Months after Google’s BigDaddy, it finally looks like search results are starting to come around. What I mean by coming around is that the results are looking more relevant.

For the last few months a number of sites were showing up for competitive keyword phrases that, in my opinion, didn’t deserve to be there. More of these site’s backlinks were from random sites that were not relevent to the keyword phrase being targeted. It made me really wonder about all that talk from Google about getting relevant backlinks, or linking for your user’s benefit. It looked more to me like Google didn’t care about anything except shear quantity of one way links.

But now, after four of five months, it finally looks like Google is concentrating on relevancy. The results are looking better to me.

Google PR updated last week. But this was no ordinary update. This last week Google did something that I’ve never seen before; they started killing PR on some links pages. Killing PR would have been bad enough, but they went even further by deindexing pages as well. On six sites that I manage the PR on link pages is gone.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about Google going after reciproal link trading, but I had never really seen any solid evidence until this last week. A lot of small business doing SEO are going to need to make some serious changes if they want to continue link trading.

However, it looks like authority sites with enough one way links were not affected by the update. If your site was not affected, I would take what happened to other sites as a warning and make some changes to your links pages.

Here are a few things that I would do right away.

1. 1. If possible take out any words that may give away your links pages ie. links, resources, partners etc.
2. 2. Try and kill patterns in your links pages. If you have the traditional link description, link description you will want to seriously consider contextual linking. I don’t think Google will ever go after contextual linking. If they did, they’d kill all the blogs out there.
3. 3. Another option is to not have “links” pages at all and just place link trades on “normal” pages in your site

Whatever you do don’t wait around, make the changes now. There is significant evidence that Google is trying to kill link trading. If they see obvious patterns your site will suffer.

During the first month or two of Bigdaddy results I saw some serious problems with the results, but I wasn’t too worried about it. I figured that Google would make the necessary adjustments and that the results would improve. Well, it has been three or four months now and the results still suck.

Ok, anybody can say something sucks, so here are the reasons why I think Google’s results suck.

1. Google is so focused on backlinks, any backlinks (relevant or not) that a number of sites are rising in the results that are not relevant to the search phrases searched. I think a lot of this could be fixed by requiring that the phrase searched at least existed on the page.
2. Relevant sites drop completely out the rankings for particular keyword phrases. I have a few sites that rank well on a number of keyword phrases, but have completely dropped out of one or more competitive phrases. They don’t drop a few spots, they drop completely out. I can see devaluing a site, but to have a site completely drop out is a search result problem in my opinion - unless, of course, the site dropping out is caught for spamming or something devious.
3. The Google “sandbox” or delay in letting new sites into competitive or high-traffic results is making Google results old and stale compared to MSN’s results. Finding new content in competitive keyword results is really rare.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. MSN’s results are looking better and better all the time.