In an aim to continually inform and educate webmasters regarding the ever changing Google Algorithm, Matt Cutts yesterday (14th November) posted on the official Google Blog the latest 10 changes made to the ranking system. In what he calls an effort to maintain the ‘spirit’ of visibility for site owners, this post is a simple summary of just 10 amendments from literally hundreds every year.
At the bottom of the text he comments that if you manage a website, you should let him know if you’d like to see more information like this…. Yes please! View original blog entry here.
Cross-language information retrieval updates. An adjustment to display the text of languages with limited web-functionality in English. Previously this was only in available in one language (Korean), now 15 in total including Welsh and Norwegian.
Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content. Previously the snippets that appear in search results contained a high amount of content retrieved from the header or the menu of a webpage. Now the algorithm is that little bit smarter, and will begin to pull more of the snippet from the content of the page body text.
Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors. Many websites have a high number of internal or incoming links which are either duplicated (the anchor text) or very similar. This new permutation means the devaluing of what are labelled ‘boilerplate anchor’ links, or simply the duplicated links that just target one or two phrases. Google now wants to see a varied mix of incoming links relating to the page content.
Extending application rich snippets. Original snippets were text only in format. Now the recent modification allowing rich snippets (extra’s like reviews and download links) has been extended further.
Retiring a signal in Image search. This is an exercise to reduce the images displayed in Google Images which have multiple sources.
Fresher, more recent results. With quite a significant impact on search results, the fresh update is one of the more serious to take note of (attention all webmasters). By considerably remodelling the implication of timeliness of content, the consideration of having fresh content is now extended greatly.
Refining official page detection. In an attempt to quash wannabe’s taking search results and from official websites, this adaptation of the algorithm attempts to restore genuine content from official sources higher in the results.
Improvements to date-restricted queries. There must have been some issues on the quality score of search results whenever date ranges were applied. This is a correction of the issues to deliver better returns.
Prediction fix for IME queries. An alteration to the Autocomplete function and how it copes with questions being submitted with characters that are not of Latin origin. Aimed at improving the outcome in 3 languages which suffered poor resulting information.
