Is Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacting Your Site?

Is Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacting Your Site?

April 11th, 2007


Well Google is updating their algorithm again and it’s wreaking havoc for a number of entrepreneurs who rely on their web rankings to get business.

To “improve” their search engine, Google is taking the first set of results for a keyword and testing them against a number of different ranking measures. If your site is in the first set then you may see the yo-yo effect of the term being at the top of the page and then at the bottom only hours later. If your site is not in the first set then you probably are not seeing any difference… yet.

If after the re-ranking your site score better than before you will rise to the top and if it scores worse you will drop off. It will likely take a couple of weeks to settle down so expect the bouncing around to continue.

Google is also sending a lot more pages to their supplemental index. If your page gets put into supplemental you will lose all but all of your traffic to the page. I have 15,000 pages on my site to monitor so it’s hard to keep up on all of them but it also allows for tweaking and testing without damaging the whole site.

What I have found is that some of the pages that went to supplemental were very keyword rich. I used to rank on the first page for these pages and suddenly dropped off the index. By lowering the keyword density of the test pages they were back to page one within a couple of weeks. We are now applying this keyword density lowering strategy to the rest of my pages.

If you have noticed a drop in your rankings and traffic recently, try changing the keyword density around and submit a new sitemap to Google to let them know about the changes. If your rankings are jumping around from day to day, hang in there - the update will settle down in short order.

Evan Carmichael