Both Google and Yahoo appear to be updating their listings at this time. Searchers and SEOs have reported major fluctuations in search engine results pages over the past two days.
The Google shuffle was confirmed by the recent backlink update, which saw some sites gain thousands of recognized links and others lose links. Whenever Google updates its backlink counts, a ranking update will almost certainly follow. Check out Google’s view of your site’s backlink counts by typing: link:www.yourdomain.com. The key to maintaining strong placement at Google is to focus link building efforts on establishing links between documents that are relevant to each other and useful for site visitors.
Yahoo doesn’t offer any obvious hints before an update but according to posts at various forums, a fairly significant shuffle is underway. Yahoo tends towards onsite factors such as titles, tags and content but it also evaluates relationships between content in linked documents.
Major updates to rankings are rare as the search engines subtly stir their rankings from day to day. These updates don’t appear to be earth shattering but such updates can often point to changes in the ranking formulas used by the search engines.
Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel – 250-385-1190 Toll Free – 877-385-5526 Fax – 250-385-1198
