Post-Jagger Optimization Tips
In an article title SEO For The New Google, Dave Davies writes about the latest 3-part Google update, nicknamed Jagger, that has essentially changed many of the rules and have thrown the SEO community for a loop. The key areas, he notes, that have been affected with this update are:
The History Of Your Web Pages
The longer your site or page has been online the better your chances of it ranking well. He recommends that in the beginning of a promotion you should optimize for less competitive secondary phrases that contain the primary phrase rather than an intensely competitive phrase. Excellent advice, we say!
The Way Backlinks Are Counted
- The sandbox for links means that new links will take longer to show an effect on your rankings
- Because of Latent Semantic Indexing, links to your site do not have to be from pages that match the exact keyword of your page, but can be from related industries
- Natural links have gained weight over unnatural links. Links that are contained within content areas of a page will be weighted more strongly.
- Avoid redundant anchor text so your link building efforts look more natural.
Site Content & Structure
- Keyword density is no longer important (no big surprise here). Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.
- Google no longer ranks pages but the entire site, opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page.
The article concludes with the recommendations here.
- Use clean tactics.
- Don’t spam. Google is better able to detect it, so its becoming less effective.
- Dedicate yourself to building a site with a lot of useful, relevant information and solid, natural links.
In other words, in the long term, it pays to play by the rules than break them.
November 17th, 2005 at 3:03 pm
Hi,
Jumped here while searching for some stuff on net.
Basically the things mentioned in the article are basic and are being implemented pre-jagger period also.
I have been keeping an eye on how google works on new sites or optimized sites.
Following points should be noted:
- Google has always given more importance to the sites which are older ones (thats what is happening for more than 7-8 months)
- Google always gives more importance to the sites which have less keywords in meta tags (sounds crap? it should..but give it a shot and see the results)
- Short titles helps more than having long titles with stuffed keywords
- When the site is in sanbox, it starts appearing from low searched keywords then, the site will jump for those keywords in 50s and then it will hop ahead with say 20+ listings up and then this process continues for quite sometime and then site comes on top
(obviosuly if properly optimized)
The only change in post-jagger I found was, change in the way google considers backlinks….
There is something now which is more important than backlinks and thats the only factor I am trying to understand…
My own company site…which had only 1 coming soon page for 1 year with no text at all..only image..is PR4…only 2 backlinks counted i.e. when PR was given…
2nd example would be recent site I have optimized for, site has PR3, quality links coming but still PR3 but inside page which is totally new has PR5 and that page was resources page..nothing else..
3rd example would be, the other site I had optimized..the site was again a single coming soon page for more than a year…I put up the site recently with very less keywords in meta tags and title strictly optimized for 1 or 2 keywords..
result - no sandbox…site is ranking well….
So moral of the story, shorter is better
Regards,
Deep
November 22nd, 2005 at 9:44 am
Thanks, Deep. Good tips