Google Algorithm Changes

Google Algorithm Changes

Google is constantly evolving in order to maintain the most relevant search results thats why news that the Google algorithm changes isn’t a complete surprise.  As a matter of fact engineers, analysts and raters are working together to help with the Google algorithm changes.  However we aren’t always lucky enough to get the inside scoop on the changes.  Recently Google’s blog released a post on the top ten Google algorithm changes made over the past few weeks.  We’d like to break down these changes and share them with you here.

Google Algorithm Changes | Top Ten Updates

Although Google definitely wants companies to succeed in search and become good members of the Google ecosystem in order to keep people on the site, Google’s main concern is that their users are able to find the highest quality and relevant webpages based on their search.  That being said, these Google algorithm changes offer no direct SEO tips, but it will give you a better idea of what Google is looking for:

• Cross-language information retrieval updates: There are a lot of languages out there (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic) that have little web content.  This really limits what these indigenous speakers can find, but now with the new Google algorithm changes:

• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
• Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.  Basically the new Google algorithm changes assumes that Google users prefer more recent content rather than content for 10 years ago.  It affects at least one result per page.
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
• Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.