The last few weeks,
I swear over half the posts across Webmaster World have been in
the neighborhood of "Google sucks after the 'Florida' update".
Is that true? Well, I did some research, and found a very interesting
trend. Let's look at some of the different page categories and
compare before vs. after 'Florida'.
Before 'Florida', these sites usually had very high page rankings.
They were all fighting about the top SERPs. Many were tweaked
and tweaked to acheive the ultimate SE (in this case meaning 'Google')
ranking. These pages ranked well on other search engines as well.
After 'Florida', however, these sites took a dive on Google.
Now, the interesting thing is that they still rank well on most
non-Google powered SEs!
What does that tell us? Is Google penalizing SEO? I wouldn't
say that. It looks, however, like highly optimized sites, sites
targetting Google's algo, no longer benefit from that. In other
words, sites optimized for Google seem to have lost their advantage.
To better understand this, let's take a look at the next category.
Category Two: Plain optimized sites
First, what's the difference between a 'highly optimized' and
just an 'optimized' site? Well, there are some basic steps to
optimization that should be involved in all site development,
such as proper use of headings, paragraphs, and other HTML elements
to properly mark up the content for what it is -- 'the right tool
for the right job'. Clean search engine friendly code.
Then, there are sites that go beyond this basic optimization,
sites that were tweaked against Google's algo. These are the highly
optimized sites, the ones that took a noticable dive post 'Florida'.
What does this tell us about the post 'Florida' Google, and about
Google's new algo? We come back to that after taking a look at
the last category.
Category Three: Non-optimized sites
Sites in this category are usually home brewed personal Web sites.
They are more often than not built using one of many WYSIWYG editors
out there. But, what sets these sites apart from the rest is their
purpose. Usually, whoever built them, had no intentions of getting
high rankings. Most likely he/she is not a professional, or has
a very limited user base, and would not benefit from SEO. These
sites were pretty much unaffected by the 'Florida' update, as
expected, and will therefore not be included in the further analyze.
Analyze: Trying to sort out the WHYs
Let us first look at a quick summary of the difference between
search engine results before and after 'Florida'.
Before 'Florida' Category One:
Ranks well on all search engines
Ranks extremely well on Google
Category Two:
Ranks well on non-Google search engines
Still ranks well on Google, but is not fighting about the top
SERPs for more general keywords
After 'Florida' Category One:
Ranks well on all search engines
Google results seem to be worse
Category Two:
Ranks well on all search engines
Google results seem to be better
What does this tell us? For some reason, there is no longer a
difference between one of those 'highly optimized' and a plain
'optimized' site -- they fight about the same SERPs, and are ranked
on the same level. What did Google change? Well, there has been
a lot of discussion on the board about whether you get penalized
for what your incoming links look like, or whether Google penalizes
you for this and that. Is that really it? Or is there more to
it?
Google's FR (Fair Ranking) Algo
Imagine that there never were any 'highly optimized sites', that
no sites were targetting Google more than other engines... Everyone
would just optimize their sites using basic techniques like proper
use of HTML elements, focus on content instead of keyword placement...
What would the SERPs look like? I believe, contrary to most people's
belief, that we would have had the same results we see today.
To be more frank and to the point -- I think there was a bug in
Google's algo before. Now, Google has yet again tweaked their
algo. Why? To return better and more accurate search results.
And that's why some sites appear to have taken a dive, or as some
would put it, why 'some sites have been penalized'. While that
may be true for some sites, if your site still appears in Google's
index at all, it is not penalized. Instead, it has lost its unfair
advantage over other sites.
Google has always proclaimed that to rank well, you should do
the following:
• mark up your HTML content using the HTML tags (headings,
paragraphs, etc) the way they were intended
• use clean code, not too markup heavy
• focus on content, content, and more content
• write for humans, not spiders
• use descriptive page titles, file names, and link texts
• if using dynamic pages, make sure they can be spidered
• focus on the content some more
For some reason, that seems to be more true today than yesterday.
Pages that do all of the above -- nothing more, nothing less --
rank well. They ranked well before 'Florida', and they still do.
And, they probably always will.
Is the competition gone? No, it's tighter than ever. But your
tweaking skills will no longer determine your ranking. Instead,
your content will.
