Google Dance - Thousands of webmasters danced along

Google dance, the day where the search engine result pages will change. Most of the time, the results page don’t change much and I still see pretty much the same sites on the top of the search terms. Haha, not this time… I observed some big changes in the results page after the most recent dance.

For the benefit of those who knows nothing about Google, Google have a habit of massively updating their results on certain days. This means that they will track all the backlinks, assign the pagerank (how popular your site is) and play around with the results page. The reason behind not having significant changes is simple: Sites won’t become popular overnight and sites that are popular seldom become obsolete in a day.

However, noticed I just said that the recent dance had massive changes? Well… when this happens, it probably means that Google has changed its algorithmn, meaning it’s placing priority on different factors that gives a site good ranking. The main problem about optimising your websites for search engines is guessing what they are looking out for and you will never know if you are right or wrong. It’s always just a best guess.

However, one thing is for sure: link popularity always helps, not only in search engine optimisation, but also in helping you to get traffic from many different sources. That’s the main reason why I will only focus on getting links and probably stop my on-page optimisation at just the title and meta tags. Why meta tags? Well… Although it’s speculated that meta tags do not carry much or even no weight in search engines, it’s still good to have, because webmasters can look at them and use your descriptions. Remember my previous post about bringing convenience to webmasters who wants to link to your site?

With all that said, I have a guess on what Google is probably looking out for in this update. It seems like it’s placing a bit more priority than before on the words in the URL, title and on the page. Doesn’t it seem like it’s rolling back to years before where search engines placed weight on the on-page factors? Well… it does appears to be so, at least from the recent dance. However, as I said, Google is very complex and could probably be looking at link text from other sites, but if I were to spend my time doing a full analysis, I would not do well in all my coming exams.

Another possibility that I will raise is that Google is trying out new algorithmns, especially in the area of relating words with other words. So, I’m expecting that, let’s say I’m trying to rank up high for the word Groceries, having words like canned food, Soy Sauce, Chilli and other groceries will probably help in your page’s ranking. Now… it is damn difficult to guess Google’s algorithmn and your best bet would be to simply design for your visitors. How many times have I emphasised this point? Haha

My final point: Google is just getting so advanced… I’m totally amazed

P.S: For the thousands of webmasters whose rankings got knocked down Google’s result pages, don’t worry, there’s always a next dance. Just build your website with all your efforts and remember, there’s always other traffic sources.

P.P.S: For those webmasters whose sites went up the rankings, please make your sites even better, so that visitors like us will get truly useful results. It’s for the world!