By : Admin

Recently, those (SEO community etc.) who keep a constant vigil on the Google rankings have noticed fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm. According to this shift or change many sites that were lying behind somewhere on page 6 or so got indexed in top 3 and those who were in the top three were thrown back on page 4 or 5 at the same time. Everybody is so perplexed about this phenomenon. I am going to entail a few reasons for this. This update seems to have revolved around basically these three main areas: domain age, backlinks and PageRank. Let us now understand the effect of these areas on the Google ranking!

Domain Age: It appears that Google is presently giving a lot of weight to the age of a domain, disproportionately in the opinion of SEO’s. The age should and generally has only had a very small influence on a site’s ranking. This appears to have changed in the recent update with age holding a disproportionate weight. In a number of instances this has resulted in older, less qualified domains to rank higher than newer sites of higher quality. While the age of a domain can definitely be used as a factor in determining how solid a company or site is, there are many newer sites that provide some great information and innovative ideas. Unfortunately, a lot of these sites got spanked in the last update.

Backlinks: The way that backlinks are being calculated and valued has seen some adjustments in the latest update as well. The way backlinks are being valued appears to have lost some grasp on relevancy and have placed more importance on sheer numbers. Sites with large, unfocused reciprocal link directories are outranking sites with fewer but more relevant links. In the current environment, building a reasonably sized site with a large reciprocal link directory, even unfocused should be enough to get you ranking. For obvious reasons this cannot stand indefinitely.

PageRank: On the positive side of the equation, PageRank appears to have lost some of its importance including the importance of PageRank as it pertains to the value of a backlinks. PageRank means little in terms of a site’s importance however, it did serve a purpose. PageRank would be or is being replaced by TrustRank. It seems that Google have shifted the weight from PageRank to TrustRank to some degree and is sorting out the issues with their TrustRank calculations. With this shift reducing the importance of PageRank the issues that face the TrustRank calculations may well is becoming more evident.

However, to conclude, more of the adjustments to this algorithm are necessary and in regards to PageRank, Google will likely shift back slightly to what worked and give more importance to PageRank. Moreover, if you’ve used solid SEO practices and been consistent and varied in your link building tactics, keep at it and your rankings will return, certainly!

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