Google results undergoing update

Chris Richardson at Webpronews reports a large backlink update is underway at the datacenters used by Google Search. With such an update, expect to see changes in search results for your law firm Web sites and blogs – lawyer blogs probably more than sites as blogs will have more incoming links than a Web site.

…[A] backlink update is where a search engine essentially checks sites within their index to see how many links they have pointing to a particular site. Because search engines give ranking weight to relevant backlinks, when an update occurs, the changes can have varying results on users and results alike… depending on whether or not they gained or lost links.

Because backlinks are an important aspect for determining search engine rankings, updates of this kind can also have rippling affects on search results. When a search engine initiates an update that can influence SERPs, two things normally happen: some sites lose ground and some sites increase their ranking.

Chris also notes that as “Google also uses relevant backlinks to help determine PageRank scores, a backlink update is normally followed by a PageRank update.”