Google Algorithm Explained

Everflux - Google Phenomena Explained

1. Intro - about Google
You are probably aware that Google is a "search engine", that almost 80% of the internet searches in the world are done through Google. If you are a metro- or uber-geek, you probably know that the term "to google" became part of the English language, as in "she googled her high school boyfriends". And if you are really, really on top of things all trivia and have Wikipedia as your browser's home page, you might even know that the name "Google" is a play on the word "Googol", which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nine-year-old nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeros.
2. Everflux - what is that?
Some unknown "Glossary of SEO terms" (SEO = Seo) defines the Everflux as "An anomaly by which pages can quickly appear and then disappear in Google page rankings. Usually strikes newly included webpages."
Generally, Everflux describes the consistent modification in Google's Search Engine Outcomes Pages (SERPs), while Google constantly searches the web searching for "minty fresh" material, changing their index appropriately.
In plain English, occasionally, ranks go up or down arbitrarily, link popularity is totally lost, pages that have been indexed for years just disappear and are no place to be found in Google and other comparable Outer Limits phenomena. Most people whose income depends proportionally on their prospective clients' ability to find them by means of a Google search, may believe their service is ruined, they are messed up, and I can plainly see why.
According to online forums at Webmasterworld, the first sightings of the phenomenon took place in July 2002. Later on that year, the following speculation on Everflux emerged: "Lastly, they could be dealing with the index, rolling indexes back, changing parts of the index, backing up parts of the index, rewriting some upseting part of the index, deleting parts of an index - or a plethora of other actions or issues that just Google could understand about."
Legend has it that there is one ex-Google worker who passes the name of Googleguy, who publishes in related online forums. He used this explanation: "As we do a full crawl of the web, we discover the majority of the websites from our fresh crawl and put them in our regular index. My guidance on our fresh crawl is to view it as a good "bonus offer" on top of Google's deep index. Users can always browse our complete index, but often we can dish out even fresher pages as an extra nicety."
Google presented a "fresh crawl" procedure to make their outcomes as pertinent and as fresh as possible. It runs every day. The function of the everyday fresh crawl is to update Websites in the index that modification frequently. This permits Google to offer outcomes that are updated with existing events.
Google also does one major update per month, which generally begins anywhere from around the 19th or 20th of the month to approximately the 28th of the month. Once the update has been completed, the new data migrates to Google's partner sites. The main reason for the fluctuation is that Google employs several sites that have to be synchronized (in popular terms).
The routine month-to-month crawl occurs at various times for different web sites. The outcomes of this crawl are typically reflected at the time of the following update.
For a variety of months, starting early Summertime 2002, spidering of websites and changes have actually been observed to be going on all month, in between the routine monthly updates. This has actually come to be known as Everflux, and represents Google's continuing desire and efforts to keep their search appropriate, of high quality, and "minty fresh."
Everflux is another evolutionary step in the process of offering the most current and appropriate snapshot of the web to the general public. Google is adding to their worth as a search tool by offering their index a few of the very same qualities as what is being indexed. That is, the more fluid and adaptable an index of the web is, the more accurately it will be able to reflect the fluid and adaptable nature of the web.
These of you who evaluate web logs probably observe that traffic surges for certain search terms on certain days. Say you create a page on the web (or as the younger generation refers to it these days - you make a blog entry) about a movie which is just coming out on DVD and the "fresh crawl" daily process visits your site and makes note of it. Because of its significance in time (excessively streamlined: sort outcomes by pagerank and date), your page reaches the top of the SERPs for a few days. Eventually, though, the story falls off your homepage and is replaced by another story about another motion picture which is quickly gobbled by Google's robot. Meanwhile, the long-standing sites relating to that particular film restore their dominant positions in the SERPs. This is Everflux in full action.
As I am composing this short article, there are reports of a possibly calmer Everflux coming to a web browser near you. Google has really recently performed an upgrade to their software application, dubbed "Jagger". It appears that "Jagger" affected Everflux, but things started to decrease. It has actually been reported that the most fascinating effect of "Jagger" on rankings has actually been lessening the impact of reciprocal linking as a procedure of appeal. It looks like "Jagger" has negated the hard work of thousands of site owners. The outcome is pricey connecting campaigns that result in high rankings and high earnings have plummeted. On the other hand, article submission appears to have come through the "Jagger" update obviously safe and sound. Because Google has put more emphasis on one way links, I believe this is happening.
The moral of the "Jagger" upgrade story? Ensure that you do not follow the fads and the top new discovered ranking elements of the online search engine algorithm. If you have all your eggs in one basket, I guarantee you, Google is sure to trip you up ultimately. So, diversify your ranking efforts and usually, attempt to follow the very basic rules that web designers have been hearing because the beginning of the web: create your site for users, not for Google and not for robotics. Ensure every page has a distinct title (you know, the tag), do not put a google of keywords in the title, just one or a couple of that show the content of that page. Ensure every page has different material and various title. Most of us, myself consisted of, get lazy or simply copy and forget and paste pages to alter the title - Google's software sees all that and does not forgive. Utilize the old-fashioned tag, that is the "Header" tag. Google considers it to be respectful to have paragraph headings. Don't utilize images for titles, or anything text. Google does not appreciate your images and does rule out a page full of images to be useful - they put a great deal of emphasis on good old text. If you don't know what I'm talking about) and the keyword tags, use the description tag (read about Meta Tags. Do not keyword-spam, do not utilize entrances, do not hide text (you understand, white text on white background). Basically, play nice, a-la late 90s pure HTML sites. Hire a SEO consultant at the very least if all this is too complex. An analogy is the stock exchange. If you understand what you're doing, you understand what you're doing - essentially, you follow the guidelines and play nice. If you don't know what you're doing, yes you can mess around, but the majority of people have a consultant to prevent the ups and downs of the market shift. In the Google world, we call this shift Everflux
3. Conclusion - don't be terrified of the huge bad Everflux.
Even if you do not own and/or design and/or run your own site, it's interesting to see how all the information collected by humanity over centuries is put into place inside a so called index of indexes. It is interesting to see how the exponential increase in information that has to be indexed presents real challenges to a process that started as a mere science experiment and evolved into a cultural phenomenon. It is also interesting to see how the people at the steering wheel deal with such challenges and the creative solutions they come up with in order to tame the information overload monster that can literally eat it all, if unleashed.
Now if you do own, operate, design websites and if your paying bills on time process depends on the above mentioned process, it can be really frightening, as incertitude is the main enemy of happiness as we know it. As always, I believe that while you might not be able to control a process, your happiness will benefit dramatically from just the mere idea of understanding that process.
4. Conclusion - about Google
Someone should really write a book entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide to Googling and start it with an excerpt from Google's own "Information for Webmasters" resource:
Just do the normal things you should do:
1. Create a great site.
2. Submit your site to google on our "add url" form.
3. Get a link from the Open Directory Project or other directories (Yahoo, etc.).
4. Don't panic if your site takes a little while to show up in google. Be patient, and start to look around the web-- there's lots of great advice about improving your site for users and search engines.
Hope this helps, google.