It may not be a bad idea to watch your incoming Google search hits more closely then usual over the next week or two to see how you are affected by one of the biggest changes to their search system since its inception. The changes, going under the codename “the Bourbon Update” has mostly taken place already but final tinkering will no doubt be ongoing. There are a plethora of reasons for the update but most seem related to improving organic search quality and reducing fraudulent results which is ironic since Google in my opinion and based on our own search statistics, are already way ahead of the other search engines in these regards. However it would be fair to say that not everybody has been happy with the results of the update and there are many reports online of previously popular sites losing much of their Google traffic. Hence my suggestion that you watch your Google stats closely over the coming weeks to find out how the changes affect you.
Our incoming Google referrals have risen by 4% in the last few weeks, so right now I’m pretty happy with the changes, but our growth has been totally organic and we’ve not engaged in any potentially shady methods to increase our ranking having basically just followed our own SEO tutorial. Also the number of external sites linking to, or mentioning us has grown gradually but dramatically over the past year, so I wasn’t expecting us to be adversely affected. It seems that one of the worst things you can do nowadays to hurt your rankings is to have your number of incoming links increase dramatically in an unusually short period of time, (something that is often a strong indicator that you are engaging in questionable tactics to gain Pagerank). That is however not the only thing you can do to get yourself in Google’s bad books so watch your Google referrers in the coming weeks to see how your sites are affected, you may find you will have to take some action in order to restore your traffic to pre-Bourbon levels. A good review of the Bourbon update can be found at dotcomicide where they suggest that the changes are to better detect the following questionable practices:
– Non related Links. (Links from sites that have nothing to do with your content.)
– Duplicate Content. (Affiliate sites and sites which copy the content of others are likely to be adversely affected.)
– Fraternal Linking. (Cross linking sites on the same host or in some other way related.)
– Run of Site Links (Links to you from every page on another site.)
– Low Quality Reciprocal Links. (Links swaps with sites that in Google’s mind are SPAM or very low quality.)
The above factors are not new to the search engines, they are just receiving more attention from Google then previously. The best SEO advice I’ve ever seen is mentioned on that site and can be best worded as: “put yourself in Google’s head” which is something I’ve been suggesting to clients for some time now. Basically if you think about your site from the search engines perspective, you can get a good idea of those things that will adversely affect your ranking, as well as those things that can improve it.
