Google and Jagger’s Aftermath

tags, CSS, or
comments, can negatively affect your rankings. (This is something
you should never do).

• Footer Links – Some say links in the footer are disregarded now.
(This is one we have found no evidence for).

• Directory Links - Links from directories are weighted less now.
(This is one we have found no evidence for, but is most likely true
or will be soon)

• Decreased Rate of Link Building - The speed and volume of inbound
link creation to your site from other websites, if changed, can
negatively affect your rankings more so now. (This one is most
likely true too).

• Reciprocal Links - Reciprocal link trades are worth less then they
were before or are worth nothing now. (It's probably true that they
are at least worth less now).

• Linking to Bad Neighborhoods - Reciprocal link trades hurt your
rankings when you link to sites that are considered 'bad
neighborhoods' by Google, such as link farms or sites that are
banned by Google. (This is most likely true and has been for a
while).

• Link Schemes - Participating in link schemes such as Co-ops or
Link Vault can hurt your ranking more than help them. (I have not
found any evidence of this so far for my client's sites, but this
could be true).

Again, I don't think anyone outside Google knows which of these
factors above are true or false, and how each one affects a given
keyword phrase's ranking. In fact, that's the idea. Google doesn't
want people 'gaming' their system. There are so many variables that
need to be considered that it is very difficult to figure out which
ones affect what.

*** So, what do you do now if your site's ranking have dropped since
Jagger? ***

If your site was ranking well in the Google SERP's (search engine
ranking position) before Jagger, then it was nowhere to be found
right after Jagger hit, and now your site has still not bounced back
at all, then you probably tripped a filter, got penalized or even
banned. You may have duplicate content on another site, or someone
copied a lot of your content, or you may have canonical issue (where
yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com are considered two different sites
by Google causing it to look like duplicate content). You may have
hidden text, or keyword stuffed your pages or any number of other
things. You're definitely going to need more knowledge than this
article can give you to get your rankings back.

Some say that Google updates have happened before around the same
time of year, and many sites that tanked came back after the first
of the year. I don't know if this is true, we'll just have to wait
and see. For those who have still not rebounded, this may be nice to
know.

Interestingly, most of our clients' sites either stayed the same or
improved after Jagger. Our own company site improved. But
unfortunately, a few of our other clients saw some decreases in
their rankings right after Jagger, and have since rebounded, but not
at quite the same pre-Jagger levels. Here's what we did for them:

• Scoured their site for bad outgoing links and made sure that each
site they linked to was indexed by Google and was not trying to game
Google. Any questionable links were deleted immediately. But we did
not get rid of all our link partners, we just culled.

• Determined the ratio of the different types of incoming links to
learn where improvements were needed. In other words, we determined
the percentage of links to their site that were link trades, one-way
links from related sites, one-ways from unrelated sites, link
advertisements, directory links, forum signature links and more. We
then advised them to increase their one-way related inbound links
that are embedded in sentences, and not concentrate so much on link
trades and stop getting one-way unrelated link development
altogether.

• Cleaned up the HTML on every page, made sure all tags were closed
and that there was no extraneous code on any page. And we put CSS
and JavaScript's in separate files.

• Took out any inadvertent hidden text. One client had keywords in
comment tags in their HTML that we deleted.

• Decreased file size of pages, by taking out old links and
superfluous verbiage, and by re-optimizing the .gif's and .jpg's.

• Wrote much more succinct Meta descriptions and on-page verbiage.

• Made sure that every title tag on every page within the site was
different.

• Coached them about the importance of continually developing good,
quality, original content.

• Brainstormed ways in which their sites could entice other
webmasters to link to them because of what their site offers, such
as good content, free Web tools, articles and many other things.
This is called natural linking and what Google regards as the only
legitimate way to build links. Therefore, this is vital.

We tried to look at the overall link development strategy, the value
of their site, and the quality of the site, both the content quality
and the html quality. A clean, simple, fast-loading site with
natural links pointing to it from a variety of other related
websites, some .org's and .edu's, others from trusted authority
sites, and many from small related websites, that adds fresh and
unique content daily, will rank well in Google over time and won't
be affected by any update, including Jagger.

The best way for you to learn what to do in Jagger's aftermath is to
read articles like this, participate in forums that discuss these
topics, and most importantly, by experimenting with your own sites
to see what works. This takes time and patience. So does building
quality sites that have things to offer and that subsequently get
natural links. But it's all worth it.

Jason OConnor is president of Oak Web Works, LLC
http://www.OakWebWorks.com, a full-service Web firm.