Jagger Conclusions
Essentially, one of my observations of Jagger is that it has made Google less "off page". That is its algorithm is driven by factors found on other pages rather than the target page. The "complete failure" (George Bush on Google.com) and "liar" (Tony Blair on Google.co.uk) are prime examples of the "off page" nature of Google. Jagger appears to have reduced the value of many inbound links (IBLs). The debate within the
SEO community concerns which ones have been devalued the most. Candidate links include the following:
1. Purchased links
2. Automated links
3. Reciprocal links
4. Links from non-relevant pages
5. Links with little variation in the anchor text (i.e. appear unnatural).
Even if nothing else changes some of the other influences must, by definition, be stronger. My candidates for this include:
1. Inbound links from relevant pages
2. Natural links contained within the body of relevant text
3. Outbound links to relevant pages
4. Outbound links with relevant anchor text
The latter two of these four factors would definitely make Google more "on" page.
Yahoo Changes
Until very recently, Yahoo seemed to give very little influence to inbound links. It appeared very "on page" driven. The site title, the description meta tag and the alignment of the first two with content appeared to be the main influences.
Just recently I've noticed that several sites that I manage are responding to linking influences. Not much, but suddenly these sites are moving up the Yahoo rankings relative to competitor sites that have an inferior inbound links base.
MSN
MSN, in its short life has always been a sort of hybrid search engine. Steering between the two existing major engines as its algorithm has been fine-turned. In the beginning MSN seemed very content based. Then it seemed to pick up the meta tag hook. And through the summer and early fall (Autumn in Franglais) its spider has built up a huge source of links. Just run a "link:" test on any website to see how far MSN has crawled compared to Yahoo and Google (Yes, I know Google only shows a sample).
Conclusion
I've always maintained that its been possible to rank highly with Google, Yahoo and MSN. In simple terms, Google was essentially off page driven and Yahoo was essentially on page driven. MSN, through various revisions in its short life as an independent search engine, has tended to steer between the two. But off page and on page
SEO strategies are not mutually exclusive. Just two ways of arriving at the same solution. With convergence, the objective of ranking highly in all three engines should be more easily attainable.
