OK. Now you all should take what I’m about to tell you very carefully. If not, you might just be yet another helpless sole that will be added the cult of the Google Dance. Virtually every month Google updates their entire database. Also every month, more and more people have become uncontrollably obsessed with this update. There are a couple reasons for this. First, and probably most importantly, it really has become a sort of cult. People that follow the forums closely see all of these people going mad when the update is going to happen and consequently the madness spreads to them. However, there are people (people who probably started the psychosis) that make their entire living on Google. These people (usually affiliate marketers) are typically running web sites where they sell the products or services of other companies. The affiliate marketers usually make money every time someone completes a desired action, like filling out a form, or the visitor buys a product. The companies who agree to pay the affiliate usually have little or no idea how these people are making all of this happen. Or it is too cost prohibitive to ramp up an optimization campaign.
Let me show you an example of this. Check out this link:
Google Search: diet pill
Most of the top sites here are affiliates. If you go through any of the top sites and select a product to buy, you will see that the shopping cart goes to another site that has a referring id attached to the address. The site that referred the visitor to buy the product makes money on each sale - and it’s probably a nice amount of money. It could easily be $20 per sale, no matter what the cost of the product was. The lifetime of that new customer will typically more than pay for it.
Now you might be saying, “Man, I got to get involved in that scheme.” It’s not as easy as you might think. The people who run these ‘diet pill’ sites are top notch search engine marketers. And further more, those people are probably making “top-notch-search-engine-marketer” money. It is not uncommon for these affiliate marketers to make $10,000 -$40,000 PER MONTH! And many of those people are making more.
The downside to all of this is, most of that money is coming from Google. If an update goes bad for these people they are suddenly out of money and they have gone from living the high life to looking for a regular job.
So, now you know what all the fuss is about. If you feel like you are strong enough to fight off the sirens of the Google Dance, you can read the forum threads of this dance. They start here:
Update Cassandra! Google Monthly Update
(Incidentally, “Cassandra” is just a name the WebMasterWorld people chose. They name each update - much like hurricanes are named. Last month’s update was named “Boston”.)
The update thread continues here:
Update Cassandra! Google Monthly Update Part 2
Google Update Checker - so you can see if there are any changes in the databases.
Google Update History - Here you can see when each update happened. For a while, people suspected the updates happened with the phases of the moon. The update goes back to July 2000.
Google 4×4 Surfer - Brett created this so you can get a visual feel for the changes taking place during an update.
Don’t blame me if you find yourself up for nights on end next month because you are now a Google Dance convert.