Google Algorithm Busted

Everflux - Google Phenomena Explained

1. Introduction - about Google
You are probably aware that Google is a "search engine", that almost 80% of the internet searches in the world are done through Google. If you are a metro- or uber-geek, you probably know that the term "to google" became part of the English language, as in "she googled her high school boyfriends". And if you are really, really on top of things all trivia and have Wikipedia as your browser's home page, you might even know that the name "Google" is a play on the word "Googol", which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nine-year-old nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeros.
2. Everflux - what is that?
Some unknown "Glossary of SEO terms" (SEO = Seo) defines the Everflux as "An anomaly by which pages can quickly appear and after that vanish in Google page rankings. Generally occurs to freshly included web pages."
Basically, Everflux refers to the constant modification in Google's Search Engine Outcomes Pages (SERPs), while Google constantly searches the web looking for "minty fresh" content, changing their index appropriately.
In plain English, periodically, ranks go up or down arbitrarily, link popularity is totally lost, pages that have been indexed for many years just disappear and are no place to be found in Google and other similar Outer Limits phenomena. Many people whose income depends proportionally on their prospective consumers' ability to discover them via a Google search, may believe their business is destroyed, they are ruined, and I can plainly see why.
According to online forums at Webmasterworld, the very first sightings of the phenomenon occurred in July 2002. Later on that year, the following speculation on Everflux emerged: "Finally, they could be dealing with the index, rolling indexes back, switching parts of the index, supporting parts of the index, rewriting some angering part of the index, deleting parts of an index - or a multitude of other actions or problems that only Google might learn about."
My advice on our fresh crawl is to view it as a nice "bonus" on top of Google's deep index. Users can always search our full index, but sometimes we can serve up even fresher pages as an extra nicety."
Google introduced a "fresh crawl" process to make their results as appropriate and as fresh as possible. It runs each day. The purpose of the day-to-day fresh crawl is to update Web pages in the index that change frequently. This enables Google to provide outcomes that are updated with present occasions.
Google likewise does one significant upgrade monthly, which typically begins anywhere from around the 20th or 19th of the month to roughly the 28th of the month. The upgrade procedure continues for a number of days, with search results appearing to fluctuate as the update continues. Once the update has actually been completed, the brand-new information migrates to Google's partner websites. The primary factor for the variation is that Google utilizes a number of sites that need to be synchronized (in popular terms). While this procedure happens, search engine result may appear to leap and details may appear to vanish and re-appear. It is similar in idea with the idea of DNS propagation.
The regular month-to-month crawl happens at different times for various website. The outcomes of this crawl are usually reflected at the time of the following upgrade.
For a variety of months, beginning early Summer 2002, spidering of websites and modifications have been observed to be going on all month, in between the routine monthly updates. This has come to be known as Everflux, and represents Google's continuing desire and efforts to keep their search pertinent, of high quality, and "minty fresh."
Everflux is another evolutionary step in the procedure of providing the most recent and pertinent picture of the web to the public. Google is adding to their worth as a search tool by giving their index some of the very same qualities as what is being indexed. That is, the more fluid and adaptable an index of the web is, the more accurately it will have the ability to show the fluid and versatile nature of the web.
Say you create a page on the web (or as the younger generation refers to it these days - you make a blog entry) about a movie which is just coming out on DVD and the "fresh crawl" daily process visits your site and makes note of it. Eventually, though, the story falls off your homepage and is replaced by another story about another movie which is soon gobbled by Google's robot. This is Everflux in full action.
Google has very recently performed an update to their software, dubbed "Jagger". It appears that "Jagger" affected Everflux, but things started to slow down. I believe this is happening because Google has put more emphasis on one way links.
The moral of the "Jagger" upgrade story? Ensure that you do not follow the fads and the top new discovered ranking factors of the online search engine algorithm. If you have all your eggs in one basket, I promise you, Google makes certain to journey you up eventually. Diversify your ranking efforts and generally, try to follow the very basic rules that webmasters have been hearing since the beginning of the web: design your website for users, not for Google and not for robots. Make certain every page has an unique title (you understand, the tag), do not put a google of keywords in the title, simply one or a couple of that reflect the content of that page. Make sure every page has different material and different title. Most of us, myself included, get lazy or just copy and paste pages and forget to change the title - Google's software sees all that and does not forgive. Utilize the old-fashioned tag, that is the "Header" tag. Google considers it to be polite to have paragraph headings. Do not use images for titles, or anything text. Google does not appreciate your images and does rule out a page filled with images to be helpful - they put a lot of emphasis on excellent old text. If you don't know what I'm talking about) and the keyword tags, use the description tag (read about Meta Tags. Do not keyword-spam, do not use gateways, do not conceal text (you understand, white text on white background). Generally, play good, a-la late 90s pure HTML websites. If all this is too complicated, hire a SEO consultant at the minimum. An example is the stock market. If you know what you're doing, you know what you're doing - essentially, you follow the guidelines and play great. If you do not know what you're doing, yes you can dabble, but most people have a consultant to avoid the ups and downs of the marketplace shift. In the Google world, we call this shift Everflux
3. Conclusion - don't be terrified of the big bad Everflux.
Even if you do not own and/or design and/or run your own site, it's interesting to see how all the information collected by humanity over centuries is put into place inside a so called index of indexes. It is interesting to see how the exponential increase in information that has to be indexed presents real challenges to a process that started as a mere science experiment and evolved into a cultural phenomenon. It is also interesting to see how the people at the steering wheel deal with such challenges and the creative solutions they come up with in order to tame the information overload monster that can literally eat it all, if unleashed.
Now if you do own, operate, design websites and if your paying bills on time process depends on the above mentioned process, it can be really frightening, as incertitude is the main enemy of happiness as we know it. As always, I believe that while you might not be able to control a process, your happiness will benefit dramatically from just the mere idea of understanding that process.
4. Conclusion - about Google
Someone should really write a book entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide to Googling and start it with an excerpt from Google's own "Information for Webmasters" resource:
Just do the normal things you should do:
1. Create a great site.
2. Submit your site to google on our "add url" form.
3. Get a link from the Open Directory Project or other directories (Yahoo, etc.).
4. Don't panic if your site takes a little while to show up in google. Be patient, and start to look around the web-- there's lots of great advice about improving your site for users and search engines.
Hope this helps, google.