Google says it makes minor changes to the search engine at least every week and now you can feel some of these changes too.
Google quickly modifies the search engine to avoid having webmasters and some enterprises to learn how it all works and then to change the results in a negative way.
One of the things you can see now that you could not see some time ago is that the content on the top of the page has more importance than the content on the bottom. In my article about Yotam you can see this perfectly. If you search on google for Yotam 2004, or 2003 or 2005 you can see the article in the top 1 or top 2, but if you search for Yotam 2006, 2007 or 2008 the ranking will be reduced. This can be not only because of the height of the placement of the keywords but also because of the amount of content around those keywords. The last Yotam dates have less content around it and that might be influencing the results as well.
The second thing that will give you a big boost or slap is the freshness of the content. As soon as you submit something Google will rank it very high and then as time elapses you will see your rankings going down and newer content sometimes with less quality will stay at the top too. This is something I believe is bad for Google and webmasters, because low quality blogs that are recent might rank higher when they should rank lower.
Another thing I just learned about Google is the limitations it has. The more I use it the more disappointed I get. My website was closed about one year ago or so and I opened it again to make money and to experiment new technologies in publishing ang blogs. It just so happens that Google still has the one year old deleted pages on the index and the newer ones sometimes do not show up. This is bad, very bad for the most used search engine in the world. It reminds me to use more alternatives and you should use them too.
Yahoo on the other hand deleted all my old pages and already indexed and ranked all the newer pages. Live search, yes this small innefective engine did the same, but Google seems to be very limited here.
Just imagine how many bad websites already gone are still in the index.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Interesting and informative information about SEO. Does the same rating apply to Yahoo as you mentioned about the keywords in the early placement of the article?