The Google Backlink Update

[Garrett]

This morning when I came in to work I saw this RLRouse headline in WebProWorld: Another Google update has begun...

I immediately began scouring forums and calling experts to find out more information.

First I called Google-hawk Daniel Brandt, who noted that some of his Scroogle pages have pagerank now for the first time. He also mentioned a way to see how the page ranks have changed if you look in different datacenters. He's heard of some people with more backlinks now, and some with less.

How did you fare?

Checking backlink and pagerank changes. For a full and too-techie-for-me description of how to check updates on backlinks and pagerank, look at RLRouse's datacenter post.

Update Rumblings Webwide. Mr. Brandt pointed me to SEOChat, where I found some welcoming and informed folks and a post entitled What's up: -gv and -va OFFLINE, Update coming?" I learned that when an update's coming Google usually takes down some datacenters. At the time of the post, the www-gv.google.com and www-va.google.com datacenters were down.

More coming as I find it.

Garrett

[janeth]

We went to a pr6.

[Garrett]

Digging Deeper. During my conversation with Jim Hedger of Stepforth I learned that Google updates its backlinks monthly. What's significant about this update is that it's happening early.

The earliness, according to Jim, is significant for two reasons. For one it shows that Google's still trying to recover relevance from the Florida update (remember, they have to do all of their testing in real time). Secondly, there could be more to the update than backlinks.

The reason this is NOT a major update like the Florida update is that, according to Jim, Google's still evaluating what they learned. "They're in tremendous competition with Yahoo!, and Microsoft's coming up behind them. There's no way they're going to dump what they've learned in the last two months."

I asked Jim when we could expect to see the results fully in place. "Next week will be when we see what the changes really are. Watch next week. The analysis of the update we see next week will show us how brilliant the SEO industry is."

By "SEO industry" I'm sure he meant Stepforth. He promised to call me when he's got some solid update analysis.

Check out Jim's articles here.

[DanielDachille]

Before this Dec update my rankings where very high, nothing was changed except the addition of more products and pages. Where the backlinks as important in the past, we always had good ranking, I never checked back links, where can I Check?

[StepForth_Jim]

Actually, I was refering to the rest of the industry but I do think my colleagues at StepForth are brilliant as well.

jim
stepforth