Google Update as of Oct2005
Google has updated their ranking formula and PageRank this past week and what a topsy-turvy mess it has been! I’ve heard many stories from amateur webmasters to professional SEO’s about how their previously glorious ranking dove in the SERPs. I’ve heard some speculate that Google was no longer ranking sites that used AdWords and others speculate that services like LinksManager were the cause for their demise. I myself took a dip on a few previously strong phrases since this past weekend, which is especially disturbing to me, but I’m pretty sure that it was NOT related to the recent full moon we just had or the wrong butterfly flapping it’s wings over the ocean.
Normally I do well for various keyphrases across the engines and I’ve managed to build myself a reputation amongst a growing number of successful clients and a few fans (where do they keep the SEO groupies?). It immediately occured to me that the clients of mine that were hardest hit were recent victims of a particularly long server crash. I’ve never had this kind of problem before with my servers, but it happened shortly before the dip in rank. I know that downtime appears to the search engines that your site is gone, but this can’t be the entire problem. How do I explain the increase in nearly every site I touched to a PR4 or better? Surely something went right.
Some of the sites under my care that didn’t do so well have… well… bad HTML code. I know that one of the things that Google stiffened up on was the use of invisible text on pages and, in particular, the spammiest of invisible text as shown in Matt Cutts blog. But the ‘bad code’ sites I have under my control don’t use spammy code… just PHPNuke using multiple [html] tags. Well, it turns out this is a killer of pages also. Who would have guessed? In our defense on those pages, it was on the list after some functionality changes…. it just became #1 priority.
Needless to say, most of the bad rankings have turned out to be explained by some fairly common phenomena. I would like to see in about a week or two if these fixes that didn’t matter so much before, made the difference in SERP position or not after the most recent update. If the server crash was to blame for the poor SERP ranking, only time should repair that problem.
Summary: Who knows… not all of the data is in yet and not all of the ‘fixes’ have been made or had time to filter through. The obvious fixes according to Google, other engines, the W3C, and common sense say to validate your code and make good pages. Good pages have good code and great content. Even if this isn’t ‘THE’ answer for fixing Google SEO, it can’t hurt a website to fix your code and keep reliable servers. Jumping into radical changes can, itself, hurt your ranking.