I always like to make sure that the SEO services I offer are up-to-date. And what better way to stay on to of it than to go straight to the source? Every so often Google updates their algorithm. Some of these updates change everything, while others are small and unnoticeable. But, I’m sure all of us to some degree have experienced fluctuations in search rankings due do the high amount of updates happening over the past couple years.
Here are links to 4 blog posts from Google’s Inside Search Blog announcing the different changes to their algorithm;
- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/30-search-quality-highlights-with.html
- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/17-search-quality-highlights-january.html
- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html
- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/search-quality-highlights-50-changes.html
That’s 137 updates to Google’s Algorithm. I remember in 2006 when Google said they have 297 ranking factors. I can’t imagine how many they have now. Anyway, I’ve listed the most important updates that we as SEO specialist should make sure we understand. ( | = update to update a month or 2 later)
- Improved local results
- Tweaks to handling of anchor text
- Link evaluation
- SafeSearch update | Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search
- Fewer “sibling” synonyms
- Image Search landing page quality signals | Better spam detection in Image Search | Fresher images
- More relevant sitelinks
- More accurate country-restricted searches
- Better infrastructure for autocomplete | Improved dataset for related queries | Faster autocomplete
- More accurate byline dates | Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages.
- Tweak to +1 button on results page
- Faster mobile browsing
- Panda Updates for easy algorithm updating
- Ads above the fold
- Fresher results – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html
- High-quality sites algorithm improvements | Improvements to processing for detection of site quality.
- Blending of news results | Improvements to coverage of News Universal
- Automatically disable Google Instant based on computer speed
- More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page
- More accurate detection of official pages
- “Site:” query update
- Interval based history tracking for indexing
- Disabling two old fresh query classifiers
- Improvements to travel-related searches
- Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing
- Better indexing of profile pages
- Better local results and sources in Google News.
- Better interpretation and use of anchor text.
- More precise detection of stale pages
- Migration of video advanced search backends.
- Local result UI refresh on tablet.
Like I said, there are 100′s of changes, but the ones listed above are the ones the SEO specialist should focus on staying on top of.