small businesses and SEOs were stunned late last week when the search engine results at Google suddenly changed, again. Saturday January 24 felt a lot like November 16, the date Google released its infamous Florida Update. Many in the SEO community are referring to this change as the "Austin Update" but we are not so sure this is a full-scale change in the way Google ranks websites. We are fairly certain this is an extension of the new algorithm now known as "Florida". Furthermore, we think Florida was actually introduced in June 2003, used for about a week and re-introduced on November 16. This would co-relate with a week of upset in the early summer. Here is the more solid information we have found thus far:

• This time, along with the spam, re-directs and 404's that have populated the Top20, we are now seeing a lot of "big-box" websites such as Amazon, Walmart and Craiglist. These sites tend to be considered "authorities" and have been online for several years. All these sites are massive and have absurdly high numbers of incoming links from both relevant and irrelevant sites.
• Page Rank seems to be playing a greater role in determining placement. We have noted however, that sites with a PR of 7 or above tend to have much greater power than they previously did. This "PR7+ club" is somewhat reminiscent of Inktomi's "Best of Web" database (2001).
• While sub-domains are still being considered as unique sites they do not appear to be contributing to the PR of the main site any longer.
• Duplicate listings seem to be being reduced.
• Java redirects still exist but Google seems to be removing them whenever possible.
• Google's listings are showing highly mixed results, with many Top20 listings that, according to what we thought we knew about Google, should NOT be ranking well. We have seen re-directs, sites under construction and blatant SPAM ranking well at Google
• The datacenters accessible by the Google Dance Tool are all either down or have changed their IP addresses. Along with the loss of access to the various datacenters, SEOs can no longer trust results shown at WWW2.google.com and WWW3.google.com to detail a fairly accurate description of future SERPs. These datacenters have not displayed any major discrepancies for the past few weeks.
• Google is re-measuring the value of incoming links, the former backbone of the PageRank formula. We have noticed huge changes in the value of incoming links to our website and those of our clients over the past week. While we are not quite ready to make a public statement on how links are being weighed, we have noted that both the text around a link and the anchor text used in a link appear to be extremely important factors.
• Google is not hitting all sectors at the same time. This is actually the biggest reason we feel that what has been labeled the Austin Update is in fact an extension of the Florida Update. Montreal based SEO Serge Thibodeau suggests that there is a trigger at Google that is set off by a specific number of searches per month for unique keywords. As theorized by Serge in his article PageRank: Meet Hilltop, once that number is passed, Google starts filtering using the Hilltop algorithm. If this point is correct, we can expect to see instability on Google for months to come!
• Good sites with clear content, obvious and consistent theming and extremely relevant links from high PR sites should do well on the new Google.

While these notes do not give us a full picture of what is happening with Google, they provide some very strong clues regarding Google's expectations for webmasters and SEOs. We have also noted that the "rules" posted on Google's website have not changed, even though Google itself does not seem to be rewarding smaller sites that follow those rules. Until we see the next update, it is very difficult to state exactly what is happening at Google and why. For the time being, we are going to stray away from conspiracy theories and concentrate on the belief that Google is simply trying to build a better mouse-trap.

Here are some elements we are experimenting with this week:

• The value and use of specific header tags <H1>, <H2>.
• The current role of "Fresh-Bot" in determining rankings.
• The use and arrangement of keyword phrases in titles and body text.
• Word stemming practices.
• Longevity of sites and how Google treats older sites (and why).
• Different forms of site mapping.
• Content Management Systems and Google-SEO compatibility

There are a few other things we have experimented with in the past few days that convince us that this new algorithm can be beneficial to webmasters and small businesses however, until we see others in the SEO industry writing about them, we're going to consider them trade secrets as they should give StepForth, and by extension our clients, a tremendous competitive advantage. For a few weeks at any rate.