| Have you noticed anything different with Google lately? The Webmaster community certainly has, and if recent talk on several search engine optimization (SEO) forums is an indicator, Webmasters are very frustrated. For approximately two years Google has introduced a series of algorithm and filter changes that have led to unpredictable search engine results, and many clean (non-spam) websites have been dropped from the rankings. Google updates used to be monthly, and then quarterly. Now with so many servers, there seems to be several different search engine results rolling through the servers at any time during a quarter. Part of this is the recent Big Daddy update, which is a Google infrastructure update as much as an algorithm update. We believe Big Daddy is using a 64 bit architecture. Pages seem to go from a first page ranking to a spot on the 100th page, or worse yet to the Supplemental index. Google algorithm changes started in November 2003 with the Florida update, which now ranks as a legendary event in the Webmaster community. Then came updates named Austin, Brandy, Bourbon, and Jagger. Now we are dealing with the BigDaddy!
The algorithm problems seem to fall into 4 categories. There are canonical issues, duplicate content issues, the Sandbox, and supplemental page issues.
1. Canonical Issues: These occur when a search engine treats www.yoursgoogleincome.com, and yourdomain.com/index.html all as different websites. When Google does this, it then flags the different copies as duplicate content and penalizes them. Also, if the site not penalized is http://yourdomain.com, but all of the websites link to your website using www.yourdomain.com, then the version left in the index will have no ranking. These are basic issues that other major search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN, have no problem dealing with. Google is possibly the greatest search engine in the world (ranking themselves as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10). They provide tremendous results for a wide range of topics, and yet they cannot get some basic indexing issues resolved.
2. The Sandbox: This has become one of the legends of the search engine world. It appears that websites, or links to them, are "sandboxed" for a period before they are given full rank in the index, kind of like a maturing time. Some even think it is only applied to a set of competitive keywords, because they were the ones being manipulated the most. The Sandbox existence is debated, and Google has never officially confirmed it. The hypothesis behind the Sandbox is that Google knows that someone cannot create a 100,000 page website overnight, so they have implemented a type of time penalty for new links and sites before fully making the index.
3. Duplicate Content Issues: These have become a major issue on the Internet. Because web pages drive search engine rankings, black hat SEOs (search engine optimizers) started duplicating entire sites' content under their own domain name, thereby instantly producing a ton of web pages (an example of this would be to download an Encyclopedia onto your website). As a result of this abuse, Google aggressively attacked duplicate content abusers with their algorithm updates. But in the process they knocked out many legitimate sites as collateral damage. One example occurs when someone scrapes your website. Google sees both sites and may determine the legitimate one to be the duplicate. About the only thing a Webmaster can do is track down these sites as they are scraped, and submit a spam report to Google. Another big issue with duplicate content is that there are a lot of legitimate uses of duplicate content. News feeds are the most obvious example. A news story is covered by many websites because it is content the viewers want. Any filter will inevitably catch some legitimate uses.
4. Supplemental Page Issues: Webmasters fondly refer to this as Supplemental Hell. This issue has been reported on places like WebmasterWorld for over a year, but a major shake up around February 23rd has led to a huge outcry from the Webmaster community. This recent shakeup was part of the ongoing BigDaddy rollout that should finish this month. This issue is still unclear, but here is what we know. Google has 2 indexes: the Main index that you get when you search, and the Supplemental index that contains pages that are old, no longer active, have received errors, etc. The Supplemental index is a type of graveyard where web pages go when they are no longer deemed active. No one disputes the need for a Supplemental index. The problem, though, is that active, recent, and clean pages have been showing up in the Supplemental index. Like a dungeon, once they go in, they rarely come out. This issue has been reported with a low noise level for over a year, but the recent February upset has led to a lot of discussion around it. There is not a lot we know about this issue, and no one can seem to find a common cause leading to it. |
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