How To Beat Google's 'Brandy' Update

How To Beat Google's 'Brandy' Update: "Brin, one of the founders of Google recently said,
Google has made five significant changes to its algorithmic formulas in the last two weeks."

1) Increase in Index Size

2) Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
This is a very significant new technology that Google has always been interested in, and the incorporation of LSI has been on the cards for some time. If you are an insomniac, then Yu et al.'s Cover Page: "Patterns in Unstructured Data" paper is quite helpful in explaining the concept, but, in short, LSI is about using close semantic matches to put your page into the correct topical context.

It's all about synonyms. LSI may see Google effectively remove all instances of the search keyword when analysing your page, in favour of a close analysis of other words. For example, consider the search term 'travel insurance'. LSI-based algorithms will look for words and links that pertain to related topics, such as skiing, holidays, medical, backpacking, and airports.

3) Links and Anchor Text

Links have always been the essence of Google, but the engine is steadily altering its focus. The importance of Page Rank (PR), Google's unique ranking system, is being steadily downgraded in favour of the nature, quality, and quantity of inbound and outbound link anchor text.

4) Neighbourhoods

Now, more than ever, has the question of who's linking to your site become critical. Links must be from related topic sites (the higher the PR the better); those links are seen to define your 'neighbourhood'

again consider the example of travel insurance, big insurance companies might buy links on holiday-related sites in order to boost their ranking. These businesses will actively invest in gaining targeted inbound links from a broad mix of sites. Consequently, their neighbourhoods appear tightly focused to Google.

5) Downgrading of Traditional Tag-Based Optimisation

Google has taken big steps to downgrade standard SEO techniques in favour of LSI and linking, which are far less manipulable by the masses.
(NB Yahoo have not...)

Concludes: to optimize your site successfully for Google has become a lot more difficult

Synonyms As LSI appears to be so significant, it is important to start looking carefully at the information architecture of each major section of your site, and to increase the use of related words. It is also important to re-examine the title tags to include this concept; good title tags have synonyms and avoid repetition of the key phrase.

Outbound Links Link to authority sites on your subject. In the travel insurance example, these authority sites could include places like the State department, major skiing directories, etc. Not only will this help with LSI, it also allows Google to define the neighbourhood more easily. Furthermore, you could engage in link swaps with other companies so that you gain the benefit of an on-topic, LSI-friendly link.

Inbound Links and Link to Us Pages Based on what we have just said, sites need to formulate a link development strategy. A budget needs to be set aside to buy links and develop mini-sites. Look to set up links with university sites (.edu or ac.uk), as these seem to be valuable given Google's informational bias.

Each section of a site should have its own link-to-us page. For example, HotScripts, the major computer script directory, has a great link-to-us page. By providing people with creatives and cut-and-paste HTML, you can vastly improve your chances of attracting reciprocal links to your site. You'll need to have a separate page for each section, to maximise on-topic inbound links.

Dodgiest...Mini-Sites It is important to develop separate mini-sites (also known as satellite sites) for each key subject of your Website. This is a useful tactic that improves your chances of appearing in the SERPs for your keywords. Furthermore, as the last three Google updates have shaken things up so much, having more than one site reduces the likelihood that your business will be disrupted by the engine's updates. However, Google is likely to view satellite sites as spam, so you must take some steps to reduce the chances of your being blacklisted on this basis.

First, make it as hard as possible to for Google to detect host affiliation between your main site and its mini-sites. Google may define sites to be owned by the same person if the first 3 octets of the sites' IP addresses are the same (e.g. 123.123.123.xxx). Therefore, if you're going to run mini-sites, put them on different Web hosts.

Secondly, use different domain names for your mini-sites, rather than sub-domains of your main site. In the past, Google has not penalised sub-domains, but the early results from the Brandy update show a considerable reduction in the presence of sub-domains in the SERPs.

Finally, be very careful with the linking strategy you use between mini-sites -- Google will look at the linking structure very critically. Don't plaster each of your sites with links to the others, and don't reciprocate links between the sites.