What changes did webmasters notice in Google’s search results?

Not all webmasters noticed the same changes. Here’s an overview of what has been reported:

• Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google’s index early March.
• It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
• Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
• The Cache data doesn’t seem to be updated.
• The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.

Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.

Is this really a ranking algorithm update?

Google engineer Matt Cutts denied that there are any major changes in the search results and that there was a ranking algorithm update on the way.

However, he wanted to investigate if and why the results change so much.

The observations of the webmasters in the forum might be normal changes that happen all the time. But the webmasters who discovered the changes are very web-savvy and they should be able to distinguish an anomaly from usual fluctuations.

What does this mean to your Google rankings?

It has yet to turn out whether this really is a ranking algorithm or not. If your rankings haven’t changed yet, there’s no need to act. The whole thing might just be a temporary hiccup.

Keep optimizing your site and provide quality content to maximize SEO to make money online.

In the New Year, Google seems to be changing their algorithm and making the search results more time related. The leading search engine has been ranking items from popular sites like Digg higher than factual or historical sites like Wikipedia. Is this a move towards a Web 3.0? In other news, Kara Ratliff reports that Yahoo’s Chief Performance Expert, Steve Souders plans on joining the Google team on January 7th, 2008. For more details, keep visiting http://CashTheWeb.com

Here’s a hint: Do a bit of research on those press/news distribution sites and blog providers that currently have high PageRank from Google. Then focus your efforts on those. You’ll find that your additional content not only ranks highly, but shows up relatively quickly (usually within a day or 2, if not a few hours). Take about a month just to focus on creating additional content that can be mass-distributed to major sites like YouTube and Digg. Content that can be shared becomes viral marketing, and will do you much better than a few static websites in the end!

Cheers to Google!