The Jagger Update by Google

Here we go, another Google update, and this one was named Jagger by the Webmasterworld folks. Webmasters and SEO’s were waiting more for a bug fixes type of improvement, not a real update. As a reminder 302 hijacks, supplemental results, non-canonical URL’s have ongoing issues considered to be fixed by a number of folks, probably including Google engineers.
Basically rankings went up and down for the past 4 weeks or so and were coupled with an index size increase and some user interface experiments.
Matt Cutts, engineer at Google provides us with some update about the new situation users will face in the next few days/weeks on his blog. Matt explains that a new set of backlinks will be displayed soon, eventually along with a new page rank update. Three months passed by since the last PR change so we can assume that change is going to happen within a week or two.

Googleguy, who is sort of a PR for the major search engine appears from time to time on Webmasterworld and supplies a weather report to a very anxious community at webmasterworld. According to him a new binary was spread out across datacenters a couple of days ago but current rankings should not be considered as final. As with any update, websites drop or rise, some are satisfied others are depressed a good marketing plan should not rely solely on one search engine results though.

It is still a bit early to comment on new changes and determine if we are talking about improvement or not. So far, probably not much improvement can be found, given the results returned by a few dozens of test queries. A significant number of websites aren’t really legitimate where they are ranked right now, but Google probably holds on a few surprises soon to come on its SERP.

If this Jagger update would be at its final stage now, the following are my 2 (and likely too) early observations:

• Websites out of the sandbox by the June update are sandboxed again, from observation, especially if they do not benefit from natural links from at least one authority site. For more information on authority sites and the Hilltop algorithm, we believe that it is still the very core of this engine’s calculations, please visit ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/reports/csri/405/hilltop.html . The sandbox is currently approximately of 6 to 12 months counting from the date of first inception of a webpage/domain. The current results would penalize sites younger than 18 months or so.
• Un-natural link patterns are penalized. This observation isn’t new at all; obviously a website gathering lots of incoming links without any outgoing links at all could trigger a filter. This kind of filter is placed in order to penalize primarily text links buyers, Stepmiles has always refused buying text links for that reason and because it is way too expensive for no direct traffic. Let’s say that it is part of what makes us ‘Ethical’. Self promotion ends here 🙂 . In other words, a valuable website gathers valuable incoming links and distributes also high value outgoing links, this is the whole concept of neighborhood of a site implemented in a previous update.
• Sites wiped out in June 05 would make a glorious come back, while their link popularity often doesn’t stand out in front of the competition, it might be an aging (as mentioned above) or domain registration issue. Not to forget that Google may not have entirely integrated its domain registrar’s information but we have very good evidences that it’s on the way.
• Credit to incoming links coming only from the internal linking given by the June update seems to be completely eradicated from the new algorithm.
• Some hyphenated domain names (welcome to the branding world!) including keywords as well as some sites obviously benefiting from automatic link schemes are surprisingly given back some credit. It’s a surprise because these are the first signs of spam and poor content quality – not talking about writings like mine, english isn’t my mother tongue.

We will keep the rest of our observations for ourselves, not for the pleasure to do so but simply because this Jagger update is currently going on and what is true today could be wrong tomorrow. Keep the heads up for next postings and remember, most of the time quality content will keep you out of trouble!
Also, even if the Googleguy is sometimes using very confusing terms, he also said in his latest appearance. Just don’t assume the sky is falling from first impressions, therefore it gives hope to some online business owners and webmasters who while reading a few threads on specialized forums were even more upset than usual with this Jagger hurricane. It just started, hopefully and some irrelevant SERP might have been anticipated.
We will keep you posted later on…

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