Jagger Update - Lets figure this out

Alright, a couple of questions for all of you that are getting hit by the Jagger update:

1 - Did you buy links to your site/were they relevant?

2 - What kind of site replaced yours in the serps?

There seems to be complaints about what sites are now getting rankings. I've seen postings where people complained that authority sites were dominating the serps, but I've also seen posts about small sites dominating. So what has happened to your specific markets?

Lets put some information together here folks and figure out what the update involved.

I'm suspecting it has to do the link relevancy.

I'm starting to wonder if G is now identifying sites that sell link space on them and penalize the sites that get that link space.

I'm also speculating that G is taking their spam reports too seroiusly. Alot of sites that were making money through adsense seem to be penalized, so I wonder if G took all the spam reports they had over the past 12 months and finally did something about it. And if that's true, I bet they didn't verify the accuracy of most of the reports.

For my sites in particular, none of them were penalized except for 1. My pharma domain actually got a big boost. The other domains I manage (about 200) seemed to remain in their current positions. My blog site is the only one that took at hit (dropped from PR5 to 2, lost alot of traffic), which is fine to me since I barely update it anyways (last time I posted was like a month ago lol). But I only do white hat stuff (mostly content manipulation).

 

I guess it is because of the reciprocals. Sites which mainly rely on the reciprocal linking as their primary SEO method have suffered.

 

If you try to figure out a change before the update is completed then your going to drive yourself nuts. What you are trying to do is to decide what sort of cake is being cooked, when all that has been added is the flour and water. Until all the ingredients are in, have been mixed, and baked, there is no point in trying to work anything out!

 

I agree 100% with OWG.
You can come up with as many theories as you want. I think you'll find that at least one person will tell you that they have sites that don't fit.
Wait 'till it's over or you'll drive yourselves crazy (er)

 

I don't buy links and I was penalized. I do sell links though.

 

#1 - don't buy or sell links
#2 - large sites such as amazon or directories

 

There is no pattern to it; that is what is so befuddling. A previous post is spot on. For every site that fits the "popular" pattern, I can show you one that does not.

If reciprocal links were the target, I wouldn't have been hit, as less than 10% of my links are reciprocals.

Buying links as a "penalty" makes no sense.

I can imagine that google is discounting more links, possibly on some sort of trustrank scale. That'd make quite a bit of sense. Maybe they pumped up an "on-topic" link filter. That'd make sense too.

To me, right now, it seems that internal links are not factored into the ranking equation. External links do. I don't see any sort of onpage optimization changes. Everything that happened is what is off-page or off-site.

I see no reason to make huge changes for now.

 

While I don't jagger is limited to any one factor (I think several thinks it’s likely several things in the algorithm changed) the current state of rankings has a lot to do with text only links being devalued or ignored. I do not believe it is reciprocal links, at least those from relevant sites. I am not stating this as a fact, but I am personally positive this is what happened.

I base this on spending days going over my 40+ sites which cover a wide range of sectors. It is not limited to paid links, because I only have one site where I experimented with a paid link.

Out of 40+ sites, 14 sites did not have text links from anywhere (co-op) included (the only type of link program I use is the co-op). 13 of the 14 sites had no change or an increase in SERPS. All sites with text links were affected in a negative way - some minor, others saw major drops- including DMOZ listed sites that I have had for 8 years.

I received a personalized letter from google about a duplicate content issue I am having with a site that stole my content, and while it wasn't related to jagger, they did mention my site was under "no penalty" - and this site had co-op weight pointed to it. If you are to believe google, the co-op weight did not result in any penalty to the site. This leads me to conclude that google is relying more and more on links with inanchor text. If you check inanchor links vs. allinanchor, you might find that inanchor seems to be a much more accurate gauge of the current rankings (at least it did in my checks).

All my sites but one (which went from PR5 to PR4) either stayed the same or increased in PR. I believe the text links are still passing PR, just not being used for SERP's in the same capacity as they previously were.

I know google was intending to do something about text links. Several months ago I posted about a conversation I had with someone I ran into at a function in San Francisco who worked for "G" and while nothing specific was said, they had plans to do something about the sale of text links (no time frame was given). Discounting text only links will do a lot to crack down of the selling of text links and artificial rankings.

I also think it is very possible google has some sort of "duplicate content" filter going on with inanchor links - where the title and description don't vary. I think they start to ignore them after X amount of times. I think they are relying on inanchor links that are varied (while this has always been important, I think it is even more so)... i.e. if you want to rank for "hosting" get links with "affordable hosting" "dedicated hosting" etc. and a description that includes the anchor, but a varied description. It will certainly look more "natural."

I am not making any changes right now - during the last 8 years I have found that to be a mistake. Google is likely to tweak jagger and what would work today, might not work tomorrow.

I have been guilty of trying to focus too much on one keyword and haven't always varied the description. I don't think you can go wrong by focusing on varied anchor with a varied description. I am certainly not going to think about buying any text only links. I think they might still pass PR, but won't help you with SERP's, certainly not if they are from non-relevant sites.

The above is just my opinion, but does come from many hours of looking at logs and researching which sites did well and which ones didn't.

 

Finally a good, plausible theory. I can substantiate this to some degree. I can also point out where its incorrect though.

A page that barely moved (4 to 6 on the primary phrase, 7 to 10 on the secondary) alternated textual links quite a bit.

Pages that moved the most are ones that did not vary anchor text very often (usually only links were internal links).

But I also have other pages where I took time to vary anchor text and they dropped too (text links of course) though probably not to the same degree.

It's still a hokey way to "penalize" a phrase though. As its very open to bombing a site out of google on a specific keyword if you wanted.


EDIT:
Something else I've been thinking is that google has been able to spider javascript and 302 redirects better now (or other types of links) so those big companies that run doubleclick ads all over the place are getting "credit" for those links too and that's why they are rising up.

 

My oldest site ranked #1 on google and in the top 3 for yahoo for a long time for a competitive keyword. When I first started eight years ago I didn't know anything about SEO, and my link exchanges, DMOZ listing, etc. focused primarly on one keyword (which best describes what we sell). I was killed in jagger. By looking at the sites that now rank in the top 10, they have an even less amount of inanchor links, but they have varied them to related keywords. I believe that when google gets to a certain point of the same exact descriptions, they ignore the rest. I don't know if that number is 5, 10, 20, or 50.

When Larry Page first came up with Page Rank, the idea behind it was a link to your site was a "vote" and made it more relevant for SERP's. IF google wants to combat "unnatural" links, it only makes sense that if someone is going to write about your site, they aren't going to describe it the SAME exact way every single time. Give 100 people the task of describing any one site in a few sentances and no two people are likely to describe it exactly the same. Let's face it, most links aren't "natural", but by doing things like 3-way links, and varying descriptions is has to make it a lot harder for robot to make a connection when you are talking about billions of pages. Exact matches are as easy to detect as duplicate content - vary the content and it makes it much harder.

 

If you are even close to correct, a ton of links saying "click here" as the anchor text is the way to go. LOL "click here" is probably the most common 2 word phrase online (except for free porn or something).

 

Please give examples of a "text link" and an alternative link.

Thank you,
Caryl

 

guys your driving yoursel;f nuts... Look I have test sites up, and there is no pattern. Google admit to 100 elements on a base 5 sliding log scale giving over 2 BILLION combinations to their algorithm.

Wait for the birds to land, and then try to figure out how many there are

 

Ask Adobe inc

 

Exactly! 2.3 billion pages with "click here" (next to each other) can't be wrong. I might actually give it a shot and see what happens LOL ("free porn" only has 5.8 million - amazing).

 

Sorry, I am talking about co-op type, allinanchor links. widgets.

vs. Beautiful Widgets If you're looking for widgets that are beautiful. (with description).

As my co-op links ran in "other" they tended to display on pages that had nothing to do with widgets and were unlikely to contain any text on the page that mentioned "widgets". These links were also not likely to be static, as even the "static" feature only lasts for a period of a few weeks. (and yes, I know the co-op wasn't "designed" for rankings, but rather advertising.)

 

Ok, maybe a little off track, but I have seen several references to inanchor vs allinanchor lately.

What's the difference?

 

That's what I am also thinking. It seems that sites with a lot of off-topic links (both incoming AND outgoing) got hit hard, while sites with links to/from related sites were okay.

Just my observations..

 

I would guess that the age of your links is counting as a big factor. None of my 3 biggest sites are anywhere to be found in Google since the update.

On one site, my backlinks have been cut in half. It says in Google's patent agreement that links are scored for freshness and decay at an undefined rate once the bot has found them.

All my site's that have disappeared were being held up by old links, so I'm quite sure that is a part of what has changed.

 

I think that after all the research I've done, posts I've read and opinions I've heard that I subscribe to this theory. Ever lost your homework or had the dog tear it apart..? Well if that homework assignment included recalibrating 8 billion websites for umpteen relevancy factors and your data was either lost, corrupted or just not processed yet I think the analogy might be similar to what G's situation is now and it's ripped the SERPs apart. Nothing about this update seems intentional except that it happened... Until it's settled the eagle hasn't landed and the speculation abounds. jmho///
It'll happen. My hope is... sooner... than later...