Guys at webmasterworld.com this Recent Google update (02 Feb 2005) named Allegra.
As usual lots of people disappointed with the results, lots of people curses google, threatens that they will use MSN or Yahoo…
This happens with almost every update.. For every disappointed webmaster who lost the positions in serps there is a happy webmaster who gained the positions.
What happened?
I’ll try to tell my personal opinion about this update. First of all if you follow the news, you should know that there was new “rel” attribute created for the links. more info My first guess was that people started to loose the position because of sudden lost of “strong” links from blogs, where “rel” attribute was implemented. But I saw that the sites with no links from blogs are affected too. After some analysis I saw that the affect of Allegra update is the biggest for the sites who gained or lost the positions 6 weeks ago around 16 Dec 2004.

All our sites gained the positions, some remained in the same positions. I cant see the difference in very competitive areas or in not very competitive areas. Our sites got hit on December and now they got back.

Anyway webmasters should know that these who blogged a lot will loose the positions, these who spammed a lot – loose the positions. even if you tried to gather links legitimate way, you can loose the positions if the links and descriptions are massively the same. You should start linking more inner pages than main index page. 100 links to inner pages always were better than 100 links to 1 page.

Only natural linking is treated as normal linking.

It looks like minor algo tweak from google not the huge update.

From now on you can Send the feedback about google search results directly to google engineers.

How to know if the link passes PR on not?
There are few options how webmasters can link one or another resource from their page. The clear link should look like:
<a href=”link”>text</a>

Google recently announced new attribute “rel” to link. more info here

if you see that the code looks like this:
<a href=”link” rel=”nofollow”>text</a>
then this link doesn’t pass any value to the linked site.

Other options to link the site:
If webmaster don’t want to leak PR from their websites they usually use other linking techniques:
1. Uses JavaScript. The link looks like:
<a href=”#” onclick=”window.open(‘link’)”>text</a>
At this time this kind of link is not readable by spiders, but in our opinion its just a matter of time when it will be readable. From webmaster side I can say that its only a temporal workaround not to give any “credits” to the link and not to leak the PR from the site.

2. Redirect via PHP headers. Sometimes in the status bar and in the code you can see that there is NO link to your site, but by pressing the link you still get to the site. You see something similar to:

<a href=”link/goout.php?id=xx”>text</a> the link goes to the inner page and there redirected to your page via PHP header:
header(“Location: http://”.$ref->link())
We’ve made the tests in our sites and saw that this kind of link google understands and counts as a link. I can’t say for sure if it passes PR or gives some value, but if we think logically it should. If it’s not passes PR, then it’s also just a matter of time when the link will be treated as a Vote.

3. Redirect via meta refresh tag. another way of redirecting is via meta refresh tag. in this case you will also see the link to the inner page like this:
<a href=”link/goout.php?id=xx”>text</a> and this page will have meta refresh tag like this:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT=”xx; URL=link”>
In a perfect situation the link should be counted by google, if it’s not when I remain to my position that it’s just a matter of time when it will be counted…
4. There is an option when another meta tag can be added to this redirect page to prevent from leaking of Page rank and giving any value to the link. If you can see the redirect page or normal page with the meta tag like:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” /> then it is clear Order to google and other bots not to go through the links and not to index the page.

Be careful with the link exchange and with PR leak.

With the help of various WYSIWYG software, premade templates and freeware scripts now even a 10 years old boy can create a website and call himself a web designer. We can ask ourselves: “So do we need professionals for creating a project?”
For simple project like company’s home page the only thing you need is to know suitable Content management software and some kind of template. The page can be created for less than 100 usd. Will it be credible page?
As a matter of fact YES it Will. I’ll try to answer why.
1. If company will choose a template and adjust it to its website, about 90% of global visitors will not know it, there are lots of templates and milions of websites the probability to see the same template in the same theme is very small. Even if you create a unique design, there is a probability that someone will steal it and will use it on his site.
2. If you choose professional cms, the code there will be clean, in some CMSes even the structure, logic will be professional. So you can get even more value than other company which choose to hire some kind of designer or programmer to create unique site with own Content management system. Lets take for example my blog: it has no design, everything is powered by wordpress software and I can assure you that the creation of unique code is not necessary. WordPress did a good job and it will take a lot of time to you to create something similar yourself.
But there are minuses for that development strategy too:
1. If your page is more complex, it’s better to create your own code. Your needs might be bigger than software developers forecast in their software.
2. Every professional company will take care even about 10% of customers, who might understand that the company’s design is pre made template. So it is always better to have something unique.

what to avoid when creating a website?
1. avoid templates – even 10% of visitors matters.
2. avoid coders who does the sites very cheap, hire credible development company.
If you decided to create the site on you own then:
1. avoid frames, not every search engine robots reads frames, think about other strategy.
2. avoid dynamic url’s. Not every search engine understands normally special symbols like “?”i n urls. Even if they understand, these pages ranks lower.
3. avoid over usage of keywords. You don’t need to repeat the same phrase 20 times in the same page. Its unprofessional and looks like you created page for search engine, not for the user.
4. avoid shady techniques:
a) do not cloak the content. Show the same copy of the page to search engine robot and for the visitor.
b) do not add invisible text or tiny text. If you will create graphic background and will use the same color on text as your graphic background you still can be banned.
c) do not create doorway pages, it’s the technique from the dark ages, they don’t help anymore.
d) do not duplicate content within your site on any other site.
e) do not use short time refresh tags.
while all these techniques might help you in a short term, you will get punished in a long term. It’s not worth to risk.