Google's Honeymoon With The Media May Be Coming To An End

When Google first appeared on the scene its relevant results and word of mouth advertising quickly propelled the search engine the top of the search engine heap. The media caught on to this as well and the gushing stories about Google solidified its position.

A couple of years ago - when Google implemented its infamous "Florida" update - many in the SEO industry began noticing that search results were not as relevant as they used to be and since then this has been a topic for discussion in most SEO forums. Those of us who have an interest in search engines have our own experiences with Google providing irrelevant results to our searches and we have heard the same complaint from friends and relatives who have no connection to SEO as well.

The media has until now continued to speak of Google and their search results in positive terms but tonight I saw my first evidence that the media too may becoming aware of some of Google's relevancy problems. Tonight on Canada's CBC Network on their national Sunday News program there was a piece about doing research for Canada's John Macrae and his poem "In Flanders Fields". It seems that in Google's top 10 results they found an anti-immigration site - which led to a warning to parents to be aware that their children should not rely on Google to research Homework assignments.

This is quite a change as Google usually enjoys bubbling media comments recommending it as the place to find whatever a person wants.

How does this affect real estate websites? I think it means Google's popularity has probably peaked and that other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN are going to increase in popularity. If up untill now you have been thinking of Google as being the only search engine that mattered - it is time to pay more attention to making sure your real estate website has good visibility in the other major search engines as well.

Google's "Jagger" Update

Google is once again in the middle of a major update - this one has been dubbed "Jagger" and the good folks at Google have been kind enough to tell us that Jagger is actually being rolled out in 3 parts. As of this writing, we are still waiting for the completion of Jagger2.

This update did not just begin - the changes some are seeing now have been happening for several weeks now as Google has been incorporating new backlink and PR updates into the indexes. The update was just recently given a name but probably has been underway for many weeks.

So far, both Jagger1 and Jagger2 seemed to be primarily about how links are evaluated. Real estate sites that participate in link exchanges where identical pages of links are exchanged among a group of websites have suffered. The value Google places on different links probably has changed too to which has caused some sites to go up and others to go down.

Duplicate content (anytime Google sees the same content on more than one web page in its index)and improper redirections (not using a 301 redirect) have been an ongoing issue with Google and with this upddate more sites seem to be hit with penalties because of this.

It will be at least another week until Jagger is finished and it is best to wait until it is all over before evaluating how your site is affected. However, here are a few recommendations.... if you do participate in any link schemes where the same block of links are exchanged between participants I think you can safely discontinue that. If you have a template site where your provider links your site with other sites they produce - you can bet Google and Yahoo have you in their sites if you are not already penalized for this. If you have pointer sites that are redirected to your primary website using the redirection service offered by your domain registrar - you should be aware that usually these are not 301 redirects - the only safe redirect to use these days. Make sure that you always use the same url when linking - either http://www or http:// - if you interchange the two Google picks up on this and often thinks you have duplicate content and penalizes.

None of this is new really - it has been going on for a long time. Google just seems to be tightening the screws more with each update.