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Friday, July 13, 2012

Google's current ranking algorithm update

You have probably noticed that Google is currently updating its ranking algorithm. This seems to be a major update because many webmasters have seen big changes in their rankings.

The PageRank of www.MSN.com dropped to PR2 in this latest update so there really seem to be some big changes in the new algorithm.

Google engineer Matt Cutts more or less declines that this is a big update in his blog:

"These days rather than having a large monolithic update, Google tends to have smaller (and more frequent) individual launches.

My point is that more than ever, we are constantly working to improve our algorithms and scoring. Some changes are hardly noticed at all. Some changes (e.g. user interface improvements) are more visible. Some changes have nothing to do with spam .Some changes do try to decrease spam or increase core quality.

And again, these PageRanks and backlinks have already been incorporated into scoring a while back (Google updates PageRank continually and continuously), but some people just love to look at PageRanks.)"

What has changed with this update?

Only Google's engineers know exactly what has been changed with this update. However, it seems that some factors seem to be important in this update:

Hidden text spam seems to be more penalized. While most search engines consider white text on white background spamming, it seems that Google now also recognizes text that is hidden in invisible CSS layers.

Links from automated link exchanges and text link advertising systems seem to count less.

As with every algorithm update, Google tries to remove the spam from its database with this update.

What should you do now?

First of all, don't panic. If your web site rankings have dropped, wait another week to make sure that the index update is over. If your web site is still not listed, take a look at what you might have done wrong.

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