Half’s SEO Notebook

At the risk of sounding like another SEW echo chamber post, here’s a recent Googleguy quote (now a random Googler dude, or is it Matt Cutts pretending to be a random Googler dude? You be the judge) regarding recent reports of backlink updates on several DCs:

It’s Brett’s decision to call something an update, but I agree this one isn’t anything to write home about. Like Pluto, I think this would be a shrinking update; the SERPs aren’t really changing. :)

I talked to one of the engineers who would know, and it turns out that it’s an engineer who has grabbed the 64.233.187.whatever datacenter for himself to tinker around with making info: queries slightly more accurate. I don’t expect the visible/external info: or backlink data to spread to other data centers (or if it did, not for a long time).

So have fun poking around over there if you really enjoy monitoring IP addresses, but just bear in mind that it’s an engineer tinkering by himself, not part of a larger trend or an upcoming update.

Earlier, he says:

I’ll ask around with a couple engineeers who keep a closer eye on external backlinks/PR and see if they have anything they’d like to mention.

Bear in mind that backlinks/PageRank updates happen at their own rate, and we’re continuously finding and incorporating new backlinks and computing new PageRank all the time. So an update of visible backlinks doesn’t really cause an “update” or big change in rankings, because we’ve already known about those links for a while.

Anyway, I’ll ask around and if anything interesting comes out of it, I’ll let you know.

BTW, if you’re still suffering from supplemental problems, there’s also a thread developing over at WMW started by Whitey that you may want to take a look at (just because I posted twice there, yeah…).