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Google Allegra Update Feb, 2005!
NOTE: Please read this article very carefully. It will help you to understand important aspects of Google Allegra Update, February - 2005. Note that "Allegra" is NOT an official name, so are Brandy Update or Florida Update or any other update. These names have been given by a very popular website and so are accepted in the Webmaters community.
What is Google Update?
The name "Google Dance" has often been used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google's index update occurred on average once per month. During an index update there was significant movement in search results and Google showed new backward links for pages. Last Google update was in Nov 2003, known as the Florida update. However, since then Google started to update it's index continuously. It appears that, still, there has to be an update of the complete index once in a while and during this time new backward links are shown. But, because of the continuous update, the effects on search results seem to be rather insignificant.
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The Technical Background of the Google Dance:
The Google search engine pulls its results from more than 10,000 servers which are simple Linux PCs that are used by Google for reasons of cost. Naturally, an index update cannot be proceeded on all those servers at the same time. One server after the other has to be updated with the new index.
Many webmasters think that, during the Google Dance, Google is in some way able to control if a server with the new index or a server with an old index responds to a search query. But, since Google's index is inverse, this would be very complicated. As we will show below, there is no such control within the system. In fact, the reason for the Google Dance is Google's way of using the Domain Name System (DNS).
Google Dance and DNS:
Not only Google's index is spread over more than 10,000 servers, but also these servers are, as of now, placed in 13 different data centers. These data centers are mainly located in the US (i.e. Santa Clara, California and Herndon, Virginia) and in Dublin, Ireland.
In order to direct traffic to all these data centers, Google could thoeretically record all queries centrally and then send them to the data centers. But this would obviously be inefficient. In fact, each data center has its own IP address (numerical address on the internet) and the way these IP addresses are accessed is managed by the Domain Name System.
Basically, the DNS works like this: On the Internet, data transfers always take place in-between IP addresses. The information about which domain resolves to which IP address is provided by the name servers of the DNS. When a user enters a domain into his browser, a locally configured name server gets him the IP address for that domain by contacting the name server which is responsible for that domain. (The DNS is structured hierarchically. Illustrating the whole process would go beyond the scope of this paper.) The IP address is then cached by the name server, so that it is not necessary to contact the responsible name server each time a connection is built up to a domain.
The records for a domain at the responsible name server constitute for how long the record may be cached by a caching name server. This is the Time To Live (TTL) of a domain. As soon as the TTL expires, the caching name server has to fetch the record for a domain again from the responsible name server. Quite often, the TTL is set to one or more days. In contrast, the Time To Live of the domain www.google.com is only five minutes. So, a name server may only cache Google's IP address for five minutes and has then to look up the IP address again.
Each time, Google's name server is contacted, it sends back the IP address of only one data center. In this way, Google queries are always directed to different data centers by changing DNS records. On the one hand, the DNS records may be based on the load of the single data centers. In this way, Google would conduct a simple form of load balancing by its use of the DNS. On the other hand, the geographical location of a caching name server may influence how often it receives the single data centers' IP addresses. So, the distance for data transmissions can be reduced.
How data centers, DNS and Google Dance are related, is easily answered. During the Google Dance, the data centers do not receive the new index at the same time. In fact, the new index is transferred to one data center after the other. When a user queries Google during the Google Dance, he may get the results from a data center which still has the old index at one point im time and from a data center which has the new index a few minutes later. From the users perspective, the index update took place within some minutes. But of course, this procedure may reverse, so that Google switches seemingly between the old and the new index.
Finally, it shall be noted that Google did the DNS load balancing by themselves until September 2003. Since then, they are out sourcing it.
Why does Google update?
"We do in-depth testing of the changes we make to ensure that we're improving our relevancy and results," said Google software engineer Matt Cutts.
Google has seen their search engine results manipulated by SEOs to a significant extent over the past few years. Their reliance on PageRank™ to grade the authority of pages has led to the wholesale trading and buying of links with the primary purpose of influencing rankings on Google rather than for natural linking reasons.
Google SEO consisted mainly of ensuring your page had your primary search phrase placed in all appropriate places on your page and that your sought after phrase was inserted in the anchor text of any incoming links. Thousands of SEOs and webmasters followed these simple and basic rules and loved the fact that Google seemed to reward them by giving them top listings.
People forgot the fact that Google really wanted to give surfers the most "authoritive" results. So someone looking for cheap computers found the site that had "earned" a reputation for providing cheap computers - not just that a webmaster had optimised their site to make it look that way by getting links with the phrase "cheap computers" included on a load of unrelated sites. This update was an attempt to redress the balance and get back to the way Google thinks that results should be calculated.
It is certain that Google will be watching the result of their change and will adjust the algo if they think it will reward sites of merit and increase relevancy. Whatever happens, though, the days of easy rankings through simple SEO are over.
Google Allegra Update - The Five Important Changes:
Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google recently said, "Google has made five significant changes to its algorithmic formulas in the last two weeks." Feb 17th 2004.
While we can only guess at what those changes were, the following are probably a good bet.
1. Increase in Index Size
Google's spider, Googlebot, has had a busy few weeks -- at the time of the update, Google announced that it had massively increased the size of its index.
This move was probably made to ensure Google made headlines at the same time as Yahoo! (for example, in this report in the BBC News, Feb 18th 2004). However, in order to increase the index size, Google may have had to re-include some of the pre-Florida results that had previously been dropped.
2. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
This is a very significant new technology that Google has always been interested in, and the incorporation of LSI has been on the cards for some time. If you are an insomniac, then Yu et al.'s paper is quite helpful in explaining the concept, but, in short, LSI is about using close semantic matches to put your page into the correct topical context.
It's all about synonyms. LSI may see Google effectively remove all instances of the search keyword when analysing your page, in favour of a close analysis of other words. For example, consider the search term 'travel insurance'. LSI-based algorithms will look for words and links that pertain to related topics, such as skiing, holidays, medical, backpacking, and airports.
3. Links and Anchor Text
Links have always been the essence of Google, but the engine is steadily altering its focus. The importance of Page Rank (PR), Google's unique ranking system, is being steadily downgraded in favour of the nature, quality, and quantity of inbound and outbound link anchor text. If PR is downgraded, and the wording of inbound links is boosted, this may explain, to a large degree, the position in which many sites currently find themselves.
For example, most people will link to a site's homepage. In the past, due to internal linking structures, PR was spread and other pages benefited. Now, it is more important for Webmasters to attract links that point directly to the relevant pages of their sites using anchor text that's relevant to the specific pages.
Furthermore, Google seems to be using outbound links to determine how useful and authoritative a site is. For example, directories that are doing well are those that direct link to the sites, rather than use dynamic URLs.
4. Neighbourhoods
Now, more than ever, has the question of who's linking to your site become critical. Links must be from related topic sites (the higher the PR the better); those links are seen to define your 'neighbourhood'.
If we again consider the example of travel insurance, big insurance companies might buy links on holiday-related sites in order to boost their ranking. These businesses will actively invest in gaining targeted inbound links from a broad mix of sites. Consequently, their neighbourhoods appear tightly focused to Google.
5. Downgrading of Traditional Tag-Based Optimisation
Clever use of the title, h1, h2, bold, and italics tags, and CSS, is no longer as important to a site's ranking as it once was. It is very interesting to listen to Sergey (co-founder of Google) talk about this, because he's the one usually quoted about the ways in which people manipulate his index. Google has taken big steps to downgrade standard SEO techniques in favour of LSI and linking, which are far less manipulable by the masses.
Author : San Christopher
Date Posted : March 10, 2005
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