service Web firm.
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NewBeing, Jan 15, 2006 IP

vagrant Peon

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#2

NewBeing said:

ZillionBits com have come up with another good article that I think you will find interesting.
Click to expand...

The original copy of the article by it's author is at
http://www.oakwebworks.com/articles/jaggers-aftermath.htm

vagrant, Jan 15, 2006 IP

admans Peon

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#3

Nice article, I havent seen any major changes in my ranking as of now, but will be sure to keep the above points in my mind before forwarding to any more SEO links for my sites. I have although seen that duplicate hurts a lot. One of my friends site is an article directory which collects articles over the net and arranges them in an order. However some of the starting contents which he collected came from 2-4 sites and seemed like duplicate sites for google i suppose, the site ranking went from pr5 to pr2. Luckily i havent had any bad experience with Pagerank till now. Lets see how the coming update is. Just can wait and watch for the google surprise.

Regards,
Admans.

admans, Jan 15, 2006 IP

lschmidt Peon

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#4

This article really just restates what is already known and says we should do it more. Groundbreaking news...

lschmidt, Jan 15, 2006 IP

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Google and Jagger’s Aftermath - ZillionBits

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