Google Jagger update and mortgage websites

oppenheimer · #1 (**permalink**) 10-30-2005, 05:27 PM

Its been a few weeks now since Google implemented there latest update, nick named Jagger and here is the fall out: Our mortgage websites seemed to have passed through the update with little noticable changes for their primary key phrases while some of our real estate websites seem to have been effected in the breadth of secondary key phrases that were providing a substantial amount of referals on a daily basis. The net effect has mortgage referal traffic holding steady while real estate referals are noticeably fewer since the update. Interestingly when searching/evaluating markets for new clients it seems that the top 10 on Google in many markets is now populated by large sites, directories or others that are not specifically related to the local market where one would expect to see local area specific lender websites.

Mean while MSN continues to perform strong for both real estate and mortgage websites. How long will it take for Bill to overcome Googles lead? Let us have your opinions on the ongoing war of the search engine Titans!

oppenheimer · #2 (**permalink**) 12-12-2005, 12:55 PM

Weeks later Google seems to have headed back towards their older search as our real estate websites have recovered most of the ground given up during the Jagger updates.

It appears clear that Google has found ways to better determine when link popularity has been unantuarally inflated by purchasing links from other websites (something we have never done) as sites that have had astranomic link popularity counts and once ranked highly have had the air let out of their SEO balloons. The process of purchasing site wide links for websites was from the begining considered a somewhat Black Hat method, but even so many of the top SEO firms were offering this type of service to their clients.