Googleīs Jaggar Update was the most frightening
for the SEO community of all Goolge Updates so far. It has also been the
update taking the longest time so far. The Jagger Update has been
carried out in various steps over a longer period of time. The Search
Engine algorithm update affected almost all websites, especially
websites with very competetive keywords or keyword phrases. A vast
majority of webmasters, website owners and search engine optimizers
(SEO) did not like the Jaggar Update very much. This is because many of
them had to totally rethink and change their SEO strategies.
Google today is the major search engine.
Personaly, I like Google. Not only because of itīs popularity and
search volume. I like Google for itīs continuing efforts to maintain
and improve their search engine quality and relevance of search results.
Google after all is a popular search engine, not a piece of SEO
playground. In terms of internet search and research, Google always
comes up with new ideas and innovative approaches. The recent updates of
Googleīs search algorithms have only been additional steps in the
direction to offer even better and more relevant search results to the
search engineīs users. This is only legetimate.
In the following I will try to provide a list of
elements that had been implemented within the most recent Jagger Update:
- Detection of Blog Spam
- Detection of CSS Spam
- Pirate Sites or Pirate Matter
- Abuse Usage of Reciprocal Link Exhanges (RLE)
- Outbound Link (OBL) Relevancy
- Inbound Links (IBL) Repetition
- Redirect Domains or Redirect Pages
- Keyword Stuffing within ALT-Tags
- Hidden Links and Hidden Text
- Top Domain PageRank (PR) Weight
A lot of threats Google had to deal with, mostly
very rightfuly, but letīs hope they do the job right without causing
too much of colatoral damage to innocent webmasters and honest website
owners. For example I found, that they are blocking and deleting lotīs
of Blogs run on Google owned blogger.com for spam reasons, but without
that you can find out or understand why these blogs had been abused to
be spamy. It seems, blogger is overdoing things here, hitting lotīs of
innocent bloggers away as well. But letīs go back and take a closer
look at the individual points of the recent Google Jaggar Update as
listed above. I have tried to give a decent description of every issue
and I also try to give you some hints about how to avoid getting trapped
or penalized by Googleīs updated filters:
1. Detection of Blog Spam
A Spam Blog has been defined to be a blog which is
not more or less regularly updated and which has been created for the
sole purpose to promote another website or product.
Solution:
Create blogs and maintain them regularly. Do not
always use the same links to yours or other websites (including
affiliate links). Try not to use your blogs as spam. Try to use them as
useful addition to your website, to add community value to your
visitors. Use your blogs as a guidline or help area rather than filling
it with useless content or even worse to use it as a dull promotional
platform only.
2. Detection of CSS Spam
The bad thing about black hat SEO is, that some
people always think they are too clever. The good thing about search
engine algorithms is, that they are updated more or less regularly and
that they are constantly getting better in trapping black hat SEO down.
As a result many of these dark freaks find themselves or their websites
penalized or even banned by the search engines. One of the latest search
engine "tricks" had been CSS spamming. CSS spam are CSS pages
which have been solely created for the misleading of both, search engine
bots and human visitors. Playing such games with CSS is no longer worth
the effort, at least after the recent Google Jagger Update. At least the
Google robot will with a pretty good certainty detect such spam CSS
leading to invisible text, which it by any means will rate as SPAM.
Solution:
Use CSS and CSS style sheets for better formatting
of your website, not in order to mislead search engine robots. Besides,
I can still not understand why so many webmasters are trying to hide
their text away. Write good, honest content and make it officially
visible to your visitors and the search engine spiders. The result is
even better than spamming, because you will not mislead and will attract
both, robots and humans, to rate your site to be more valuable. And all
this without the constant danger of getting trapped and penalized on any
other day.
3. Pirate Sites or Pirate Matter
Pirate sites and pirate matter are sites which
mainly contain out of other - mostly automatically - stolen content
without having the permission of the original author or webmaster. It
could also be a mirror copy from the same domain, which has also been
rated as spam. Sometimes, this is a dangerous game even to honest,
straight forward webmasters. For example I run a website where I have
two domains leading to it (one with a hyphen within the domain name, one
without the hyphen). Of course it was not my intention to spam, but to
have both very similar domain names, pointing to the same content, for
obvious, legal reasons. Well, unfortunately this was enough for Google
to rate this as spam and I had lotīs of trouble to get out of this
mess, I can tell!
Solution:
If you cannot manage to keep up with regular fresh
content, go to free content and article distribution websites, from
which you can grab fresh nad free content at no or low cost. Use content
from there, it is totally legal as long as you leave all links within
these free articles within it and being active. It is a simple deal with
advantages for both, the author and the webmaster copying the content
offered. Some good sites with free articles and content for legal
downlad are http://www.goarticles.com
, http://www.az-articles.com
or
http://www.dreamicles.com to only mention a few.
4. Abuse Usage of Reciprocal Link
Exhanges (RLE)
In general there is nothing to say against link
exchanges, as long as it is not done for the sole purpose of cheating
the search engine spiders for better ranking. A honest exchange of links
in between two sites, because their webmasters feel each otherīs
content to be a good supplement to their content is nothing to feel
ashame or worried about. Therefore Google obviously has decided not to
totally ignore link exchanges for a better ranking. But their overall
value has been decreased, they are not weighed as heavily as before
after the Jagger Update. Some reciprocal links or so called cross link
exchanges have been detected as black hat SEO and are now totally
neglected or even rated as link spamming. These are known sites created
for the sole purpose of exchanging links as well as many FFAs (Free For
All Link Lists), link farms, link selling or link renting and so on.
Solution:
Keep away or at least be very careful about
exchanging links with suspicious FFAs, link farms or link exchange
sites. They may more likely hurt you, than bringing any benefit to your
website ranking. Stop or decrease your RLE link building strategy. Try
to build one way linking through partnership programs, web and niche
directories, relevant category listings and relevant industry portal
registrations. Also to write your own articles with a link to your
website within them and submitting these articles to above mentioned
free article directories can be of great help for link building. Every
time your article is picked up and distributed by another webmaster,
they will include the link to your site within it. Allf for free and
without you to have to link back. Make sure to write useful high quality
articles without spelling mistakes, in order to have them republished
more frequently. Also allow the other webmasters to modify your content
as long as they leave your link active, in order to avoid duplicate
content filters of the search engines.
