Thoughts On July 2008 Ranking Changes On Google.co.uk

After the abrupt changes in June on Google.co.uk and other sites it looks like Google giving a lot more weight to sites with a LOT of backlinks. In some of the more spammy niches we see sites that were gone three months ag are back and stronger than ever due to their huge number of backlinks from footer spam or similar tactics.I would look for an update to fix this mistake in the next 30 to 60 days as I think the quality on this update was not the best and they will tweak this problem out relatively soon.

In the mean time if you have a site it doesn’t hurt to encourage mass links to your site using good content, useful posts, useful widgets or anything else. Rounding out your link profile is important so that these updates don’t cause problems. If you have good focused links from quality sites spend a little time focusing on the masses. That way when Google relies on pure link numbers you will be fine. Just remember to stay away from tactics that are not going to favor your site in the long term. Things like using web counters, WordPress footers, or so on to make users link to you without them knowing it is going to cause penalties from Google and not help your business in the long term.