url URL date NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERtNUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER remember that saying from chaos theory about how when a butterfly flap its wings it can cause a hurricane a month later halfway around the world as several people have already noted google has made some major changes in their most recent update the weblogging community was hit hard for instance i used to be the NUMBER mark NUMBER i am now NUMBER the changes appear to be the result of an attempt to stop two phenomena explicitly selling ads based on pagerank NUMBER and google bombing NUMBER specifically google is now apparently cross checking link text with the linked site and discounting or ignoring links whose text does not appear in the linked site this all but kills off google bombing searching for go to hell NUMBER no longer takes you to microsoft com NUMBER searching for talentless hack NUMBER no longer finds ohmessylife com NUMBER although it finds a lot of people who were previously participating in the google bombing no definitive word yet on whether google is actively penalizing such sites unfortunately the algorithm tweaks necessary to stop these two techniques have caused a wide range of collateral damage apparently coming down hardest on medium to large sites that had previously been doing everything right as far as page structure link structure accessibility and general honest hard work putting together a usable and useful site the webmasterworld forums are alive with complaints and speculation new update pagerank death NUMBER september NUMBER google update discussion part NUMBER NUMBER let s find out what happened sept NUMBER update pt NUMBER NUMBER side note amongst the confusion it has been suggested that google is no longer indexing alt text in images i can confirm that this is absolutely false searching URL for gimli NUMBER finds my entry of july NUMBER NUMBER where gimli is mentioned only in the alt text of an image regardless google s search results in general appear to be significantly degraded in many key areas the forums are full of people complaining that spam sites doorway pages and obvious cloaking attempts which google used to be so good at filtering out are now popping up in top spots with disturbing frequency nobody in the forums wants to talk about which keywords they re tracking so i tried to find my own concrete example of crap search results it didn t take long searching for reservation hotel NUMBER brings up an empty sub page NUMBER of a hotel reservation company in italy NUMBER as the first result this seems unhelpful and unlikely to be relevant to the average us based consumer and google absolutely knows i m in the us based on my ip address searching for news observer nc NUMBER the news observer is a raleigh nc newspaper does find the news observer NUMBER but it also finds an internet betting spam page NUMBER at NUMBER and a non existent page NUMBER at NUMBER searching for eminem NUMBER gives us two generic portal pages a non existent site and a site that redirects to a site that continuously redirects to itself i am not making this up and this is just on the first page good thing i didn t care that much about eminem to begin with because google just isn t that helpful many people in the webmasterworld forums are now suggesting that URL NUMBER has better search results overall just as a single comparison their results for eminem NUMBER do appear to be much more relevant is this the beginning of the end of google s reign NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL NUMBER URL 