Google Rumors. Dan Thies wants to stop some dangerous Google rumors. Read his feature article here.
New Google Backlink Update. Monday morning when I came in to work I saw this RLRouse headline in WebProWorld: “Another Google update has begun…”
I immediately began scouring forums and calling experts to find out more information.
Getting the Story First I called Google-hawk Daniel Brandt, who noted that some of his Scroogle pages have pagerank now for the first time. He also mentioned a way to see how the page ranks have changed if you look in different datacenters. He’s heard of some people with more backlinks now, and some with less.
It could be a week or more before these changes show up on the main Google search page, according to WebProWorld member rlrouse.
For a full and too-techie-for-me description of how to check updates on backlinks and pagerank, look at RLRouse’s datacenter post.
Google Datacenters Down. Mr. Brandt pointed me to SEOChat, where I found some welcoming and informed folks and a post entitled “What’s up: -gv and -va OFFLINE, Update coming?” I learned that when an update’s coming Google usually takes down some datacenters. At the time of the post, the www-gv.google.com and www-va.google.com datacenters were down.
There’s some speculation that this update may further diminish the value of crosslinking.
Digging Deeper. During my conversation with Jim Hedger of Stepforth I learned that Google updates its backlinks monthly. What’s significant about this update is that it’s happening early.
The earliness, according to Jim, is significant for two reasons. For one it shows that Google’s still trying to recover relevance from the Florida update (remember, they have to do all of their testing in real time). Secondly, there could be more to the update than backlinks.
The reason this is NOT a major update like the Florida update is that, according to Jim, Google’s still evaluating what they learned. “They’re in tremendous competition with Yahoo!, and Microsoft’s coming up behind them. There’s no way they’re going to dump what they’ve learned in the last two months.”
I asked Jim when we could expect to see the results fully in place. “Next week will be when we see what the changes really are. Watch next week. The analysis of the update we see next week will show us how brilliant the SEO industry is.”
By SEO industry I’m sure he meant Stepforth. He promised to call me when he’s got some solid update analysis.
Keep checking the Google Backlink Update forum in WebProWorld. I’ll post there when I learn more.
Further Reading: Great Glossary of SEM (search engine marketing) terms from the SEMPO (search engine marketing professional organization) site. http://www.sempo.org/search-engine-marketing-glossary.php
Best Wishes,
Garrett French + The murdok Team
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
