Google releases a list of 52 changes to its search engine algorithm this month.
Google announced a list of 53 changes to its search engine algorithm this month. That’s a huge amount of change in a single month that has SEO specialists and webmaster scrambling to catch up. These changes are part of both the Panda and Penguin updates Google has unleashed on the Internet community which are aimed at high-quality results.
The list is pretty comprehensive but from a cursory review here are some highlights:
Here are some changes aimed at “better” search results:
More domain diversity. [launch codename “Horde”, project codename “Domain Crowding”] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.
Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename “Bi02sw41”] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.
No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.
Reducing results from the same domain, changing the way search terms are ranked and reducing low quality content are three obvious initiatives based on these changes.
Here are some changes that look especially interesting that deal with way Google deals with results:
Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.
News universal results serving improvements. [launch codename “inhale”] This change streamlines the serving of news results on Google by shifting to a more unified system architecture.
UI improvements for breaking news topics. [launch codename “Smoothie”, project codename “Smoothie”] We’ve improved the user interface for news results when you’re searching for a breaking news topic. You’ll often see a large image thumbnail alongside two fresh news results.
More comprehensive predictions for local queries. [project codename “Autocomplete”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of autocomplete predictions by expanding coverage for long-tail U.S. local search queries such as addresses or small businesses.
So your previous searches influence your following ones. In addition, autocomplete has been improved to provide additional details. Google is also giving massive relevance to news related articles with these changes and blogs and news sites seem to have gained ground in the SERPs.
There were also a bunch of updates aimed at internationalization:
More language-relevant navigational results. [launch codename “Raquel”] For navigational searches when the user types in a web address, such as [bol.com], we generally try to rank that web address at the top. However, this isn’t always the best answer. For example, bol.com is a Dutch page, but many users are actually searching in Portuguese and are looking for the Brazilian email service, http://www.bol.uol.com.br/. This change takes into account language to help return the most relevant navigational results.
Country identification for webpages. [launch codename “sudoku”] Location is an important signal we use to surface content more relevant to a particular country. For a while we’ve had systems designed to detect when a website, subdomain, or directory is relevant to a set of countries. This change extends the granularity of those systems to the page level for sites that host user generated content, meaning that some pages on a particular site can be considered relevant to France, while others might be considered relevant to Spain.
Items like these are also prevalent in these changes as Google looks to improve the way it handles international queries.
There is quite of but of information here to look at and understand. I urge your to comment on the article and let us know what’s important to you or anything you find interesting and want to know more about.
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