In the first test for its users response speed, Google just released a patch to its Android operating system that corrects a bug in its browser that came to light about ten days ago, as well as some other minor details. The update process was reportedly smooth and completely automated for T-Mobile’s G1, the only commercially available phone that currently features Google’s mobile operating system.

Last week Charlie Miller, security expert, had found a security bug in the Android’s browser that could have allowed the execution of malware, software specifically designed to damage the data contained on the phone. Starting Saturday afternoon, G1 users are receiving a message inviting them to download a new, patched version of the browser, which is said to keep all the personal information — bookmarks, settings, etc. — in place. The update also brings a series of other fixes that should increase the overall efficiency of the platform (and, consequently, the battery life of all Android hand-held devices).

The first bug discovery was highly publicized by the specialized press all over the world: Miller, a security researcher that had already rooted out high-profile bugs in both Apple’s Mac OS X operating system and the iPhone, identified the bug and reported it to Google last week, on October 20th. Not much is known about the vulnerability, as Miller refused to comment on it because of security reasons: it is however known that it is a “buffer overflow” vulnerability that can be exploited by having users visiting a malicious website: “There’s a chance that the attacker could execute malicious code remotely with the same privileges as the user of the phone’s browser“, Miller said.

According to Miller’s reconstruction featured on techworld, after alerting Google a security researcher from the Android team contacted him privately for more information, also asking for what is commonly referred to as a “responsible disclosure” — in other terms, that he withhold information until a patch was released: at this point, Miller refused to wait to announce his discovery, even though he never disclosed details on how the vulnerability could be used to the advantage of crackers.

Miller’s justification for his own actions is that people should know there is a problem with the platform before they decide to buy the G1. Indeed, since much credit is attributed in the security and developer community to the person who first finds a critical bug, this behaviour is considered quite common and respectful for both the producer and the end users who are to buy the final product: “I don’t want to help the bad guys either, but people should have all the information before they make a decision to buy [the phone]. I think I’m totally in the right here“, he added.

A somewhat more detailed description of the problem can be found on the ISE site. Here it is explained that Android relies on 80 different open source packages, and that the vulnerability derives from the Android platform not using the most up-to-date version of some of them: while this is a common developing choice because of stability issues, in this case it meant the platform missed a recent update from a third-party component that corrected the problem.

Because of the publicity the vulnerability reached among the security community, Google representatives released a statement saying that the threat was not as big as it had been portrayed by some. In fact, as later pointed out by Miller himself, the architecture of the Android platform as a whole is more secure than that of the iPhone because of its compartmentalization and application sandboxing, so that each application runs as its own user and can only access its own files.

Step 1: Phrases that pay

Think of SEO as like cooking a meal. Keywords and keyphrases are your ingredients. Discovering phrases that pay is all about finding the right keyphrases for your business proposition, then deploying them for best effect in your site and campaign.

• Proposition development is about working out who your customers or audience are; what you can sell or promote to them online; how they will find your site; and what will convince them to do business with you.
• Keyword discovery is the first of three steps in my D–A–D keyword analysis technique. In discovery, you generate the longest list of possible search words and phrases your customers might use, with your competitors as a guide.
• Keyword attractiveness is the second D–A–D step and involves balancing keyword popularity and keyword competitiveness to determine the overall opportunity, or attractiveness, attached to each word or phrase.
• Keyword deployment is the third and final D–A–D step, where you use the principles of prominence, proximity, and density to work out how to chain, split, and splice together keywords into phrases that pay.

Step 2: Courting the crawl

Courting the crawl explains how to help Google to find your pages and index all of them appropriately, through building the right technical foundations and structure for your new or existing website.

• How Google finds. Your first important step in courting the crawl is learning how the Google spider, Googlebot, actually works and how to use sitemaps and robots.txt to initiate, control, and manage its crawl through your site.
• Setting up a new site contains vital information for new webmasters on how and where to host your site and how to select your domain name.
• Managing an existing site explains how to move your site to a new web host and/or move to a new domain without having an adverse impact on your website.
• Site structure and navigation concerns how to structure a site to the right depth and width to facilitate an effective crawl. It includes the optimization of your directory structure, file names, and file extensions.

Step 3: Priming your pages

Priming your pages covers the SEO art of page copywriting and asset optimization. This includes deploying your phrases that pay throughout your site and manipulating Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

• How Google stores. Before you can prime your pages you must understand how Google stores your content in its search index. This important chapter also covers the dreaded supplemental index and how to avoid it.
• On-page optimization is all about effective SEO copywriting of metadata, tags, page text, and other on-page elements, so that web pages are keyword rich for search engines but still read well for humans.
• Asset optimization. It is vital also to optimize the images, documents, videos, and other assets on your site. This section shows you how.
• SERPs and snippets outlines how Google displays its search results and how to manipulate the link and the snippet for your own pages, so that web surfers are enticed to click on the result and visit your site.

Step 4: Landing the links

Priming your pages is only a small part of the battle to get top rankings. By landing the links in a well-managed link-building campaign, you can go from also-ran to world champion and establish both the importance and the relevance of your site.

• How Google ranks. One of the most important sections in the book begins with an exploration of the Google algorithm (how sites are ranked or ordered within search results). It also covers PageRank, TrustRank, and text matching.
• Off-page optimization, the longest part of the book, incorporates strategies to build keyword-rich anchor-text links into your pages from other websites, so that the quality and quantity of your links exceed those of your competitors.
• What’s new in Web 2.0 explores how the emergence of hugely popular social networks has shifted the balance of traffic on the internet. The chapter specifically explains how you can use this to your advantage in your search campaign.
• Avoiding penalties is an introduction to the dark side of SEO: how to avoid using methods that could attract a Google penalty, and how to recover from and reverse a penalty if it happens to you.

Step 5: Paying for position

While 65% of people never click on paid (or sponsored) search results, 35% do. No comprehensive website promotion campaign is therefore complete without a full evaluation of paid search engine marketing.

• Selecting match drivers involves choosing the location, language, and time you want your ads to be searched in and selecting the phrases you wish to pay for (positive matches) and qualifying words you want to exclude (negative matches).
• Ad text optimization is the biggest challenge in copywriting: compelling a user to click on a link when all you have to work with are 25 characters for a title, 70 for the ad itself, and 35 for the URL. I show you how to achieve this most effectively.
• Landing page optimization. Your cost-per-click and conversion rates both benefit from well-written landing pages that deliver on the promise you made in the ad and channel the user through the rest of your site.
• Bid and campaign management is all about managing your campaigns, budget, day parting, bids, and ad variations to minimize the cost and maximize the return on investment. There’s more to it than you might think!

Step 6: Making the map

As the web gets bigger, so searches become more locally focused. This innovative step shows you how to exploit this by improving your position for locally qualified searches and on local Google instances. It also covers Google Maps and Google Earth.

• Language optimization. If your site is multilingual, it is important that Google knows this. This chapter shows you how to tag pages and individual text blocks for different languages and how to get ranked in local-language searches.
• Geographical optimization. This may surprise you, but users narrow down 35–45% of their searches to sites based in their own country. This chapter covers the key steps required to rank well in these local search instances.
• Google Earth and Google Maps. In this chapter you learn how to rank well in Google Maps and even Google Earth for local searches – a vital piece of futureproofing for the increasingly mobile web.
• Priming for local search. Many people add a place name to their regular search query. This chapter shows you how to factor this into your regular search campaign.

Step 7: Tracking and tuning
SEO is not a one-off process but an ongoing competitive struggle. You need to monitor your performance objectively, using reliable data, and feed this back into your campaign. This step shows you how.

• Google Analytics. Discover how to sign up for and use this amazing set of free tools from Google: learn how to monitor your paid and organic search traffic and track goal conversion and campaign return on investment.
• Google Webmaster Tools is the all-in-one interface for managing your crawl, monitoring your search rankings, and checking your backlinks. Google continues to enhance this now invaluable toolset.
• Other useful tools contains a round-up from across the web of tools for tracking PageRank and Traffic Rank, plus how to interpret your own website statistics. The chapter also explains how to use a Google API key, if you have one available.
• Tuning the campaign considers how to use the results of your ongoing monitoring activity to refine your campaign further and tune your site. It also looks at how to monitor what your competitors are up to and learn from them.

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend.  Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time.  We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming.  After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

This update seems to have revolved around three main areas:  domain age, backlinks and PageRank.

Domain Age

It appears that Google is presently giving a lot of weight to the age of a domain and, in this SEO’s opinion, disproportionately so.  While the age of a domain can definitely be used as a factor in determining how solid a company or site is, there are many newer sites that provide some great information and innovative ideas.  Unfortunately a lot of these sites got spanked in the last update.

On this tangent I have to say that Google’s use of domain age as a whole is a good filter, allowing them to “sandbox” sites on day one to insure that they aren’t just being launched to rank quickly for terms.  Recalling back to the “wild west days” of SEO when ranking a site was a matter of cramming keywords into content and using questionable methods to generate links quickly I can honestly say that adding in this delay was an excellent step that insured that the benefits of pumping out domains became extremely limited.  So I approve of domain age being used to value a site – to a point.

After a period of time (let’s call it a year shall we) the age should and generally has only had a very small influence on a site’s ranking with the myriad of other factors overshadowing the site’s whois data.  This appears to have changed in the recent update with age holding a disproportionate weight.  In a number of instances this has resulted in older, less qualified domains to rank higher than newer sites of higher quality.

This change in the ranking algorithm will most certainly be adjusted as Google works to maximize the searchers experience.  We’ll get into the “when” question below.

Backlinks

The way that backlinks are being calculated and valued has seen some adjustments in the latest update as well.  The way this has been done takes me back a couple years to the more easily gamed Google of old.  This statement alone reinforces the fact that adjustments are necessary.

The way backlinks are being valued appears to have lost some grasp on relevancy and placed more importance on sheer numbers.  Sites with large, unfocused reciprocal link directories are outranking sites with fewer but more relevant link.  Non-reciprocal links lost the “advantages” that they held over reciprocal links until recently.

Essentially the environment is currently such that Google has made itself more easily gamed than it was a week ago.  In the current environment, building a reasonable sized site with a large recip link directory (even unfocused) should be enough to get you ranking.  For obvious reasons this cannot

(and should not) stand indefinitely.

PageRank

On the positive side of the equation, PageRank appears to have lost some of it’s importance including the importance of PageRank as it pertains to the value of a backlinks.  In my opinion this is a very positive step on Google’s part and shows a solid understanding of the fact that PageRank means little in terms of a site’s importance.  That said, while PageRank is a less than perfect calculation subject to much abuse and manipulation from those pesky people in the SEO community it did serve a purpose and while it needed to be replaced it doesn’t appear to have been replaced with anything of substantial value.

A fairly common belief has been that PageRank would be or is being replaced by TrustRank and Google would not give us a green bar to gague a site’s trust on (good call Google).  With this in mind one of two things has happened; either Google has decided the TrustRank is irrelevant and so is PageRank and decided to scrap both (unlikely) or they have shifted the weight from PageRank to TrustRank to some degree and are just now sorting out the issues with their TrustRank calculations (more likely).  Issues that may have existed with TrustRank may not have been clear due to it’s weight in the overall algorithm and with this shift reducing the importance of PageRank the issues that face the TrustRank calculations may well be becoming more evident

In truth, the question is neither here nor there (as important a question as it may be).  We will cover why this is in the …

Conclusion

So what does all of this mean?  First, it means that this Thursday or Friday we can expect yet another update to correct some of the issues we’ve seen rise out of the most current round.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone too much, we’ve been seeing regular updates out of Google quite a bit over the past few months.

But what does this mean regarding the aging of domains?  While I truly feel that an aging delay or “sandbox” is a solid filter on Google’s part – it needs to have a maximum duration.  A site from 2000 is not, by default, more relevant than a site from 2004.  After a year-or-so the trust of a domain should hold steady or at most, hold a very slight weight.  This is an area we are very likely to see changes in the next update.

As far as backlinks go, we’ll see changes in the way they are calculated unless Google is looking to revert back to the issues they had in 2003.  Lower PageRank, high relevancy links will once again surpass high quantity, less relevant links.  Google is getting extremely good and determining relevancy and so I assume the current algorithm issues has more to do with the weight assigned to different factors than an inability to properly calculate a links relevancy.

And in regards to PageRank, Google will likely shift back slightly to what worked and give more importance to PageRank, at least while they figure out what went awry here.

In short, I would expect that with an update late this week or over the weekend we’re going to see a shift back to last week’s results (or something very close to it) after which they’ll work on the issues they’ve experienced and launch a new (hopefully improved) algorithm shift the following weekend.  And so, if you’ve enjoyed a sudden jump from page 6 to top 3, don’t pop the cork on the champaign too quickly and if you’ve noticed some drops, don’t panic.  More adjustments to this algorithm are necessary and, if you’ve used solid SEO practices and been consistent and varied in your link building tactics – keep at it and your rankings will return.

Source : http://www.isedb.com/db/articles/1689/1/Google-Algorithm-Update-Analysis/Page1.html