NumaTek Web Design E-Zine
NumaTek Web Design E-Zine (e-magazine) is a free newsletter covering many aspects of e-commerce and how to build a successful online business.
You
can search our archives
and read the last
issue below on this page.
If you would like to receive NumaTek Web Design E-Zine directly in your mail box, please subscribe here.
The Last Issue:
01.04.04
"Florida" Google Update
Hello and Happy New Year! We hope you all had wonderful Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Kind of hard to get going again and back to work. 
In this first weekend of 2004 we would like to look back and recall what happened this last year in the web design and search engine promotion business.
The most important and most unexpected thing happened in the middle of November – Google changed its algorithm.
During that time, we were building a web site for a Colorado Springs real estate company. Clint and Laura, the owners gave us a few URLs of their competitors who claimed they have good traffic. We researched and it turned out that only one from those competitors – Mary C - was really a competitor. Her web site comes up on the first page in Google’s result when you searched for "Colorado Springs real estate", "Colorado Springs realtor", "relocation Colorado Springs", etc. So, we started watching Mary’s web site closely. In one day, we noticed that Mary’s web site disappeared from the first page on Google to nowhere. It was not found in 9999 results! A little shocking to say the least. It was the strangest thing we had ever seen. Of course Google’s result is not something written on stone, but changes daily. One week your web site can be #1, next week it can be dropped down to #10, then again come up. It is normal. But to lose the first position and disappear completely from the search results – it was really unusual!
In the same day, we saw the first entries about similar situations appearing on SEO forums. Within the next few days, the number of these messages increased very much and people started to panic. Nobody had figured out what was going on. Thousands of web sites which used to be in the top 10 on Google, didn’t come up in the search results any more. Can you imagine what these businesses were thinking? They were used to receiving thousands of visitors coming from Google on a daily basis and making good sales. Suddenly the flood of visitors and income has stopped. It was a catastrophe for them. Just like people give names to tropical storms and hurricanes, the November Google update received a name also – "Florida".
So, the end of November and the beginning of December was a tough time for us. We spent a lot of time checking our clients’ web site positioning and watching the Florida update. We didn’t start any new projects at that time because we felt responsible for search engine positioning of our existing clients’ web sites and spent a great amount of time trying to "crack" the new Google algorithm. By "cracking" we mean a detailed analysis – what changed, which methods still work and what doesn’t work any more in search engine optimization, etc.
Fortunately, our clients’ web sites didn’t lose their Google positioning and some of them even increased their ranking. We feel great about it! What it means is that we know what we are doing and we do it correctly. Our clients triumphed while thousands of other web sites lost (you can see your web site positioning at http://www.numatek.com/portfolio/seo.html). After that, NumaTek Web Design has entered the New Year with new slogan: "Become the Winner!"
So, what exactly happened on Google and which methods can you use to promote your web sites in 2004? In this newsletter, we will just list them. In our next newsletters, we will talk about each of these tendencies more detailed.
1. Google’s crawler (Googlebot) became smarter. If you have multiple domains with duplicate content and cross-link them, you will easily get caught by Google and your listing will be dropped. Use your energy to make your only web site as good as possible instead having multiple "mirror" web sites.
2. Google switched to a semantic algorithm. In other words, a Google crawler can READ and UNDERSTAND what your page is about. It doesn’t matter which keywords you put in meta tags – if you don’t use them within a web page real content, your keywords are useless.
3. It seems Google made a big step toward favoring informational web sites better than commercial ones. Thus, currently Google sorts web sites using the following hierarchy:
• Informational, discussion, educational and governmental web sites (specifically with extensions .gov, .org, and .edu)
• Search engines, directories and portals
• Company presentation web sites
• Online stores
• Affiliate sellers
• Others
Why did Google drop e-commerce web sites down? We see 2 reasons here:
(a) Like any other business, Google wants and deserves to make more money. Putting the filter on the most popular key phrases, it pushes e-commerce web sites owners to pay for AdWord advertising (sponsored links on the right side).
(b) Google is trying to push Froogle as the commercial search tool while Google itself will be the more informational search tool. If you missed my previous newsletter about Froogle, please read it at http://www.numatek.com/articles/froogle.html. This is a "MUST-READ" article for e-commerce web site owners.
So, you ask, if Google dropped e-commerce web site down, why didn’t it hurt our clients’ web sites?
(a) We never used spam methods. Thus, we didn’t need to re-build web sites just because Google started ignoring keywords in Meta tags or ALT tags.
(b) We always suggested to our clients to make their web sites more informative. Our clients’ web sites are not just online stores with no information but a shopping cart. We kept repeating to you: "your web site needs more content", "before trying to sell, give your visitors ALL the information they need to know about your products/services", "the more pages your web site has, the more traffic you get, the more sales you make". Thank goodness most of our clients follow our suggestions, and their web sites have been treated by Google not as just online stores, but as informational web sites (which are priority web sites – look again at the hierarchy list above).
OK, this newsletter turned out to be long and serious. We hope we didn’t lose your attention to this point, because this information is really important. We promise to make our next newsletter shorter and more fun to read.
Best Regards,
Archives:
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
