Search Engine Optimization & Google Bourbon Algorithm Update

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google's search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days.

For webmasters and SEOs, an examination of the new Google Webmaster Guidelines is a definite must. Google has recently changed its webmaster guidelines which are also considered to be a primer on "ethical SEO" practices in relation to Google placements. Google has recently updated its webmaster guidelines to include information on "supplemental listings", crawling frequencies and prefetching. Google has also posted information on its new Google Sitemaps experiment.

Google Sitemaps is perhaps the most important new feature for SEOs offered by Google in a long time. Said to be an experiment in spidering, Google Sitemaps invites webmasters to feed site data directly to Google through an XML sitemap page. Webmasters and SEOs can now tell Google exactly which sections of their sites to crawl, and providing they are keeping their XML sitemap current,
when and where to look for changes to their sites. This experimental initiative will especially help webmasters working with database driven sites or large Ecommerce sites where documents are subject to frequent change and are often found behind
long-string URLs. Google has been kind enough to provide detailed information on establishing an XML feed and setting priorities for Googlebot.

As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain's unique topic focus. In order to keep themselves accessible, understandable and relevant, Google's teams of engineers, programmers and public relations specialists are involved in what appears to be a massive overhaul of the
interface, public documents and the basic sorting algorithm that produces organic results. As in previous years, how this all plays out in the end is entirely up to the searching public. From the SEO/SEM perspective, it is a good thing Google is in the midst of this update. Web workers have been demanding a greater degree of transparency from Google for some time and perhaps these updates are the beginning of a new commitment to communication from the Googleplex.

Highlights from an article by Jim Hedger for Site Pro News