Google Mistake Shocker
December 12, 2003
Google, the darling of the internet industry, the champions of search engines, the anarchists of algorithims look like they've made a rather large mistake. And you don't want to making serious blunders when you're just about to launch yourself as an IPO.
On 15 November, Google changed the way it ranks pages by introducing an Over Optimisation Policy (OOP) that takes into account the incoming link text and the on-site keyword frequency. If too many sites that link to your site use link text containing a word that is repeated more than a certain number of times on your home page, that page will be assessed and will either be demoted to oblivion or removed entirely from the rankings. In a sense Google is penalizing sites for being optimised for the search engines--without any forewarning of a change in policy.
Seemingly this is causing untold amounts of damage to businesses that have worked hard on their linkage strategy, and at a time of year when e-commerce sites are at their busiest. In my opinion, Google is attempting to address the problems caused to its quality ranking system by bloggers (ahem!) but have gone about it in a very unintelligent way. You'd think with all the PhD's working for them that someone would have thought about the consequences of this taking place just before Christmas!
On a more macro scale, I'm waiting for the Google IPO to happen with much interest as I believe it will signal the start of a new technology cycle which can only be good for my business. Cock-ups like the Florida Update (what the OOP thing is being referred to) are only going to slow things down.