Hotwiring Your Search Engine

But for now, such tactics appear to work. Avatar Financial ranked seventh on Google last fall for its key search term "hard money loan,'' a type of commercial mortgage. Then last month Google upgraded its search algorithm with a software update it called Jagger, a secretive scrambling of the variables it uses to rank sites. Avatar fell to page two of search results, eliciting cries of anguish from Fishkin's client. But by last week he had restored it to the second spot on Google's results, partially by increasing the number of links to the site on other financial Web sites. His clients were happy, and their rivals were probably out shopping for an SEO of their own.

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