Did Google Change Its Search Algorithm in Early February?

I have a hunch that Google may have changed its search algorithm in early February in a way that is favorable for Lab Soft News. Here's what I have been seeing on the blog in terms of inbound traffic, which is to say readers who are referred by a Google search or who navigate directly to the site. This is in contrast to the majority of readers who subscribe to the blog or follow it on Twitter and then read the notes via email, with an RSS news consolidator, or in Twitter.

• Beginning on February 2, 2010, my total inbound traffic has increased by about 70% in a steeply ascending curve.
• In the more than four years that I have been blogging and for reasons unknown to me, the leading referring search engine has always been Yahoo with Bing a close second lately. Since early February, Google leads all other search engines by a margin of about 7:1.
• When a Google search is launched, one option is to click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, In this case, you are conducted to a single web page among all of the choices on the search engine referral page (SERP). I have been seeing a number of such referrals for the first time. This suggests a higher ranking for the blog on SERPs.
• All of the above suggests to me that some change in the Google search algorithm has resulted in a higher ranking for Lab Soft News during Google searches and more activity on the site.

Relevant to this same topic, I came across an article from Wired discussing the profound influence of Google search algorithms for all of us. Below is an excerpt from it (see: Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web):

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything....One by one, potential modifications are introduced, along with the results of months of testing in various countries and multiple languages. A screen displays side-by-side results of sample queries before and after the change....You might think that after a solid decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax. After all, it holds a commanding 65 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search..... None of [the Google search competitors] individually presents much of a threat, but together they hint at a wide-open, messier future of search — one that isn’t dominated by a single engine but rather incorporates a grab bag of services.

The majority of people who use a search engine may not be totally aware of the fact that the links shown on the SERPs, and the page ranking of each, is the result of complex algorithms executed by each search engine. I had no idea that there was so much tinkering going on by the Google engineers but it makes sense. This is a highly competitive business. The future of web search, characterized above as wide-open and messier, should be very interesting, particularly from a smart-phone perspective with its frontier mentality.

Comments

[Robert]

I wish I could keep up with all of this. I have been working at optimizing my site, doing ethically slow link building and focusing on my users and I lost my page rank to 0. So frustrating