Recently I have seen some major changes in my rankings and my competitors rankings on Google.  Some good and some bad.  Same with my competitors.  I have no idea what Google has done.  Anybody know what algorithym changes have been made and how to counteract or benefit from them?

To start with Google is doing data refreshes every day or so.. so 'everflux' is here to stay. I would get used to that. For more on that read up on the Jaunuary Google update and Matt Cutts Keynote session from last week's SES London.

Outside of that there are many things to account for fluxuations from Link profiles and link maturity to site age and authority and soooo much more. There is too many unkown factors to say 'what' exactly was happening in you case specifically.

They generally don't tell us much about the algorithms, but there are those of us that are leaning towards Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval (PaIR) playing a larger role in the over all IR system. I had to wonder about the whole announcement of killing GoogleBombs recently, so I surmised a little conspiracy about using that to turn the knobs up on the PaIR

For more on that see Phrase Based Bomb Buster.....

There was SUPPOSED to be an article full of PaIR resources somewhere around here... but ..er... uh.. I can't seem to find it  ( Nic? U happen to know M8?) - so try the Guide to Phrase Based Indexing and retrieval

Happy reading - he he

Thanks gypsy.  I read your info. prior to posting, on PaIR.  My keyword research lead me to choose keywords and phrases but probably need to do some more research on phrases.  I will check out the articles.  The thing that is really confusing to me is that I think the relevance of Google's search is not as relevant as it had been in the past.  I type in a keyword phrase and the results are not as relevant as a Yahoo result a lot of the time (in my opinion).  It also seems to me that adwords $s spent seems to influence Google's non paid results.  I saw a large competitor spending in excess of $40k a month and his non paid presence jumped dramatically.  Once they dropped their pay per click he dropped signicantly.  Any feelings on this?

Well, I try to avoid wearing too many 'Tin Foil Hats' .... there is always some one speculating about that, problem is that som VERY smart folks have tried time and time again to prove such thoeries and it has never been proven.

With that in mind, Google is VERY wary of people testing it, so it is not financially wise for them to do so. They have far too much to lose... One disgruntled insider or astute researcher... and they could have a huge scandal. I don't know anyone in the AW division, but I would think that answer is close. It is simply not worth the risk for them to be playing at that.

Google is, IMO, well ahead of YaH with their algos. Often what U see is sheer mass. That is to say, just like more guys try to 'crack' Windows XP over Mac, Web Spammers target Google more than Yahoo...  Popularity is a wicked mistress you know.

I believe Yahoo is focussing more in communities, the directory, business services, social media and local search stuff at the expense of the organic endeavors.  MSN/Live has actually published more interesting papers on improvements ot the Organic Search algorithms than Yahoo... The direction at Yahoo the last while has been interesting to say the least....

I can't prove it obviously but I track my competition several times a week and it sure seemed relevant to me.  Obviously there are a lot of variables.

Yes Google is ahead of the others but I still don't understand why good quality one way links for the most part are not showing up?  We have press releases and reviews as incoming links and Google seems to simply ignore them.  They are only seeing the links between or own sites.

I just answered the other post on finding BLs in Google..... should help