I believe the general opinion seems to be that Jagger 3 is coming to an end and is spreading to the other DC as well. If the jagger update is ending I don't know for sure, but the spreading from the serps on 66.102.9.104 to the rest is also my own experience. I guess there will be some minor flux here and there but the framework seems to stabilize, so time for some early conclusions, ideas and experiences. There are a few ( maybe even al lot questions on what happened, what did change in the algo etc.. Google won't light up our minds but we can maybe shine a little ourselves, in analyzing the event, and trying to find some answers. My own experiences & ideas are described below, and I hope you will add yours. Age of site & age of pages: I noticed that in the serps that I'm following for quite a while only old sites are shown, preferably those from the iceage, after the jagger thing this is only worse. The content on that sites does not really matter, only the keywords on the page or in the title is enough to rank first page, google even don't mind if they are not working, have cloaked KW etc.. I also noticed that for good ranking KW's from our own site, it are almost always the oldest pages of the site, even if there are other pages that are more relevant on our site for the same KW. Before jagger sometimes a new page from our site would pop up in a few days to the first page, now none are. Title/description/keywords: Most, not all, sites & pages that rank well have quite extensive usage of keywords in these three basic tags, some I even would consider spammy, stuffing of as much keywords around the main phrase as possible. We always thought Google only uses the title, but I think it's definitely those three together. Our own site did not use them, only the title, and a very general description, and my impression looking at the serps is that it did hurt our site. I know a personal discussable impression. Links/allinanchor: backlinks do count, but less then before jagger, maybe only the backlinks from really relevant big sites, I'm not sure, but again my own feeling about it. allinanchor is the same, not sure what variables count here, I do know, that we were on top with our site for allinanchor, allintitle and allintext for art of love & erotic art for example. We are now nowhere to be found anymore for those, reason I really don't have a clue. Not all the backlinks and the allinanchor text would change over one night, right? according google, using the great Mcdar tool , they did. Serving images from an other server: Something I'm thinking about is that google penalizes serving images from a different server, different Ip. Maybe they don't see it as content that belongs to the site, any ideas? Blogs & blog techniques: Seems to me that after this update blogs, sites using rss, or maybe even dynamical sites using wordpress or Movable type are out or pushed downwards. although in my opinion, who cares anyway , it is a really wrong step for google to take, there are not much blogs left in the serps I follow. Our own site is not really a blog, but we do use rss, so maybe google is considering it as such. This list is surely not complete, but these are some of the mayor things we noticed on our own sites, it's maybe or maybe not, to soon to rush in to conclusions, but we have to start somewhere, looking for answers and I hope you will share your experiences as well.
You have got me thinking... You know, I think what has really happened is that the age of LINKS to our sites is what is counting. I think that OLD links is what may be bring sites to the top... Just a guess, of course, but from what I have observed, it makes the most sense out of what I have seen.
My experience is quite different. My original Lingerie Dreams site was dropped from Blogger at the beginning of August. To this day they have not told me why. No notice. OK. I rebuilt the site using Wordpress - which is a wonderful CMS system by the way - and wrote some of the people who linked to me before. Many changed their links. But I was sandboxed which, frankly, I had suspected. Then Jagger. Pretty quickly Lingerie Dreams was well spidered and indexed. I got a PR5 in J1. But nothing in the serps. That changed last weekend when I began to rank for many of the more important keywords. Now, I host virtually all my images at a different server. I have not optimized the site particularily. I do use title/description/keywords but quite sparingly. I have Technorati tags on each post and I have alt text - sparingly, call it three or four words directly related to the picture. Here are a few things which may have helped. I have used Sitemaps from the go. Each update - one or two a day - pings Google Sitemaps I have self subscribed my RSS feed to Google Feed reader (as well as Yahoo) The site updates daily Google seems entranced with RSS - its whole blog search function is RSS based. My sense is that while spammy splogs are getting killed here, real blogs with content and RSS are doing fine.
we use sitemaps as well, did not notice a difference when we start using it in the serp, sitemaps could do good for news sites I can imagine.
I have a domain from 1999. It got heavily hit by Jagger, but is slowly recovering... 1999.. is that the Ice Age?
One thing I have noticed: I was ranking #2 for the keyword realtones on the dutch google. My homepage was all dutch. In the international google (.com) I ranked #1 for realtones. This was before jagger. During Jagger my listing in the dutch search engine got dropped and slowly came back to #9 and #11 (where it is now). During Jagger my listing in the international google stayed the same on all DC's (#1). Also other sites in the dutch top ten didn't even notice any difference during Jagger, and those sites all have dutch backlinks. Almost all of my backlinks are from english sites. So maybe google is looking more at the language of the backlinks than before. Has anyone seen something familiar?