Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Something very subtle was changed in Google's algo overnight.
The balance between on page and off page factors and the quality of those off page factors changed.
First a bit of background so that you know where I am coming from, I’m using a page and SERP of mine that I watch very closely to illustrate what I think happened.
I have a page which was at #1 for the most important two word term in my niche for a couple of years prior to the Florida update. It then disappeared for 3 months and came back to #1 in February 2003 (from memory) and has stuck there until BD started to kick in. The page dropped to #3 with two pages from a competitor appearing above. I think that I have worked out why this happened.
Then this morning 4/12/2006 another competitor has appeared as if from nowhere and has pushed me down to #4.
I think that Florida was primarily focused on on page factors, word stems and symantics. Google implemented a solution which was able to factor in symantics and stems into its algorithm and did so. In effect this was a new additional factor involved in ranking pages. It made on page factors more important and since these are in direct control of the webmaster it is relatively easy to play the game and make your pages fit what Google wants. Out links to relevant pages with the target keywords as anchor text also became more important.
What happened last night is all about off page factors.
In my opinion and in very simple terms previously Google appeared to weigh back links from major sites such as DMOZ, its own directory and on topic pages higher than those from lesser and off topic sites and pages. This meant that if you were listed in a relevant section of DMOZ and on some relevant quality pages you had the core of your back link strategy sorted. Quality was somewhat more important than quantity. I’m not saying that quantity is unimportant and I do understand how Pagerank works I’m just trying to keep things simple to illustrate what I think happened.
The page that slotted in above mine last night has almost 500 links from none relevant archive pages of a small regional UK newspaper and a few from general directories that are vaguely associated with our industry. The regional newspaper uses static html pages for its archive. The link which appears on these pages is in a block of 24 others and has the search term as its visible link text. None of the sample of archive pages that I viewed were in any way relevant to the page linked to.
It seems to me that the balance in importance between quality and quantity of back links has changed. If this is not switched back the example I’ve detailed above illustrates I can buy my rank rather than having to earn it.
Am I off my trolley or do others agree with this assessment?
Best wishes
Sid
Your comment: "It's as if the semantic and content-related factors are dialed down and the mechanics are dialed up -- if that makes any sense." brings up something I've noticed.
I have a page geared towards "industry specific definitions", it's usually in the top 5 of 69M results. That same page, if a search was done for "industry specific glossary" would show up between 10-20 of 35M results. The word glossary is not mentioned nor are any inbound links using it.
Quite recently, without having made any content changes, a search for "industry specific glossary" puts that page in the 40s. It's certainly not proof of semantic knob twisting, but I find it interesting.
