Google Update January 2007

'Ol MC recently gave a little ‘heads up’ around the time of the TBPR and BackLinks export updates. While there is rarely any gems to be gleaned, there are certainly many points worth covering that are commonly asked/discussed topics.

This is what he likes to call ‘ infrastructure status reports – this is the recent Google infrastructure status report and here is the previous report from back in October 2006.

Apparently things “are relatively quiet.” Over with the SQ Team (Search Quality). I am certain the spammers will be happy to give you guys plenty to play with...hang tight Matt.

Of course we simply have to talk about the ToolBar PageRank export ( that’s TBPR for ya’ll following along at home). As for the topic of seeing ranking changes in tandem with the new exports he said,

“don’t expect traffic or rankings to dramatically change, because these PageRank values are already incorporated into our scoring. The same quarterly-ish data push that updates PageRank in the toolbar also updates the data for related:, link: and info: (remember that operator?).”

He then highlight some Q & A from the last PageRank hulla-baloo. A personal fav to be sure.

He also slides by a reference to a Dec 2006 Data Push post to refresh us on the differences between TB and BackLink exports and an actual data push (index refresh)

Supplemental Results; on the topic of supplemental index issues Matt mentioned that

“supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”

– Of course Matt, we all understood what you meant :0) - the supplemental index is still a work in progress and is said to be ‘fresher’ – I assume they are using a new brand of laundry detergent – and that web site owners “may see more traffic from their supplemental results pages.”

Data Refresh; to Matt’s credit this was covered before – but I know many webmasters keep asking about it. People got used to those monthly (sort of) index refreshes and keep watching the radar for the next blip, all the while getting per’plexed’ about why SERPs can be jumpy these days… Along those lines Matt mentions;

“ one of our data pushes that used to happen every 3-4 weeks is now happening more like every 1-2 days. Regular searchers won’t really notice this, but if you see more variance in your rankings, I believe it’s probably due to that data push happening more frequently. “

Then some chit chat on some Geo-targeting issues which all seem to be working themselves out.

..and that’s it for the highlights… for me at least. ..