A review of the Google ‘Jagger’ update

October 2005 saw the latest of Google’s occasional algorithm updates that created some significant changes to their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and set off much discussion and debate about the causes and effects. The update was nicknamed ‘Jagger’ and now that the dust has settled again, what were the main changes implemented by this update?

Over the last few years, Google has moved away from the regular updates to the search listings every 4-6 weeks (termed the ‘Google Dance’) and has preferred to implement continual and ongoing updates between its different data files that gradually lead to changes within the ranking results. However, there is occasionally a big update that affects lots of sites and leads to cries of foul and a perceived worsening of results.

The previous seismic change was the ‘Florida’ update in November 2003 and, more recently. ‘Jagger’ created a significant change during October last year. Cynics have noted that both of these changes occurred in the run-up to Christmas and consequently affected a lot of sites hoping for good sales from their hard fought ranking positions and who now only had the sponsored AdWords to fall back on, thus boosting Google’s revenues.

There may be some truth in this, but Google is ultimately intent on providing the best results that it can and to maintain its market leading position against the likes of Yahoo! and MSN Search. These major algorithm shifts tend to be a response to perceived manipulations of the search results and spam tactics going on within the results. Google doesn’t review and penalise spam sites individually, but it does pick up trends and common practices and then react to stop their overriding influence.

There has been much debate and a certain amount of speculation about what Google did this time. The words of Matt Cutts – a Google employee – are often analysed through his blog plus recent patent applications by Google have also been considered. Many of the SEO discussion forums are full of comment, either based on testing or hearsay, but of course Google continues to keep its algorithms secret.

The main reasons for the Jagger update appear to be Google’s attempts to remove the increasing amount of link spam and automatically generated websites providing content ‘scraped’ from other sources. In addition the massive increase in blogs has to be accounted for, as does Google’s continual growth in data collection and new sources of information from all the products it’s been launching over the past year.

As Google’s success has relied so much on the importance of links between sites and link ‘relevancy’, then Google has tried to redress the balance from the many tricks being employed to take advantage of this system. Google may also be using the vast amount of information collected historically to identify trends and sites included in link spam structures, so that many of these were affected by the recent update.

Fortunately, very few of our clients suffered from the Jagger update and many gained higher positions. This probably reflects our avoidance of link spam sites and our more dedicated approach to building quality links to sites, which can be a slow and painstaking task, but one that is built on a long-term ranking investment.

If you’d like to know more about the latest Google changes and the impact on your site, or if you’d like to know more about a link building strategy fr your site, please contact us now for more details.

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