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Search Quality

This week we are supposed to start to see Jagger3 kick in. Apparently this is the search quality testing and improvement phase of this latest ranking upheaval on Google.

From my not very unbiased perspective here are a couple of related observations:

For the first time I can remember - over the weekend we got a visitor from the 399th search result out of 400 results. This gives a bit of a clue that people are not finding what they want on page 1 - as do the people yesterday who dived down to page 8 to find the Halloween music like Danse Macabre they were looking for.

For our own part the suggestions that a new filter may be catching sites with repetitive content pages has prompted more work to vary our product pages with in the limits of keeping them, relevant and helpful to visitors. When we started to produce these pages we did not expect them to feature is search results but we did a modest amount of optimisation around some target key words. On reflection some of this was a bit clumsy - if that is the cause of our present difficulties with Google we have certainly paid a high price.

We were digging around for more information about Jagger yesterday but there was not much to be had and I can't see the value of a subscription to webmaster world where Google Guy the much quoted source published his updates.

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