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,p>Happy New Year! We are moving into 2006 and I expect we shall be seeing some major events this year on the internet. I think the search engine wars will be fought long and hard. Let's hope when they start this years updates they do them with the people in mind and not themselves.

Let's review a few major events and what they mean for us. Although nothing here can be totally proven or unproven as no one really knows except the search engines that create the updates. I have gathered what I know or think I know from reading other articles and from watching our clients that are in many different markets.

Huge updates seemed to happen from all three major search engines this year.

1. MSN has been working on it's new search engine all year and hit it's beta stage. Have they started implementing it to their MSN search yet? We know that MSN wants to be the engine that backs AOL instead of Google. We also know that MSN is now asking Firefox users to switch to MSN as the default Search Engine. Yes, they did update their algorithms as well (many times but unlike Google they are not named)

2. Yahoo seemed to be in an update rut. Just like a potato chip you can't eat just one so, they just kept rolling them out week after week. Matter of fact part 6 of their last major update just took place on Dec 15 2005. They also what to knock Google out of the #1 spot and they seem to have integrated their last update smoother then Google. The month of March 05' is a different story as it knocked thousands of websites off the top ranks.

3. Google. Just saying the word Google alone should say it all. Google Introduced their Major update over the course of a couple months. It was a 3 part update. If you have not heard the name of this update then you must be new to the game. Google's last update, Jagger, blew everyone's mind. Thousands and thousands of websites dropped into nonexistence. Those that paid SEO companies such as Blackwood Productions thought that their SEO was to blame. Many clients from many SEO companies quit and ran or just did not make enough money from their low amounts of traffic. Those that stayed faithful to us got their ranks back. There are still thousands of sites that have not even seen a gleam of their old ranks coming back.

So what does all this mean to us as companies that rely on the World Wide Web as our main source of income?

1. Reciprocal links have lost all or most weight in trying to rank your site as this was an easy way in the past for search engines to rank a site. Now too many people share links with each other for the sole purpose of gaining relevancy. (not proven to have lost all weight but I am sure they have lost most)

2. One way inbound links have lost weight and are not worth as much unless they deal in the same market as you and come from a site with authority. (From what I have seen this is mostly true as well)

3. Inbound links from articles. These seem to have kept full weight or maybe even a boost in weight as they contain relevant content and you can support you keywords as anchor text within keyword rich content. (Unproven about the boost but from what I have seen they do hold their true value which is another reason I am writing this article)

4. Duplicate content can now really hurt your site. Do your best not to have duplicate content through your own site and/or duplicated from other sites. You may even want to put a 301 redirect on your site as search engines are indexing some sites twice, once for the http://www.yourname.com and once for the http://yourname.com version of your site.

(This one is true as far as I can see)

5. Having your site listed in directories has lost a lot of weight. This was a great way to gain ranks back in 2001. No longer is it that easy to get the rankings you need.

(Unproven but seems to be correct to some extent)

6. At least for now, Google seems to have cut weight given to original content on a site. Wait a minute content has always been king. Oh, yeah, I forgot. Jagger. With the introduction of Jagger Things at Google have been pretty shaky. Many believe content is no longer king, so what is? (Unproven but go do some searches yourself and see what comes up.)

There could be a few more things I could put in this list but, these seemed the most important or I may just want to leave them for another article. Anyway, as you have seen over the course of this year we have seen many changes and if you ask me this is just the beginning.

Everyone out there on the World Wide Web have a GREAT New Year and please be safe. I'll see you all next year.