The SEO Bible

War of the First Page: Google DEWEY Update Causes Havoc in SERPS

Matt Cutts has just leaked the information that Google has done another update. Widely known as the DEWEY update, this is Google’s major step to include Google Books results in the search results.

While we had been noticing the changes in SERPS from the end of March, this is the first “official” announcements from Google. It has caused major furore and the search rankings have been going up and down wildly.

This kind of major changes are expected every time Google does major changes without announcing… You can expect the same thing when Google launches its own version of Wikipedia. Currently, the Wikipedia results are omnipresent – almost the first in every search… but when Google brings out its own products, there always seems to be a major update just around that time…

You can read more as the story unfolds at
Screwy Dewey Update
Webmasterworld Forums

So now that Google Books results are going to show up atleast 2-3 times on the first page, this leaves only 7 to 8 spots for us morons to show up on the first page. Well, like it or not, there’s nothing much we can do… so get up and start testing & tweaking your pages to maintain your ranking and better it!

Lesson Learnt: Never become too complacent – even if you hold the top spot or first page rankings, you never know what’s going to hit you tomorrow. So continue to build those links, and continue to add new content to help you in the long run. If you rely on too much traffic from just 1 search engine, too bad. The only thing is to make your content so good and compelling that people keep coming back to you, pass your link around, and you build the good will that will help you survive the War of the first page.

Cheers,
Vinai
Editor, The SEO Bible