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[T623]The New Google Phone

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Life is a constant change, they all say. Nothing in this world is permanent, except for change itself. Everything changes with time, and there is not one thing in this world that's exempt from such a process. Search engines are included and, as trends come and go for the Internet, so do these engines' rules and tactics.

Just recently, Google has introduced a critical update to its operation. Nicknamed 'Jagger,' the update was done in 3 parts and practically turned the SEO world around. Jagger has made various changes to the algorithms and rules of how Google judges the relevancy and Page Rank of a website.

SEO rules are in for a big revamp, and to survive in this world, sites must change with it.

Coping with Change Ensures Survival
Jagger has made changes to three key areas that are crucial in the calculation of a page rank. These areas include the lifetime of a website, the calculation of back links, and the content and structure of a website.

In order to ensure the present ranking of your website, it is important to understand how Jagger has changed the rules regarding these three areas. That way, as an SEO specialist, you could make the necessary changes and adjustments to your tactics so that you could preserve your current ranking through not just Jagger, but for future updates as well.

Knowing Your Site's History and Backlinks
The first area concerns the length of time that you have been operating your website. When you are introducing a new website, you could expect difficulties and some obstacles in attaining page ranking in Google. You also have to make efforts in the beginning to optimize a website towards a keyword that is less competitive in order to garner more chances of beating the competition.

However, as time passes, you start building up the necessary links in order to gain relevancy. In this sense, a site becomes more and more relevant as its history builds up (providing that its pages are optimized to be actually relevant with certain search terms), and as your site's relevance goes up, you gain in rank among Google's search results.

Google's PageRank algorithm judges backlinks using the factor of relevance in mind. It gives greater weight to those links that point to your site from a site that is related to you. This was done before to answer attempts at link farming (a black hat SEO technique) by spam sites, which involve the establishment of sites that are purely intended to point their own sites in order to gain PageRank. For example, if a web design firm posts a link pointing to your SEO company's site, this link has more weight and importance to Google's eyes.

With this latest update, Google has given more weight to relevant links that have been pointing to a certain site for a certain period of time. In other words, links that have a long history are given higher value under the latest update. Now, not only does Google count the number of links pointing to your site but it also means it is checking for how long that backlink has existed in calculating your PageRank.

As a direct effect of this update, the tactic of building up links by buying them are no longer as effective as it was before. Since Google values older links more than new ones, this means webmasters that resort to buying backlinks will have to wait (while paying money) for quite a while before these links gain any significant value to Google's calculations.

SEO specialists' reliance on the keyword density requirement has been critically affected by the update. No longer does Google give weight to specific pages that are relevant to a single keyword. With the Jagger update, Google is now designed to look at a whole site's structure and content for relevancy to a certain theme. This totally changes black hat SEO tactics to gain relevancy for various searches by constructing pages that are individually themed for different keywords.

This means that SEO efforts should now be directed towards structuring a site around a certain theme, not just a single keyword. For example, if your website is about cars, your individual pages comprising your whole site should be centered on topics that are related to cars. With the Jagger update, you could see that general directories that use to appear on top rankings have diminished in numbers. Instead, directories for specific categories are gaining prominence among search engine result pages.

I started digging into this and you'd be surprised at what I found out.

First, let's look at the timeline of events:

In Late September some astute spider watchers over at Webmasterworld spotted unique Googlebot activity. In fact, it was in this thread: that the bot was first reported on. It concerned some posters who thought that perhaps this could be regular users masquerading as the famous bot.

Early on it also appeared that the new bot wasn't obeying the Robots.txt file. This is the protocol which allows or denies crawling to parts of a website.

Speculation grew on what the new crawler was until Matt Cutts mentioned a new Google test data center . For those that don't know, Matt Cutts is a senior engineer with Google and one of the few Google employees talking to us "regular folk." This mention happened in November.

There wasn't much mention of Big Daddy until early January of this year when Matt again blogged about it asking for feedback.

Much feedback was given on the accuracy of the results. There were also those that asked if the Mozilla Googlebot (known as "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" in your visitor logs) and Big Daddy were related, but no response was made.

Now I'm going to begin some of my own speculation:

I do in fact believe the two are related. In fact, I think this new crawler will eventually replace the old crawlers just as Big Daddy will replace the current data infrastructure.

Why is this important?

Based on my observations, this crawler may be able to do so much more than the old crawler.

For one, it emulates a newer browser. The old bot was based on the Lynx text based browser. While I'm sure Google added features as time went on, the basic Lynx browser is just that – basic.

Which explains why Google couldn't deal with things like JavaScript, CSS and Flash.

However, with the new spider, built on the Mozilla engine, there are so many possibilities.

Just look at what your Mozilla or Firefox browser can do itself – render CSS, read and execute JavaScript and other scripting languages, even emulate other browsers.

But that's not all.

I've talked to a few of my clients and their sites are getting hammered by this new spider. It has gotten so bad that some of their servers have gone down because of the volume of traffic from this one spider!

On the plus side, I have clients who went from a few hundred thousand indexed pages to over 10 million in just a few weeks! Literally since December, 2005 there's been a 3500% increase in indexed pages over an 8 week period! Just so you know, this is also the client's site that went down because of the huge volume of crawling happening.

But that's still not all.

I have another client which uses IP recognition to serve content based on a person's geographic location. If you live in the US you get American content and pricing; if you live in the UK you get UK content and pricing. As you may imagine, the UK, US, Canadian and Australian content is all very similar. In fact about the only thing noticeably different is the pricing aspect.

This is my concern – if the duplicate content gets indexed by Google what will they do? There's a good chance that the site would be penalized or even banned for violation of the webmaster quality guidelines set forth by Google here:

This is why we implemented IP recognition – so that Googlebot, which crawls from US IP addresses only sees one version of the site.

However, a review of the server logs shows that this new Googlebot has been visiting not only the US content but also the content of the other sections of the site. Naturally, I wanted to verify that the IP recognition was working. It is. This leads me to wonder then; can this browser spoof its location and/or use a proxy?

Imagine that – the browser is smart enough to do some of its own testing by viewing the site from multiple IP addresses. If that's the case then those who cloak sites are going to have problems.

In any case, from the limited observations I've made, this new Google – both the data center and the spider – are going to change the way we do things.

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Rob Sullivan1 has sinced written about articles on various topics from Types of Cancer, Payday Loans and Finances. Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for . Textlinkbrokers is a. Rob Sullivan1's top article generates over 8100 views. to your Favourites.