Whats going on in Google update land?

Some of you may have realized we are in the middle of a Google update. If you haven’t you must be sound asleep and it isn’t very good seo practice to fall asleep even for a few seconds.
Coincidentally MSN and Yahoo! have been rolling out updates over the same period of time. Kinda leads you to wonder whether Google leads the mob or what

So anyways what is going on?
Well for starters we got a update going on. Looks like we will be having more cry babies before it is done. Before I go any further I want to say that no matter what happens to your site during the update don’t do anything stupid. Let the update finish and wait and you might get everything back to normal or even better. If you do something stupid you may regret it the rest of your life. These updates are meant to throw you off your feet so if you do get knocked down don’t make it worse by crawling around in the dust trying to fix it yourself.

I believe it was August 25-27 that the backlinks in Google began updating on the following Data Centers 64.233.187.104 and 64.233.187.99. Since then they have been updated on most of the data centers or at least from what I can tell.

All my pages went supplemental….
Lately we have noticed that alot of pages are going supplemental for no apparent reason. And it isn’t just the little guys either. The big guys are getting hit as well. Google, MSN, Ebay and many other major sites are also going supplemental. It isn’t just a few pages but mass amounts. We got a good number going supplemental for all these sites. Luckily I haven’t noticed any of my pages going supplemental except my forum and old blog posts(which are now deleted) which I am not worried about. My other sites don’t seem to be getting many either. And those that are don’t look that bad so probably will get back out as soon as the update.
Again these are not real supplemental pages. Most of these will go back to the original index when the update is over.
Google updates cause many strange things to happen which are usually fixed after the update. This doesn’t mean everything will go back to normal. Actually it will be quite different depending the category however your site doesn’t have to be the one that disappears.
Now I know alot of you are asking how can I get my pages out of the supplemental index?
You can’t and I would recommend you don’t try. Just leave your site the way it is. Don’t go editing meta tags, body text/content, adding/editing or removing pages or partial content. It will only make your chances of staying down much higher. In the Big Daddy update many sites tried to fix ‘the problem’ but because they didn’t know what was going on they screwed up their sites and did more damage than if they would have just left it alone. Now I am not seeing you should stop link building at this time. I don’t believe that will really effect you and will actually do you good. I would recommend one-way link building however over recip linking especially at this time.

PageRank Updates
The PageRank data is also being updated and the toolbar is reflecting this. Some sites like one or two of mine already got updated while others still are awaiting the PageRank update. For my firefox toolbar most of my site still haven’t been updated.
The following data centers are updated with the current PageRank values. This may not be the complete list but appears to be from what I have checked.

Data Centers with Updated PageRank:

The above data centers also appear to have updated backlinks as well.The following are a list of data centers. Yes means the data center is update with current backlinks and No means it hasn’t yet.

This will change as the update goes on but appears to be the accurate right now.

I am losing PageRank in this update
I have noticed that alot of sites are losing PageRank. I can’t say it has missed me. My main site has lost 1 PR however my other 2 blogs which are fairly new haven’t. What does this mean? Well it could be a variety of things. First of all Google could be discrediting recip links and other spammed methods further. It could also mean another thing. This is just my personal hunch and feel free to come up with your own ideas but I think google is attempting to increase the value of the PageRank. Maybe not its effect on rankings because I still think it has no effect but I think Google wants the PageRank value more in conjunction with the importance rating, the real PageRank, quality of backlinks and rankings. I think Google is lowering the PageRank of certain sites so as to give the higher numbers more of a value. Now I can’t really prove this but it seems like a fair idea to me.
However again it could also be just devaluation in link value or site importance which results in link value devaluation.

When will this update end?
I am not quite sure. These updates don’t really have a set time to start or end as far as I know. They start and end whenever the Google guys say so. But it appears to be almost over. I would say give it a few more weeks and watch the data centers.

What Can I do to regain lost ground from the update?
Like I have already mentioned don’t try and change your site especially those pages which appear to have gone supplemental. Wait for it all to finish. I would recommend trying to find real quality relevant sites to get one-way links from. If your main backlinks are made up of recip links you may get hit hard especially if they are irrelevant.
I would also recommend writing new content pages which are very informational and would be useful to your visitors.

In all these updates Google throws out I never get effected and infact I seem to get much better traffic and conversions right after a Google Update. How is this? I believe you have to ride into the waves to survive. Alot of webmasters are riding paralel to the waves or trying to escape them. You will get knocked over everytime. You got to watch google. Watch your competitors. There is really alot of data in that list of top ten on google. Watch them fall of the top and try and figure out what went wrong. Ohh #2 decided google wanted to see a different page than the rest of the world so bang they are dead and so on. This and researching ideas and reading other well educated seos ideas is how you can get out of a update without a scratch or better yet get much better rankings besides.

Some rules to go by to know where your site will end up after a update.
-Content less sites or pages that have only a few words have a tendancy to end up in the trash can(supplemental index) unless they got really good backlinks which is unlikely for a very obvious reason.
-Sites that use shady techniques or gray hat are likely to be caught and either banned or penalized. Design, write, target your site towards people not google or spiders. If you do you will be sorry.
-Site which practice link building or practice using other factors which have a tendency to get spammed should be careful because in the next update your site could disappear or atleast lose alot of positions.

I will probably try to add more info as I can about the updates. If you have a question about the update please post a comment asap so I can answer it for you if I can.

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