Google updates with Jagger

It is called Jagger and is the last updating of search criteria and algorithms of the popular search engine. Exactly as they do with hurricanes, Americans love to name search criteria updates, which Google performs on its engine twice or trice a year causing the sudden rise of some sites and the ruinous fall of others. We hazard a forecast for the novelties brought by the new algorithms on the basis of information spreading in the world of web marketing, and review some already present.

TrustRank

The notorious 'PageRank' has its days numbered. Indeed, until a short while ago, Google used to assign a very high value to sites with numerous external links (Page Rank). Yet, this set off the creation of deceitful sites and portals with the only purpose to accumulate reciprocal links in order to artfully increase the rank. With Jagger, these sites will be automatically “pointed out” to a human operator who will communicate his own judgment to the engine. The engine will “learn”, on the basis of human suggestion, how to behave afterwards in similar situations. Therefore, artful creation of reciprocal links will be very risky from now on and Page Rank will be gradually replaced by Trust Rank.

Hosting geographical location

Some observers noticed that those sites which are hosted on USA servers are given more importance. Some are even moving servers. I have some doubts about it. But we’ll see.

Damaged home pages

Within the same search, it seems that internal site pages are favoured with respect to upper ones, totally twisting one of the basic concepts valid in the last years: short URL. The explication may look logical, since favouring internal pages means favouring a vertical search within sites, thanks to the information quantity they contain.

Sudden increase of page number

This is no big news, but a few users noticed Google’s aversion to sudden appearance of many pages on a site. Should you need to revive old pages, make it by degrees.

Links to the same page

Be careful not to have many external links pointing to one single page of your site. This can be penalized as probable agreement and not spontaneous interest of your users to the content.

Authority Sites

Well, even Google has its favourite sites. The Authority sites are sites which the engine regards as a reference and have been introduced by Austin update. There are various parameters to determine an Authority site. The most important are the following: a wide informative content, many external links to various internal pages, link pointing to different pages of the same site and, above all, links to the sites from competitors. This last condition appears to be the most important.

Duplicated contents

The existence of duplicated pages will keep being penalized. On the contrary, it seems there is no problem with translated contents. Maybe the same information in different languages is regarded as different content.