Google update?

Google’s resident rock star, Matt Cutts, has posted that a little Google Dance is underway again. Google probably doesn’t derive any pleasure from sending the ranks of SEO and SEM pros hustling to tweak hundreds of web sites for better placement each time they update the index.

Keeping the index relevant and effective for its search users does mean updates are necessary.

“(W)e are constantly working to improve our algorithms and scoring,” Matt Cutts posted on his blog. If you’re reading this article and wondering who Matt Cutts might be, he was one of Google’s first search advertising engineers.

Now, he is discussing the latest update, one in the ongoing series of mini-updates that the search engine performs from time to time. At one time Google could do one big update of everything, but the search engine has had to switch to the more frequent, smaller updates it performs now.

The latest version may include an update to PageRank, as Cutts noted:

Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; I’m guessing within the next few days. I still expect some flux after that though, just to let you know.

Google updates the index for reasons beyond page rank. Cutts wrote about some of those other reasons:

Some changes are hardly noticed at all. Some changes (e.g. user interface improvements) are more visible. Some changes have nothing to do with spam, such as the changes for Chinese and Europe…. Some changes do try to decrease spam or increase core quality.

Keep an eye on those Google search results. It may be time to update your site again.