SEO UPDATES

SEO Links is a nifty little extension for Firefox that gives you “tooltips specially enhanced for SEOs”. Basically, once the extension is installed, you just have to hover any link which stats you wish to check, and Firefox will show you ranking data for the URL, as well as Google, Yahoo! and MSN link popularity. Cherry on top, if you want to disable it at times for more casual surfing, a simple click will toggle the activation of the extension on and off.

SEO Links is available for download at WebmasterBrain.

Matt Cuts is reporting that the Jagger 2 google update is underway.

Read more about the update on the Webmaster World forums here.

Update(s):

Here are some reactions to this latest Jagger 2 update from the Webmaster World Forums (reg. req’d):

Pico_Train sez:

This update is stinking so far. 50% traffic gone.

This happened back in May. Completely kicked out from fantastic search positions. Clean, clean, clean.

Wrote to Google. First response, I said that wasn’t good enough and asked to take a look, 2nd response was a bit more interesting.

Ouch.

Jaffstar sez:

I monitor various sectors, and have completed extensive analysis on the following:

I am noticing that sites with a high percentages anchor text “keyword” in their back links, above a certain % are getting excluded in this update. Old sites that ranked well in the past are also gone. You will notice that these sites normally have natural one way links, and their keyword/domain was used in the text/anchor link, which caused the majority of their anchor text (keyword) to be similar.

On the other hand, sites that go on a wild hunt and get 1000’s of backlinks have a similar pattern with their backlinks. Yes, the majority of the anchor text is above a certain %.

All sites that are in the top 10 that I analyzed, are below a certain %.

So what you are seeing now is old authority sites moving down the serps and sites trying to manipulate their ranking also getting hit because they were above a certain % for their keywords. Sites (good or bad) are thrown into the evil pit.

This has been the pattern of Google SERP (search engine result pages) following updates for some time now. For example, Aaron Wall of SEO Book has been hit by this before for times like *surprise* “seo book.”

Yes, in his case, he absolutely deserves to rank in the top 10 for that term. But the updated Google algorithms can knock “over-optimized” or simply unlucky authoritative sites out of the rankings.

I know that many bloggers give the whole Page Rank affair more importance than it probably really has, but for whoever might be interested in knowing that, Matt Cutts gives on his blog more info about updates, and announces that said PR will very likely be updated soon:

Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; I’m guessing within the next few days. I still expect some flux after that though, just to let you know.

It seems that the word is currently touring the blogosphere, and coming in from more than just one source. In any case, it won’t harm to check our page ranks in the upcoming week, just to see if this was true or not.

I like Jim Boykin’s way of presenting his opinions, and the lattest in date is one that I thought I could share, given that it seems to me like both interesting and useful. Without much ado, it can simply be summarized as follows:

The main idea I’m trying to make is that by focusing on relevance and links within good content is much better than the “old way” of making “links” pages. Link pages are dead. Long live content pages with link embedded within.

Have a look at the following post about how to create better link pages by embedding said links into relevant text, such as “tips and tricks” instead of basic lists. By opposing two examples of links pages, a “bad” one and a “content” one, Boykin easily demonstrates that not only can it be more useful for the search engines bots to crawl and index your page, it’s also more pleasant to the reader, who can this way easily target a paragraph that catches his interest (along with the embedded URL) rather than having to weed through a long list of sites with somewhat boring descriptions.

All in all, I must indeed say that I prefer the embedded links method.