Jagger Updates (Google)

2005 - This was a settling year, the industry was adjusting. During the latter part of 2004 and the first part of 2005 the UK population was finally exposed to true broadband and the signup rate was staggering. The government had held the Internet back for three years in the UK and finally the real growth was unleashed.

Websites were being designed with functionality, the .com boom and bust was just a memory and many businesses realised that spending money on their Internet facility was money well spent. Google's database was doubling in size, its indexing rate was slow and the 'Google Dance' was a thing of the past. Forums became less busy and dull and the industry became calm.

There were still big casualties among some agencies. In the UK Top Pile was finally brought to its knees and others had not been able to re-brand and change direction.

Google was developing lots of new tools and launching new types of ad services, however nothing is ever calm in the SEO world for long. Come the end of the year and there would be yet another major update.

Search engine compliance became the main issue. It's the only way to ensure that each update will pass over a website with minimum consequences. At the end of the day if a website is made compliant with search engine regulations and guidelines and is also improved for the visitor then Google and other search engine such as Yahoo and MSN will evaluate and accredit the website as being fit for its index.

The year saw the same series of aftershocks as search engines started to bite down on issues such as duplication. Many websites vanished from prominent search positions through being inadvertently non compliant with regulations.

Compliancy is a complex process. In this day of dynamic page creation and CMS it is easy to be non compliant by ignorance rather than by design. Of course the filters that screen for these 'bad practices' are unsympathetic as to whether you were innocent or guilty.

This year saw the rise of the stealth cull, many websites vanishing from page1 positions with little publicity. Much of this was due to Google testing new algorithms, working on its plan to eradicate artificial link generation. It's incredible to think that all those years ago Google was created with linking as its core doctrine and now as 2006 arrives Google launches its anti link-spam filters, this update was implemented in three phases, Jagger 1, 2 and 3.

Those strange changes during the summer now showed their true meaning, this was a fundamental change for SEO, once again an industry had sprung up due to Google’s ranking procedure, this time to feed the hunger for inter-site linking. Manipulation of this process could enable some websites to out-perform others, once again breaking the golden rule... no search engine likes to be manipulated.

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