Thursday, January 17, 2008

Search Engine Shake-Up

To say the last few weeks have been exciting, is an understatement. We've been on the edge of our seats here trying keep up on something we knew was going to affect every one of our clients. Another algorithm change by Google and Yahoo.
It all started when we submitted a new site map for a client we had done some changes for. A sitemap is something that makes the search engines like you a lot - because you make it easy for them to find what you want. Google and Yahoo both LOVE sitemaps - imagine a big dog wagging its tail when it wants something really bad and you have the idea. When we submitted our site map, it was seen and indexed in 23 minutes - a process that normally takes several days. We knew something was up. And then, we submitted a new client site and it was indexed in 24 hours. Again, that is a process we have waited months for, so this was really stimulating. We couldn't help but wonder what was going on. Then all of our SEO connections, blogs and newsletters were all talking about the same things - something big is up.
Well, that something turns out to be a very good thing for us. But we watched a lot of sites change, but nearly all of ours went up. One site, we know was using illegal link farms, just disappeared from Google all together. Sad to see it happen, since we know them, but it was always frustrating to be doing things carefully and correctly and see others jumping in ranking through banned methods. Lesson is - you can acheive great short term results with illegal links, but if you plan on staying around you had better play it safe.
And all that leads us to this - the reason we're in this business is that we LOVE what we do. (I'll spare another reference to the dog wagging its tail) And so we are constantly reading, practising and perfecting SEO methods. Sure, there is always a way to do it cheaper and faster. But as we just witnessed last week, the client who wanted to do it himself and seemed to be having great results, paid a heavy price. That hurts his bottom line, and that doesn't make us happy.
But what did make us happy is to see a number of our clients move up in the rankings. In our own rankings, we moved from nearly no where to #3 and #4 for ad agency Hawaii in Yahoo.
We're watching things real close. Guess Yahoo has filed for some patents on search engine algorithms and is ready to take on Google in a new way. We've not been fans of Yahoo for many years, but the changes they implemented recently were very good, and have caught our attention. I'm using Yahoo now to find information and getting more of what I want than I was in Google. I would have never guessed that a month ago!
Stay tuned, and we'll have more info on this SEO shake-up soon. And if you need search engine optimization, contact us today!