Last Google Dance More Like a Google Stampede

The last Google Dance was different,.. very different. It is like many web pages have vanished from the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) of Google,.. as if a Stampede went over the SERPs.

When this update started many web masters and SEO consultants raised their eye brows: "This can not be happening. They (at Google) can not be serious." It is like Google has started a war against commercial web sites, and then specifically web sites that have been optimized.

In practically every related forum a thread was started about this update and within a week many of these were filled with over 300 messages and had had up to 10.000 views or more. Needless to say that this new update got people's attention.

So what is Google doing? If we only knew,... Many theories came up and conclusions were made, and proved wrong, or proved partly correct. 2 main theories came up and both have a lot going for them:

1) Google is seperating commercial results from informative results.

If you look at the SERPs, this is what you see often. However, conclusive it is not. There still are many examples that contradict this theory, but these are not conclusive either.

The idea is that Google has built a huge dictionary based upon what their Adwords customers try to get their ads shown for. This dictionary is used to filter the commercial web pages out of the results. With Google's index and capabilities to "know" what a page is about, it would be relatively easy to filter these pages. This would be especially easy for pages that have been optimized.

A side effect of this would be that web masters are forced to use Google Adwords to have visibility in Google, which gives many the impression that Google is just after the $$$$ and no longer wants to provide relevant results.

2) Google is trying to improve relevancy

This theory is not as much accepted as the above one, but can not be discarded because it gives a more polite explanation (as to Google just doing it for the $$$$) of what is happening.

Relevancy will always be subject to opinion, and in the opinions of many SEO consultants and web masters (that have seen their web site disappear from the SERPs) the current SERPs are in no way relevant. After all, most of them consider their web pages to be the most relevant to the keyword phrase they have chosen.

However, from Google's point of view this may not necessarily be the case, especially for keyword phrases that can be considered to be very general, meaning that they describe a topic rather than a specific "something".

General phrases are however, very often used to find something. They are very popular and as a result many pages have been optimized for one or two general phrases. When a page is optimized for a general keyword phrase it will be describing just one aspect of this general "something". So in reality the page isn't about a general "something", but about a specific "something".

Google seems to be able to detect this and believes that when a search is done for a general "something" it should give lots of different versions of this "something" and preferably pages that describe lots of different versions of this "something".

This theory fits with Google's claim that it wants to give the most relevant results possible, but at the same time we have to consider that it isn't working that well (yet).

In conclusion:

There is a huge update going on at Google. It may very well change the way people search the internet and has a great influence on Search Engine Marketing. The flood of messages in the forums is proof of that.

There are 2 main theories that may explain the update, one says that Google is trying to separate commercial results from informative results, the other says that Google is trying to improve relevancy.

You are free to agree with either one of these theories, or perhaps have a theory of your own. Time will tell what the future has in mind for Google.