Google Changes the Rankings

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 25. February 2011 - 14:25

On 15-Feb-2011, Google has done some significant changes to their ranking algorithm.

In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

…

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time.

12% of the queries, that's 1 in 9 query is significantly affected. Google doesn't measure from the websites' point of view, but from the queries' point of view.

Why the Changes?

Because of me? In a very small part, yes! I wrote earlier, SEO: How To Cheat JC Penney Style. I wasn't the only one, it did hurt Google, it did hurt Google's pride, it did hurt Google's credibility. Is it the only reason? I don't think so, I'm sure that it had an effect on the time table and the speed of the changes.

What's a low quality sites according to Google?

  1. A website without “real” content
  2. A website with too many outgoing links (high link density), like a blog roll
  3. A website with pages dedicated to outgoing links (high link density), like a page dedicated to a blog roll
  4. A website with too many link exchanges

All of those are called link-farms by Google and are penalized.

What's a high quality sites according to Google?

  1. A website with many “how to”
  2. A website with some outgoing links and many incoming links that are part of text (low link density)
  3. Photos/graphics with the ALT text and the FILENAME that relates to the text of the web page
  4. A famous website like CNN, Wikipedia,…

Implications for the photography websites

  1. If you have a blog roll, do not make it a separate web page.
  2. If you have a blog roll, make sure that it's on a page with lots and lots of text.
  3. When showing your photos, make sure that they have an ALT text and a “good” filename. AD54321.jpg is not a good name but new-york-54321.jpg is a good name if you have text that relates to New York.

The last major change of Google's ranking algorithm was 3 years ago. Many people lost their web businesses, especially many web jewelery stores got penalized… It will take a few month until the dust settles.