Google Ranking Phenomena Explained

Everflux - Google Phenomena Explained

1. Introduction - 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 odd "Glossary of SEO terms" (SEO = Seo) defines the Everflux as "An anomaly by which pages can quickly appear and after that vanish in Google page rankings. Typically strikes newly added websites."
Basically, Everflux describes the constant modification in Google's Online search engine Results Pages (SERPs), while Google constantly scours the web trying to find "minty fresh" content, changing their index appropriately.
In plain English, sometimes, ranks increase or down randomly, link appeal is entirely lost, pages that have been indexed for years simply vanish and are nowhere to be found in Google and other similar Outer Limits phenomena. The majority of people whose income depends proportionally on their prospective clients' capability to find them through a Google search, might believe their service is ruined, they are messed up, and I can plainly see why.
According to forums at Webmasterworld, the very first sightings of the phenomenon happened in July 2002. Later on that year, the following speculation on Everflux emerged: "Finally, they could be working on the index, rolling indexes back, changing parts of the index, backing up parts of the index, rewording some offending part of the index, deleting parts of an index - or a plethora of other actions or problems that just Google might learn about."
Legend has it that there is one ex-Google worker who passes the name of Googleguy, who posts in related online forums. He used this description: "As we do a complete crawl of the web, we find the majority of the sites from our fresh crawl and put them in our routine index. My recommendations on our fresh crawl is to see it as a nice "reward" on top of Google's deep index. Users can always browse our full index, however in some cases we can provide even fresher pages as an additional nicety."
Google introduced a "fresh crawl" process to make their results as relevant and as fresh as possible. This allows Google to provide results that are up-to-date with current 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 different times for different web sites. The results of this crawl are normally shown at the time of the following update.
For a number of months, beginning early Summertime 2002, spidering of changes and sites have been observed to be going on all month, in between the regular month-to-month updates. This has actually happened known as Everflux, and represents Google's continuing desire and efforts to keep their search relevant, of high quality, and "minty fresh."
Everflux is another evolutionary step in the process of using the most recent and appropriate snapshot of the web to the general public. Google is adding to their value as a search tool by providing their index some of the exact 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 have the ability to show the fluid and adaptable nature of the web.
These of you who analyze web logs most likely notice that traffic rises for certain search terms on particular days. For instance, state you produce a page online (or as the more youthful generation describes it these days - you make a blog site entry) about a film which is simply coming out on DVD and the "fresh crawl" everyday procedure sees your site and makes note of it. Because of its relevance in time (excessively simplified: sort outcomes by pagerank and date), your page climbs to the top of the SERPs for a couple of days. Eventually, however, the story falls off your homepage and is changed by another story about another motion picture which is soon gobbled by Google's robot. On the other hand, the long-standing websites concerning that particular film restore their dominant positions in the SERPs. This is Everflux completely action.
Google has very recently performed an update to their software, dubbed "Jagger". It appears that "Jagger" affected Everflux, but things started to slow down. I believe this is happening because Google has put more emphasis on one way links.
The moral of the "Jagger" update story? Make certain that you do not follow the fads and the leading brand-new found ranking elements of the search engine algorithm. If you have all your eggs in one basket, I guarantee you, Google is sure to trip you up eventually. Diversify your ranking efforts and generally, try to follow the very basic rules that webmasters have been hearing since the beginning of the web: design your website for users, not for Google and not for robots. Make sure every page has a distinct title (you understand, the tag), don't put a google of keywords in the title, simply one or a couple of that reflect the material of that page. Make certain every page has various content and various title. The majority of us, myself consisted of, get lazy or just copy and forget and paste pages to change the title - Google's software application sees all that and does not forgive. Utilize the old-fashioned tag, that is the "Header" tag. Google considers it to be polite to have paragraph headings. Don't utilize images for titles, or anything text. Google does not care about your images and does not consider a page filled with images to be helpful - they put a lot of emphasis on excellent old text. Utilize the description tag (check out Meta Tags if you do not understand what I'm discussing) and the keyword tags. Do not keyword-spam, do not use entrances, do not hide text (you understand, white text on white background). Basically, play great, a-la late 90s pure HTML sites. Hire a SEO consultant at the very least if all this is too complex. An example is the stock exchange. If you understand what you're doing, you know what you're doing - basically, you follow the guidelines and play good. If you do not understand what you're doing, yes you can mess around, however most people have an adviser to avoid the ups and downs of the marketplace shift. In the Google world, we call this shift Everflux
3. Conclusion - do not be frightened of the big bad Everflux.
Even if you do not own and/or style 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:
[...] "Don't Panic." 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.