Posts tagged Google
10 New Google Algorithm Changes You Should Know
You can’t beat the Official Google blog when you’re looking for up-to-the-nanosecond updates in their algorithm. 
Although they make hundreds upon hundreds of evaluation, ranking and algorithmic changes per year, they’ve been especially active in the last couple weeks, and recently reported on ten of the more exciting updates they’ve implemented. Here’s a rundown for you (compliments of the Google Blog).
Also, here’s an informative video that looks into the methodology behind Google’s search ranking, evaluation and algorithm changes. Great stuff!
- Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
- 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.
- 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.
+1′s and Touchy Feely Search Results
I’m a little behind on posting about Google’s fairly recent +1s announcement. You can look at this as Google’s version of the Facebook “Like” button. Only I’m sure will use the info gathered by the +1s in a much more effective way.
The benefits of the +1 to you as a user of Google should be more relevant search results based on what your network likes. +1ing something will be like saying, “This is cool, and I know other people will want to see this, but it’s not time sensitive, and so I’ll dog ear this result for later.” It’s also very dependent on who your Google profile is connected to. Although Google did say they may expand that sphere of influence in the future. In general, it seems Google is trying to get more touchy feely with it’s search results. The belief is the more relational your results are, the more relevant they will be. This isn’t a universal truth by any means, but if your acquaintances like something then you probably will too.
WebP Image Format Aims to Speed Up the Web
As everyone including WebProNews knows, Google isn’t messing around when it comes to making the speed of the internet lightning fast. As described in their recent article, Google’s come out with a new image format for the web that’s purpose is solely to improve speed.
Since most of today’s technology was developed over a decade ago, Google knew it was time for a revamp so their engineers got to work finding a way to compress sticky JPEG files but still retain their quality. Their new brainchild is called WebP (presumably for Web Picture) and promises to reduce byte size and therefore load time on many of the world’s websites.
Images total over 65% of all bandwidth users absorb today and they make surfing a slow process, particularly for bandwidth constrained browsers such as mobile. Though some of the web’s image content is made up of GIFs and PNGs, Google focused its effort on JPEGs, where most of that bandwidth is contained.
For SEO, this is a considerable announcement since Google has recently announced that speed will now be considered a ranking factor. Although important, speed is only one of 200 or so factors Google claims to use.
There’s a site set up by Google for web users to test size and load times of their new WebPs and Google’s also working on a functional conversion tool to help transfer images to the new format. There’s a WebPatch planned in addition to a transparency layer sometime in the near future. SEOs are excited to see how widely this format ends up being adopted.
Summarized by Heather Hendrick
Using Custom Variables to Personalize Google Analytics
SEOmoz recently posted a great article about how to manipulate variables in Google Analytics to create custom dashboards for functionality.
In prior times, it was easy to use Analytics to track exactly which webpage an organic click was coming from. This was useful because keyword lists could be appended to include these reference clicks however its functionality was limited and it was difficult to turn this data into anything useful or actionable.
When Google first started using AJAX to track rankings everyone panicked as the referrer strings were more or less cut off after the hash tag. Once September 2010 rolled around and Instant hit the web, everyone realized there was nothing to worry about, rank tracking still worked and the SEO industry was still around. One of the things Google includes in their referral strings now is =cd, basically the exact ranking position of the link. Amazing! This can be used for a lot of different things…
Now why would anyone take the time to use custom variables? They’re difficult to manage but provide lots of possibilities for advanced tracking, so it’s important to learn their benefits. For example, custom variables allow a user to more or less track exactly how much revenue came from a keyword at any given position.
Here are the steps in pulling this data:
Step 1: Extract cd= from the referrer string
Step 2: Name cd= string a value in our snippet
Step 3: Create an “IF” statement so Google doesn’t use your custom variable all the time
Now for the most important part…analyzing. A few pivot tables should do the trick. It’s important to create advanced segments and custom reports to display this data.
You can analyze this data by:
Ranking each city, state or country
Historically tracking data and metrics
Determine the bounce and buy rate by rank
The negatives of this process are obvious. The data is only tracked when a link is clicked on, so smaller sites may have trouble. Another thing to note is that AJAX results are not being shown to all users in all areas. Keep this in mind. The local box can also wreak havoc on ranking numbers.
Recommendations are to install Excellent Analytics in Excel to help display your data correctly. Now get out there and start analyzing your data!
Heather Hendrick has summarized the article for us here.
Local Search Gets Rich Snippets from Google
Chris Crum over at WebProNews just posted about how Google has decided to use Rich Snippets for Local Search. Now, SEOs can use this data to help reference real world places and events and better optimize for local results and multiple web hosting locations.
Carter Maslan, Google’s Product Director for Local Search or something equally fancy and technical sounding spoke on the changes, “”By using structured HTML formats like hCard to markup the business or organization described on your page, you make it easier for search engines like Google to properly classify your site, recognize and understand that its content is about a particular place, and make it discoverable to users on Place pages.”
Google wants webmasters to use structured markup systems to help the search engine determine the location of your site but to use their provided forms to give them a glimpse of what you’re trying to provide with your content.
Google says it’s excited to expand local even further and wants small business owners everywhere to have more control over what their local listing looks like. Markup does not guarantee your site a listing in local, but any insight you give Google will help them determine the best way to display your results.
There’s a Frequently Asked Questions page provided by Google for customers interesting in utilizing the new rich snippets function for Local Search.
Article summary provided by Heather Hendrick
Google Instant Incites an Unwarranted SEO Panic
In light of the recent Google algorithmic changes that go hand in hand with Google Instant, Rand Fishkin wrote a great post over at SEOmoz that we summarized here.
Turns out, the long tail was not affected.
Conductor put out a great graph that illustrates what happened to search term length in the aftermath of Google Instant and contrary to popular worry, there doesn’t seem to be a huge decrease in 4, 5, or 6 word search terms…yet. Basically, this means that long tail isn’t dead, for the time being. Matt Bennett at MEC blogged a similar graph to that of Conductor, though Conductor used 88,000 searches for its data while Matt used only about 10,000.
Rand then spoke about the specific changes SEOmoz was seeing, that is, not many at all. It appeared that the number of keywords used to send them visitors hadn’t really decreased at all despite the fact that many of their key demographics were surely using Google Instant. One change he mentioned specifically is that now when typing in SEO in the Google searchbar, SEOmoz is the second Google Instant result mentioned.
Rand was also a bit upset that so many in the industry had heralded this change as something that was going to interrupt the entire SEO field. As an industry, SEO is usually fairy adept at realizing when Google is just fishing for press, but for some reason this rumor seemed to incite panic more than usual, particularly within the seo hosting services industry.
Please comment below if Google Instant has impacted your search queries or if you have any additional data to add to the discussion – Rand barely scratched the surface of what kinds of changes Instant inspired. Surely as the algorithm matures Instant will have a broader and more specific effect on SEO best practices.
Heather Hendrick summarized this article
How Will Instant Affect SEO?
Dave Davies at WebProNews speaks about Google Instant’s impact on the SEO Industry. Here we’ll discuss his main points and see how Google’s newest invention has really changed things, if at all.
When Google announced Instant was coming back in September 2010 many people in the SEO Industry…freaked out. Some declared it the “death of SEO” while others looked as Instant as a new opportunity to work within a set of boundaries developed by Google. There are certainly some pros and cons to Instant but as previously mentioned, the changes to SEO may not be all that significant afterall.
What is Instant?
Google’s calling it search before you type technology which is a simple way of saying the search giant tries to interpret what you’re looking for before you even type the words out. For example, if one was to type “buy so” Google might suggest a list of terms that seem appropriate such as “buy socks” “buy soap” or even “buy something.” The idea is that searches get faster and the site has even greater utility to users. Google’s servers are now functionally processing billions of search queries a day.
Why Instant’s Not a Game Changer:
The technology itself is limitless, it’s the users that are going to determine if this really catches on. Basically, people aren’t going to know how to use the function or the best way to garner results from it, so there will be a sharp learning curve as Instant evolves. Users who have to look at their keyboard to type (most of them) won’t really notice the change right away.
Additionally, Instant only works when it works. This means that users who don’t see their intended search query pop up in the results will just keep typing until they do, sometimes rendering Instant useless. Certain queries are bound to be harder for Google to identify than others, and just the letters in a query can really affect how accurate Instant proves to be.
Why Instant’s a Big Deal:
To a Searcher – Searchers are really going to benefit the most. Either they’re going to notice the effects on Instant and thus be helped by the service or they’ll keep on living like before…a win win for Google.
For Google – Google’s going to benefit in two main ways, neither of which needs much explanation. They’re going to instantly get increased marketshare from the release and also gain increased revenue directly from the product.
For SEOs – It’s important to remember that certain types of queries and industries are going to be affected more than others by the change. Basically, the more web savvy a searcher is, the less their search is going to be directed by Instant. These are who SEOs go after. The short term is going to be spent figuring out which search terms are most vulnerable and exactly what actions to take from there. From the get go, SEOs and seo hosting companies should prepare to shift to more generic term keywords in addition to readying for increased click through rates, which aren’t a bad thing.
Conclusion:
Google Instant isn’t going to change things too much, at least for the time being. Knowing what we know, SEO should prepare to react to this algo change as they have to so many others before, with data and metrics and tests.
Heather Hendrick summarized this article for us here
What’s so great about Instant?
Search Engine Guide’s Stoney deGeyter recently put out a piece about his speculations on the impact Google Instant will have for SEOs and for consumers, which we’ve summarized for you here.
There’s been a lot of buzz concerning Google Instant’s release a few months back, and many people wonder how much it’s really going to change the search scape. Will it revolutionize the search industry? How about make searching crazy fast for the standard Google user?
The first question, of course, is will Google Instant really save time?
Google’s blog has some interesting, if useless data:
“The user benefits of Google Instant are many–but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!”
Google goes on to talk about how the typical search takes 9 seconds, and that some searches took 30-90 seconds to actually complete. Our thought is that 9 seconds seems like an awful lot for a “typical” (is typical the same thing as average?) search, and 30 to 90 seconds seems downright outrageous. If people take that long to search, it’s likely not their typing that’s holding them up, it’s that they’re distracted easily…totally different issue which Instant is probably not going to help with.
Are the Instant results good ones?
Some clients believe that they now need to rank for all the partial phrases that bring up Google Instant results. As has been shown, these results aren’t necessarily relevant after all. For example, a search for “flow” returns an instant result for “flower factory”…not particularly helpful. Unless you’re searching for a very short, generic term, you’re only going to shave a few seconds off the backend as you’ll still have to type most of the term anyway to get your desired result to show up.
Will all these unintended results slow down searching?
Results that pop up using Instant that aren’t in fact relevant may actually prove to slow searches down since searches must stop what they’re doing, read the instant results, decide if any are relevant, then if not, continue typing. Refinement of search results is good, but having to scan through six sets of results is bad.
Instant Breaks Through to the Longtail…
Many people in SEO believe that Instant and Google Suggest are both attempts at getting people to use fewer keywords when they search. Google stands to gain PPC revenue by driving traffic to these formerly longtail terms, but the unintended effect is that searches are quickly able to refine their search based on what Instant’s suggesting. Searchers are going to have to learn to quickly refine their results based on scans, rather than full on reading.
Instant’s not changing the landscape right now, but it’s certainly unleashing a slew of unintended effects and behaviors on both SEOs, SEO hosting companies, and consumers. It will be interesting to see how the service evolves.
Heather Hendrick is to thank for this Instant summary
Google: Get Away from the Big Brands
Dr. Pete over at SEOmoz recently wrote an interesting piece about Google’s preference for big brands that could ultimately be a downfall and the ways in which the search giant should spread the love.
It used to be the case that a single domain, whether it belonged to a big brand or not, couldn’t hope for more than one or two listings in SERP results. Nowadays, one company can dominate the top ten search results, such as in the case of Apple. This is great for the brand, but how about for consumers?
Figuring out intent: the easiest way for Google to figure out what people are actually searching for when they type in a term like “Apple” is to see what they’re searching for before and after. If they’re looking for things like “iTunes” and “music” it’s likely they’re looking for the brand whereas if they look up facts about fruit, they’re probably looking for, well, the fruit. This can help Google determine what kinds of sites they should be showing in the top ten, and how varied the results should be.
Bing: Bing has a great Search Funnel Tool that Google doesn’t, and it even more clearly shows intent by consumers. Though Bing users definitely differ from Google’s, their searches fall in line with what we’ve already learned about the searches surrounding the term “apple.” The last thing Google wants to do is to create an environment where people can’t find what they need. If searchers are trying to buy Apple products, they don’t need a Wikipedia article about Apple.
What Does This Mean?
It’s tough for any engine to interpret meaning in each term, but the danger in brand loyalty by engines is that consumers will pay the price for these partnerships. It doesn’t benefit anyone for searchers to be pigeonholed by their searches, and Google should try harder not to be too brand focused.
Thank to H. Hendrick for the summary
Google Makes Changes That Could Affect Rankings
This WebProNews article, originally from August 2010, focuses on some of the latest Google algorithm changes that may impact rankings. We’ve summarized it for you here so you and your SEO can make the best decisions accordingly.
Search is the keystone of Google and in the midst of all the social media, advertising, and video initiatives they also have going on at the moment.
Algorithm changes are some of Google’s most talked about items, especially when they make a big announcement beforehand as they did recently concerning the change that multiple pages will now be displayed from one domain for relevant queries. Google’s going to attempt to determine the intent behind certain queries and determine whether or not the SERP results are best populated with multiple pages from one site, which they’ve never done in the past. Not all SEOs and seo hosting companies are happy with this news as it means big sites may further dominate listings.
As with algorithm changes, Google’s experimentation is also much talked about. They’ve recently been spotted trying a format in which the autosuggest function more or less takes over all the SERP results which could definitely wreak havoc on search results as a whole. As we now know, though, this function is fully in play and called Google Instant. Habits are currently being evaluated by SEOs to determine the best ways to manage this change.
Google is also currently testing the idea of crawling from multiple ip hosting servers. This means that Googlebots are now able to spider sites faster than ever and with greater accuracy, and webmasters are monitoring this development closely to see how it affects algorithm changes.
Along with all these changes, Google is also acquiring companies such as Like.com. It’s yet to be told how these acquisitions will effect search as a whole.
Thanks to Heather Hendrick for the summary!
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