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For about 1 month we all are seeing dramatic changes in our Google rankings, Link
popularity and all. Page rank of websites seems to be changing hourly. If it is 5 now it can be 2 an hour later. Pages seem to go from a first page ranking to a spot on the 100th page.
Webmasters, especially SEOs are really concerned about this change and this can be seen in various Forums. SEO News discusses about this in detail and here are some of the highlights:
Google algorithm changes started in November 2003 with the Florida update, which now ranks as a legendary event in the Webmaster community. Then came updates named Austin, Brandy, Bourbon, and Jagger. Now we are dealing with the BigDaddy! As per SEO news "The algorithm problems seem to fall into 4 categories. There are canonical issues, duplicate content issues, the Sandbox, and supplemental page issues."
1. Canonical Issues:
These occur when a search engine treats www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, and yourdomain.com/index.html all as different websites. When Google does this, it then flags the different copies as duplicate content and penalizes them.
2.The Sandbox:
This has become one of the legends of the search engine world. It appears that websites, or links to them, are "sandboxed" for a period before they are given full rank in the index, kind of like a maturing time.
3.Duplicate Content Issues:
These have become a major issue on the
Internet. Because web pages drive search engine rankings, black hat SEOs (search
engine optimizers) started duplicating entire sites' content under their own
domain name, thereby instantly producing a ton of web pages (an example of this would be to download
an Encyclopedia onto your website). As a result of this abuse, Google aggressively attacked duplicate content abusers with their algorithm updates.
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