Happy Holidays! A lot has been circulating concerning Google’s latest update (nicknamed “Jagger”) that they began launching back around October. The update seems to be complete now and people are either feeling like a kid at Christmas of felling like Google gave them a lump of coal.. Here are my tips for dealing with the update, mostly concerned with Google’s attempt to cut back on linking schemes:

  • After the most recent Google update, it may be more important than ever to check your multiple sites for duplicate content and shared IP addresses. Google is trying to further cut down on spam in their index, and these two factors may be more heavily penalized than before.
  • If you are using CSS in your pages make sure you are not using any hidden DIVs on your pages. Although a hidden DIV can have legitimate purposes, just like a lot of other innocent practices in web design, they have been abused by webmasters and search engine optimizers to hide text and links on pages. If you can, you should remove any hidden DIVs from your pages.
  • If you do experience a drop in rankings in Google, check to make sure you’’re not buying links from or linking out to someone who may be operating outside of Google’s quality guidelines. See Google’’s quality guidelines here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
  • Make sure you use varying text in your internal links and that you site has a strong theme. Sites (not just pages) with a clear theme may rank better than sites without, even if all other elements on that individual page are the same. If your site has a lot of different themes, it may be beneficial to have a different URL (without any duplicated content!) for each of your themes. For example, a separate site for European tours and Asian tours may help your rankings for each set of keywords.

Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO