1. Introduction – about Google
Unless you’re a web surfer in the true sense of the concept, if you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with Google. However, you think you know Google. You probably know that Google is a “search engine”, that almost 80% of Internet searches in the world are done through Google. If you’re a subway or uber geek, you probably know that the term “to google” became part of the English language, like “she googled her boyfriends from high school.” And if you’re really into all the trivia and have Wikipedia as your browser’s home page, you might even know that the name “Google” is a pun on the word “Googol,” which was coined by Milton Sirotta , nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938, to refer to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeros. But here’s some geek trivia you might not know about: The spelling “Google” is also used in Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” in which one of Deep Thought’s designers asks, “And you don’t?” said Fook, leaning forward eagerly, “a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Wit who can calculate the trajectory of every dust particle along a Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?” five weeks?
2. Everflux: what is it?
An obscure “Glossary of SEO Terms” (SEO = Search Engine Optimization) defines Everflux as “an anomaly whereby pages can appear and then quickly disappear in Google’s page rankings. It typically occurs in newly added web pages.
Basically, Everflux refers to the constant change in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), while Google constantly scours the web for “minty fresh” content, changing its index accordingly.
Speaking in layman’s terms, occasionally ranks go up or down randomly, link popularity is completely lost, pages that have been indexed for years just disappear and are nowhere to be found in Google, and other similar Outer Limits phenomena. . Most people whose income depends proportionally on the ability of their potential customers to find them through a Google search, may think that their business is destroyed, that they are broke, and I can clearly see why.
According to the Webmasterworld forums, the first sightings of the phenomenon took place in July 2002. Later that year, the following speculation arose about Everflux: “Ultimately, they could be working on the index, reversing the indexes, changing parts of the index, backup parts of the index, rewrite some offending part of the index, delete parts of an index, or a host of other actions or issues that only Google would know about.”
Legend has it that there is a former Google employee who calls himself Googleguy, who posts on related forums. He offered this explanation: “As we do a full crawl of the web, we find most of the sites in our new crawl and put them in our regular index. My advice on our new crawl is to look at it as a nice ‘bonus’.” the top of Google’s deep index. Users can always search our full index, but sometimes we can offer even more recent pages as an added nicety.”
Google introduced a “new crawl” process to make your results as relevant and up-to-date as possible. It works every day. The purpose of the fresh daily crawl is to update the web pages in the regularly changing index. This allows Google to provide up-to-date results with current events.
Google also does one major update per month, which usually starts around the 19th or 20th of the month until around the 28th of the month. The update process continues for several days and the search results seem to fluctuate as the update continues. After the update is complete, the new data is migrated to Google’s partner sites. The main reason for the fluctuation is that Google employs multiple sites that need to be synced (in popular terms). While this process is taking place, the search results may appear to skip and information may disappear and reappear. It is similar in concept with the idea of DNS propagation.
The regular monthly crawl takes place at different times for different websites. The results of this crawl are typically reflected at the time of the next update.
For several months, beginning in the early summer of 2002, it has been observed that site searches and changes take place throughout the month, between regular monthly updates. This is known as Everflux and represents Google’s desire and ongoing efforts to keep their search relevant, high-quality, and “menthol fresh.”
Everflux is another evolutionary step in the process of offering the public the latest and most relevant snapshot of the web. Google is increasing its value as a search tool by giving its index some of the same qualities as what is being indexed. That is, the more fluid and adaptive a web index is, the more accurately it can reflect the fluid and adaptive nature of the web.
Those of you who analyze web logs probably notice that traffic increases for certain search terms on certain days. For example, let’s say you create a web page (or, as the younger generation refers to it these days, make a blog entry) about a movie that just came out on DVD, and the daily “fresh ride” process visits your site and make a note of it. Due to its relevance over time (overly simplified: sort results by page rank and date), your page rises to the top of the SERPs for a few days. Eventually, though, the story falls off its home page and is replaced by another story about another movie that is soon gobbled up by Googlebot. Meanwhile, the long-standing sites about that particular movie regain their dominant positions in the SERPs. This is Everflux in action.
As I write this article, there are reports of a potentially quieter Everflux coming to a browser near you. Google has recently made an update to its software, called “Jagger”. It seems that “Jagger” affected Everflux, but things started to slow down. The most interesting effect of “Jagger” on rankings has been reported to be the diminishing effect of reciprocal links as a measure of popularity. It seems that “Jagger” has undone the hard work of thousands of website owners. The result is expensive link campaigns that lead to high rankings and high revenues that have plummeted. On the other hand, item submission appears to have come via the “Jagger” update, seemingly alive and well. I think this happens because Google has put more emphasis on one way links.
The moral of the “Jagger” update story? Make sure you don’t follow the fads and top new found ranking factors of the search engine algorithm. If you have all your eggs in one basket, I promise you, Google is sure to trip you up eventually. So, diversify your ranking efforts, and generally try to follow the basic rules that webmasters have been hearing since the beginning of the web: Design your website for users, not for Google, and not for robots. Make sure each page has a unique title (you know, the tag), don’t put a keyword Google in the title, just one or a few that reflect the content of that page. Make sure each page has different content and a different title. Most of us, myself included, get lazy or just copy and paste pages and forget to change the title – Google’s software sees all that and is unforgiving. Use the old tag, which is the “Header” tag. Google considers it polite to have paragraph headings. Do not use images for titles, or any text.
Google doesn’t care about your images and doesn’t consider a page full of images to be useful; puts a lot of emphasis on the good old text. Use the description tag (read about Meta Tags if you don’t know what I’m talking about) and keyword tags. Don’t spam keywords, don’t use gateways, don’t hide text (you know, white text on a white background). Basically, play nice, pure HTML websites from the late 90’s. If all of this is too complex for you, hire at least one SEO consultant. An analogy is the stock market. If you know what you’re doing, you know what you’re doing; Basically, you follow the rules and play well. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can get involved, but most people have an advisor to avoid the ups and downs of the market change. In the world of Google, we call this change Everflux.
3. Conclusion: don’t be afraid of the big bad Everflux
Even if you don’t own and/or design and/or run your own website, it’s interesting to see how all the information collected by mankind over the centuries is placed within a so-called index of indexes. It is interesting to see how the exponential increase in information that needs to be indexed presents real challenges to a process that began as a mere scientific experiment and evolved into a cultural phenomenon. It’s also interesting to see how the people behind the wheel deal with such challenges and what creative solutions they come up with to tame the monster of information overload that can literally devour anything if let go.
Now, if you own, operate, design websites and if your process of paying bills on time depends on the process mentioned above, it can be really scary as uncertainty is the main enemy of happiness as we know it. The advice we get from the most famous gurus (found in forum posts, of course) unanimously suggests the following: “don’t hack your pages to bits because of Google’s Everflux.” In other words, it’s not something to be scared of, but it’s still something a full-fledged webmaster should understand. As always, I believe that while you may not be able to control a process, your happiness will benefit dramatically from just the mere thought of understanding that process. If you can’t beat him, join him; in other words, learn how to understand it and live with it.
4. Conclusion – about Google
Someone really should write a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Searching Google and start with an excerpt from Google’s own “Information for Webmasters”.
resource:
[…] “Don’t panic.” Just do the normal things you should do:
1. Create a great site.
2. Submit your site to Google in our “add URL” form.
3. Get a link from the Open Directory Project or other directories (Yahoo, etc.).
4. Don’t panic if it takes a while for your site to show up on Google. Be patient and start searching the web – there are lots of great tips to improve your site for users and search engines.
I hope this helps,