Google says it has made significant changes to the way in which their algo works to favour fresh content, which they say will affect 35% of searches. The official Google announcement says: 

We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

You can check out the entire article by clicking the link below and see how it’ll affect you.

Read “Giving you fresher, more recent search results” at Official Google Blog

I noticed a drop off in traffic from a three websites last Friday (14th October) and upon investigaing found the rankings for two of those websites had dropped a few places but remained on the first page of Google, but for a website I’m currently working on getting ranked in a highly competitive market it dropped from the third page to the 12th – a really big drop.Search Engine Roundtable is reporting a lot of frustrated webmasters at the moment, suggesting this was more than the minor update mentioned by Matt Cutts:

The thing is, the level of complaints and forum posts, as well as comments on my post, is at a level that seems to be more than “minor” by our standards.

I’m not too concerned as none of my major websites has been affected, and I’ve seen some improvement in rankings on other sites anyway. And anyway, it may be that Google will revise this update soon to downscale the number of website adversely affected. Whatever happens I’ll just have to keep adding good content and wait for an improvement, frustrating as that may be.

Read “How Large Was The Google Panda 2.5.2 ‘Minor’ Update?” at Search Engine Roundtable

I noticed yesterday that Google’s toolbar PR was showing a grey bar for all websites I visited. While it’s well known that Matt Cutts would be happy to kill toolbar PR, it appears that its death has been exagerated and it’s simply a matter of Google changing the URL used to access the data. Once tools like SEO for Firefox are updated we’ll get that info back.

UPDATE: It turns out Pagerank is not dead after all. Google has simply updated the URL which is used to query it, which has caused various toolbars and websites to stop reporting the number. Dave Naylor spotted the update and has subsequently updated his own tool, which is now once again reporting PR accurately. The original article was as follows…

Read “Google PageRank is NOT Dead” at WhatCulture!

Looks like Google’s new (ish) +1 button is being rolled out more widely with the news that it’s being added to AdSense. It’ll be interesting to see how much difference it makes.

Starting in October, the +1 button will begin to appear on display ads on your site. With a single click, people will now be able to endorse specific ads and make them more likely to appear to their social connections.  We believe that these recommendations could lead your readers to notice ads on your site more, leading to more clicks and higher returns for you over time.

Read “+1: Now making Display ads more relevant” on Inside AdSense

Matt Cutts has published an article about how Google intends to fight web spam going forward. The first thing he mentions is low quality sites; the second is “content farms”, which he defines as “sites with shallow or low-quality content”. According to Cutts:

As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.

Read “Google search and search engine spam” on the Official Google Blog

Yesterday Google added starred results at the top of the page. And today – in Firefox for me at least – gone is the light blue bar under the search box and in comes a sidebar that doesn’t appear to switch off.

Do I like it?

Not much; but I’ll probably get used to it and it may be a test that doesn’t get rolled out widely anyway.

The results speak for themselves, but check out the organic traffic from Google on this site. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it is a personal hobby niche and I’ve gone in pretty deep since April/May 2004. One of the keys to its success is the number of natural backlinks it has received.

If you ‘d like to me to help your website gain results like these then please get in contact – just leave a message below.

I’m most of the way through Stompernet’s latest video, the first of their Going Natural 3.0 series and blown away. Presenting the story of how Brad Fallon’s multi-million dollar business was blown away when it was dropped from Google’s organic listings and how Dan Thies headed up new research into AdWords to save that business from certain catastrophe, this is a really fresh look at how the AdWords game has changed and what to do in 2008.

One of the tools mentioned – in fact the only tool so far – is Microsoft’s Commercial Intent tool, which has yielded some surprising tools for one of my niches.

In fact, I’m going to see what happens if I use it to screen keywords in the Thirty Day Challenge/Immediate Edge niche research stage, as it may help identify really strong keywords that are off the radar at the moment.

Anyway, go and watch the video, if you’re doing PPC then you won’t regret it.