Search engine rankings are extremely competitive and Webmasters are under pressure to do all they can to gain visibility in search results.

As warned by Matt Cutts of Google earlier in the week, Google is working on an update which has been coined as the Update Jagger by the SEO community. Google’s Cutts has put out a request for searchers to review the new update and contact Google if they find their sites banned, or spam listed in the new results. This is kind of an unofficial call for volunteers, but if all publishers and searchers put their heads together, identifying quirks in the Google rankings system, some good indexing is sure to come out of it.

Matt also mentioned, “My point is that more than ever, we are constantly working to improve our algorithms and scoring. Some changes are hardly noticed at all. Some changes (e.g. user interface improvements) are more visible. Some changes have nothing to do with spam, such as the changes for Chinese and Europe that I mentioned above. Some changes do try to decrease spam or increase core quality.

Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; I’m guessing within the next few days. I still expect some flux after that though, just to let you know.”

While we can only guess at what those changes were, I agree that the changes is related to the following theories written by Alex Walker:

Links and Anchor Text

Links have always been the essence of Google, but the engine is steadily altering its focus. The importance of Page Rank (PR), Google's unique ranking system, is being steadily downgraded in favor of the nature, quality, and quantity of inbound and outbound link anchor text. If PR is downgraded, and the wording of inbound links is boosted, this may explain, to a large degree, the position in which many sites currently find themselves.

For example, most people will link to a site's homepage. In the past, due to internal linking structures, PR was spread and other pages benefited. Now, it is more important for Webmasters to attract links that point directly to the relevant pages of their sites using anchor text that's relevant to the specific pages.  

Furthermore, Google seems to be using outbound links to determine how useful and authoritative a site is. For example, directories that are doing well are those that direct link to the sites, rather than use dynamic URLs.

Bad Neighborhoods

Now, more than ever, has the question of who's linking to your site become critical. Links must be from related topic sites (the higher the PR the better); those links are seen to define your 'neighborhoods'.  

If we again consider the example of travel insurance, big insurance companies might buy links on holiday-related sites in order to boost their ranking. These businesses will actively invest in gaining targeted inbound links from a broad mix of sites. Consequently, their neighborhoods appear tightly focused to Google.

The Other theories must be considered are Canonical domain name and dynamic url rewriting problem.

Canonical domain name

According to mostly robots spider, http://www.mysite.org and http://mysite.org are different.

Using the incorrect URL as described above will trigger a duplicate penalty in Google for the effected site. There are several ways to protect your site. The simplest way I know of is to use a 301 redirect or well known as redirect permanent.

Dynamic Url

Dynamic url may be considered as spam since it generates page based on visitor click. It may create unlimited loop of page. Search engine will stop crawling once it found  the links are dynamic. Manipulating the url can be done by rewriting your link is to use mod_rewrite.

The conclusion:

Google optimization is now a lot harder than it used to be. Success involves hard work, by develop good website rich content, relevant, no error will considered as high quality website in serp.

-by Ricky Wibowo