A couple weeks ago before I went to China I sent out an email to my clients stating that we were in the midst of a significant update by Google. Around the time I left (3rd week of Feb) this took place. Is was coined the “Brandy Update”.

Amongst changes that we are evaluating on of the apparent changes that colleagues have been able to identify is the greater influence of LSI or latent semantic indexing. This is something I have been talking about for around a year and can be found in the articles that I have published Top Tips for 2008 & 2009.

There were admittedly (by Google) 5 significant changes. We also believe that external linking has also been turned up, and is also, we believe, part of this “tweaking”, and also implements LSI technology. This means that Google is looking at the relation of your backlink anchor text as it relates to your landing page content, and the relativity of the content on the page linking to you. This is also something I mentioned as being significant.

Neither of these points are new information, but we knew they were coming.

There have been quite a few people that claim header tags have also lost quite a bit of influence.

We are diligently working towards identifying (accurately through testing and research rather than rhetoric which is everywhere right now) and will keep you updated.

Matt Cutts has made a video about it;

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9. Google Custom Desktop and Google Alerts for Content

If you are not using Google Customized Desktop, Google Reader, or some type of rss feed reader already, you should definitely start using one. The easiest way to accomplish this for a complete novice (but is actually the way I do it), is with your GMail account. This is something else you should already be using. For the data storage alone you should be using it. If you need an invitation to open one, send me a request and I’ll send an invite (garythescubadiver@gmail.com). You will need a GMail account to use this tool.

With a GMail account you can go to the Google homepage and login using your email. In the top right corner is a link for “Add stuff”. It allows you to add specific URLs and it will pull the last 1-10 entries from that page and populate your Google Desktop. Here’s a snapshot of what mine looks like;

It isn’t the best snapshot but I wanted to show as much as possible. This is actually only about 1/3 of what I have on mine. These are different places that I used to go to individually to find information.

Google Alerts is a fantastic tool. You enter your search term and whenever Google finds your term while crawling the web it will send you and email with a link to it. I have alerts on everything from “google datacenters” to “DMOZ” and “Matt Cutts” to “Danny Sullivan”.

When I look for content, I use these as reference tools. They are not meant to be used to scrape content or plagiarize other websites.

There are many other uses for these if you put your head to it. :o)

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