Google Update Bourbon
The Bourbon update started around May 20th, 2005, and 10 days later has yet to settle down. This officially makes it the second longest update since Florida which lasted almost 20 days.What has Bourbon filter/algo adjustment gone after? So far it looks like:
- Non-thematic Linking
- Duplicate Content*
- Fraternal Linking
- Run of Site Links
- Low Quality Reciprocal Links
* Google Bourbon seems to have screwed up their duplicate content detector, and there are many examples of Google assigning "authority" to the duplicate page, and restricting the original page to the "similar results" filter.
The victims of the Bourbon Update are in panic mode - some hypothesize that Google misidentified their site as a "scraper site" due to their AdSense placement and penalized it; others are going as far as to speculate (incorrectly) that Google is somehow detecting their AdSense ads on scraper sites, and considering them to be links from "bad neighborhoods", which is patently incorrect, as none of the search engine bots will actually trigger the JavaScript that loads the ads.
However, upon viewing a few of the sites filtered by Bourbon, they have a number of things in common - basically 2 or more of the factors listed above.
Lesson to be learned? Don't reciprocal link with any old site - viagra-casino-porn.biz is not a good link exchange partner for a florist's website.
Think like Google - what "signals of quality" does your site have? How can you increase and expand those signals? What can they do to automatically detect both quality and low-quality signals.
Google is trying to present their users with the best search results - concentrate on what criteria, apart from the basic on-page factors, they are using to judge the quality of a given page. Google wants quality results - if your site isn't ranking well in the post-update aftermath of Bourbon, reassess your strategy and look into what factors Google's algo might use to rank sites now, and in the future.
5 Comments:
Hey, you're #3 in Google on "google update bourbon"!
Somone told me this:
"Actually it's named after Bourbon Street, which is the location of the soon-to-be-held Webmasterworld Pubcon. Brett Tabke of WMW is the one who named this update "Bourbon"."
Gert
And a well deserved third place as this is the first place where I've found a description of the way in which Google's behaviour is changing. On the whole, it seems sensible.
But I'm no SEO expert myself, so at the risk of sounding stupid, what's a fraternal link as opposed to a reciprical link?
I am drafting a deeper analysis of the Bourbon update, Google took some interesting steps to combat manipulation of the results.
Fraternal Linking: Linking between sites that may not be on the same topic, but are closely related in other ways - they share the same IP, they are hosted at the same company, they have the same whois information. Fraternal = Brother.
A lot of times people own multiple sites and use their other sites to boost the rankings of the "money site".
First of all the list above does not relate to websites which have been dropped by Bourbon.
My website was dropped and had none of the above!
The one thing that all websites have in common being dropped is 1000's of scrapper sites stealing parts of their content and linking to them.
Another point - Google is now showing the worse search results in it's history. There are some answers,
They were hacked
A virus has got inside
They have serious bugs they can't fix.
Human intervention has been dropping good quality sites ( eval ).
Whatever conspiracy theory you believe in, the point is that Google is currently broken and Yahoo is the best search engine on the internet at this point in time.
The question is - whatever happened can they fix it or is this the start of the biggest downfall from the most sucessful internet search engine ever?
Here's the problem with that theory that scraper links are causing sites to be de-ranked in the Bourbon update.
Every site in the top 10 of commercial SERPs has links from scraper sites - in some niches there are literally thousands of links from scrapers.
If you were in the top 10, and lost your rankings in Bourbon, but the other 9 sites stayed - that proves that scrapers had nothing to do with it.
Saying that they all had scraper links in common is like saying that they all used HTML. Scraper sites are out there for every niche.
I will be posting a "post-Superbowl" analysis of Bourbon in a day or so.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< SEO DotComicide Home