Google’s January 2007 Search Engine Update

Google’s Matt Cutts recently posted his regular “weather report” on Google ranking and indexing issues. Covered in it were news of visible PageRank updates, supplemental listings, filetype command changes, lost home pages in country-specific results, an update on the disappearing sex blogs, concerns that CSS is being spidered to detect hidden text, duplicate content worries, the Minus 30 penalty and what to do if Google thinks you are a malware site.

PageRank Updated

Matts first point of call was PageRank , where he highlighted the now quarterly update of PageRank. For example our PR has gone up from 2-4 (mainly due to some well overdue TLC over the christmas period). It should be highlighted that this shouldn’t impact search rankings too drastically, since Matt says these scores have already been in use there. Some older data centres are also continuing to show PageRank from an older infrastructure.

Links of interest - Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar PageRank Update Being Reported from Search Engine Roundtable
Google Pagerank update or outage from Dave Naylor

Supplemental Results

Matt’s next port of call, was supplemental results. His first point was to allay those fears of people who have supplemental pages on their site. It should be noted that

• Pages in supplemental index haven’t fallen foul of a Google Penalty
• Sites will do well even if they have some of their pages in the supplemental index.
• Supplemental pages can rank and produce traffic.
• Should be noted that pages in the supplemental index, dont carry the same “link weight” as pages in the regular index

It also doesn’t sound reassuring to say, “we’ll check the good stuff first, then the other stuff only if we need to.” What if some good stuff for whatever reason is in the second index? That’s a fear some searchers had in the past — and it will remain with Google’s revival of this system

Danny on his SearchEngineLand website asks the question: Why not simply expand the existing Google index, rather than go to a two tier approach?

“The supplemental is simply a new Google experiment. As you know we’re always trying new and different ways to provide high quality search results,” said Google spokesperson Nate Tyler.

“OK, it’s new, it’s experimental — but Google also says there are currently no plans to eventually integrate it into the main index. Basically, the supplemental index is a way for Google to hit less important pages in specific instances when it can’t find matches in the main index. Trying to search against tens of billions of pages all at once is time consuming and expensive. Far easier to hit just the “best of the web,” exactly as Inktomi used to do — and for exactly the same reasons. But it’s a continuing reminder that Google can’t do it all. No matter how great those machines are, they have to divide up that index. The “best of the web” might still be tens of billions of pages, but divisions still raise concerns.”

Links of interest - Supplemental results

Breaking Out of Google`s Supplemental Index - Matt McGhee
Gone Supplemental? - Matt Cutts

Filetype Command Changing?

Want to know all the .doc documents in Google? The following command in Google will not return the results you expect

filetype:doc

Google insist on the command also having a search query term, like this:

filetype:doc seo

Country-Specific Results & Lost Home Pages

Matt Cutts also detailed some issues with .com domains hosted outside of the US. To read about this, follow the link at the bottom of the page.

Duplicate Content drama
There has been a lot of blogs and forum posts regarding duplicated content recently including A Guide To Fixing Google Duplicate Content & Canonical URL Issues from Search Engine Roundtable which covers a WebmasterWorld thread with some advice for those with issues, and More Tidbits on Google’s Duplicate Content Filter covers another thread with a ton of advice from Google’s Adam Lasnik (Thanks Search Engine Land for this one)
There is also the recent interview by Rand Fishkin with Vanessa Fox which highlighted how Google dealt with duplicate content issues, which I posted about recently.

To read more about the update, please feel free to visit the following links