With the "Jagger" updates, some niche industries have reported a large number of sites affected. Why? While no one but Google knows all of the details for sure, we believe that many of these individual sites have directly or inadvertently taken part in artificial linking schemes (a major target of several updates, including the "Jagger" update).

We all know that inbound links (those that come from other sites and link to your own) play a large part in the rankings game. Some believe that when it comes to links, it is about the raw number of inbound links rather than the quality of the inbound links. Some link management/sales/broker companies work on this same assumption. If you ask them to increase the number of inbound links to a particular page or pages on your site, they'll do just that. They will add links to your page on artificial directories, blogs, link lists , forums, web rings, or other places.

Because of this, there are many links that come from sites that pop up over night, that have little to no relevance to the site that they are linking to, or exhibit an artificial linking pattern. Google, like most engines, would rather not give credit or benefit to those that attempt to subvert their algorithm. In theory, why should a site with a 1,000 links from throw away sites that have little to no traffic or relevance count toward improving the rankings or "voting" for the popularity of another site? It would be like counting fake Canadian voter ballots for an election in the United States or vice versa. These votes don't really exist as natural/real votes but even if they were real, they are not relevant to the election anyway. Why count them?

Along these same lines, we have also heard horror stories before and after "Jagger", of small businesses that have experienced this same problem with "submission" companies. The dubious ones sell their services based on the common misconception that submitting alone and with frequency will get you to a top ranking. They may even tell you that they can get your pages indexed within so many hours or days of using their service. But they often take the same steps as the spammy link companies in propagating links to your site on their own network of irrelevant sites. Before "Jagger" this would mean that your site could rise to the top. Then once you stop using their service (and assuming that your site was not caught by a search engine algorithm or a competitor did not report you), they remove their links to you and boom, you start to believe that submission really is the main activity that can get your pages ranked.

While Google and other engines are not perfect, they are constantly evolving their algorithms to detect these link networks and removing any boost in rankings that sites may receive from the hundreds or thousands of irrelevant, un-natural inbound links. So, we are hopeful that research within the industry and at the search engines will mean that spammy link networks will play a less and less relevant role. As others in the industry have pointed out, aggressive SEO could be getting harder to employ as the search engines become savvier.

So, if you are taking part in any of these linking schemes, and the network is found and devalued, your site make take a hit in rankings.

Will there be higher, i.e. better, rankings for those that are not taking part in link brokering schemes or using shady submission companies? If you have well optimized pages, normal/relevant links gained over time, a well organized site... more than likely, yes. On the other hand, we don't have a lot of control over who links to us or what information they may decide to take from our sites which ... may even help or hinder us under certain conditions. So if these spammers, who take your content and link to your site are themselves devalued, you may loose some of the boost in rankings that they might have temporarily provided (whether you had wanted the boost or not).

What if you find this type of link spam site or network? You could ask Google to look into it as well as notify other engines that might be using these artificial links to bolster rankings.

What if you feel that you have unjustly lost rankings due to this update or has your site been completely removed? One Googler, Matt Cutts, recommends that you attempt to use a reinclusion request at
http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py. He even has a short guide to the process at:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto/

Before asking for a reinculsion though, we would highly recommend that you run a Google search for your site with both www. (as in "www.site.com") and with out it (such as in "site.com"). If your site is not set up to force your address to display in one of these two ways, an engine can index your site in either way. As is normal after a major update like "Jagger", it seems that this problem has caught some web masters unaware. As this is one of the more fixable issues, now is a perfect time to take control of how your site is listed. Check out this article called "Unraveling the Versatile 301 Redirect".

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