For the past month or so, developers and SEOer’s have started posting about what looks like a big change with the Google search algorithm. Sites that had consistently remained at the top of the SERP’s for specific keywords are dropping off the radar completely and sites with year’s of consistent search standing are seeing a huge increase in pages that are dumped into the supplemental index. From a user’s perspective, many have noted that they are seeing more and more commercial and advertising (spam?) sites ranking higher while non-commercial and technical results are dropping. In otherwords, what many would call “low-quaility” results that are favoring money-generating sites over resource sites. Also, if you check your site index with the “site:yourdomainname.com” tool, you have probably noticed a wide swing and the number of pages in the index and the number that are marked supplemental during this period of time. Google has acknowledged these issues  and  promised they’ll be corrected soon.

If you would like to follow a thread about this topic, click here to follow the discussion on webmasterworld.com.

Aaron Pratt has has an interesting post on his SEO Buzz Box site here. Aaron posted this article today after seeing one of his white hat sites lose 90% traffic in one day. Are these changes a “blip” that we’ll adapt to, or something much more ominous?

Google has opened beta testing to the general public for their Google Website Optimizer testing tool. The Optimizer is built to run along side Google’s two other conversion products - Adwords/Adsense and Google Analytics. This new tool is designed to let developers perform A/B and multivariate testing on different website offers and content and see the effect on conversions. If you have an AdWords/AdSense account, click here and sign up for the beta. After 48 hrs. you should see a new option on your AdWords/AdSense page. I’ve just signed up myself and when I have more information about how SEO optimizer’s can use the tool, I’ll let you know.