Google's Jagger Update and What it Means For Your Website

For those of you who may not be aware, Google has recently completed a three phase algorithm change called Jagger.  This has resulted in some pages either dropping in the rankings or disappearing completely.

Google, as well as other Search Engines, are in a constant battle to provide their searching audience the most relevant results for their particular search keyword phrases.  Identifying and cleaning up highly ranked "spammy" results is always paramount to the SEs.

Some of the more recent issues Google had to deal with were:

• Reciprocal linking abuse
• CSS spamming techniques
• Blog comment spam

Google brought some of these problems on themselves when it was revealed that incoming links to your website increased the rankings.  It didn't take long for people to devise ways to create thousands of incoming links to artificially inflate their link popularity.

What Does This Mean To You

To achieve high rankings for your site you really need to do only a few things:

1. Create compelling content that your audience needs.
2. Strategically place your main keyword phrases in your web pages.
3. Obtain links from other websites that are thematically related to you.

If you make your website a valuable resource to your target audience, then you will be rewarded in the SE rankings as well.  It's not going to be fast and easy, but you will be insulated from dramatic drops or exclusions from the SEs when they decide to update their algorithms.

If you have been using techniques that are meant to drive up your SE rankings then you'll eventually be caught, if not already.

What If You've Been Affected By Jagger

If you have been a victim of the Jagger update, then you'll have to undo whatever the offending practice you were using and then apply for reinclusion into Google.  Here is a great blog post by Matt Cutts, Google software engineer, on how to request for reinclusion.