Ten New SEO Developments Google Has Implemented This Month

Details: Thursday, 08 December 2011 16:37; Published on Thursday, 08 December 2011 18:48; Hits: 2050

10 SEO changes Google made
If you thought things were slowing down and getting boring you can relax. Google has introduced ten more search refinements this month which directly impact upon your website’s SEO and its ability to be found.

In case you were wondering if this is exceptional, this year Google has recognised the importance of the convergence of search and social media and has speeded up its rate of refinements and improvements made to search. As a result we may be in the position of having new refinements being rolled out every few weeks for the next twelve months.

Here are the ten improvements for the month that just passed straight from the Google development team’s blog and what they mean for you:

01. Related query results refinements: Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are similar to the actual search you type. This change makes it less likely that these results will rank highly if the original query had a rare word that was dropped in the alternate query. For example, if you are searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions “red widgets.”

Translation: You now do not need to work so hard on your website to get ranked just because you happen to have a product or a service which is similar to but different from a more generic product or service. Provided you have done your work and adequately described it your website’s content Google will be able to find it.

02. More comprehensive indexing: This change makes more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.

Translation: The changes in Google search which effectively destroyed the power of long-tail keywords (i.e. keywords which are not very popular but which help your website rank high because there is not much competition for them) were a great disappointment for SEOs and for many webmasters. Google’s latest refinements in indexing now address this balance making it possible for a website to start ranking high for long-tail keywords, again.

03. New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.

Translation: This is new and it affects any webmaster who has an additional domain parked and is using it to either grab some traffic and re-direct it to their main domain (a valid strategy until now) or as an additional block to crowd out competitors from getting on the same page (host crowding).

04. More autocomplete predictions: With autocomplete, we try to strike a balance between coming up with flexible predictions and remaining true to your intentions. This change makes our prediction algorithm a little more flexible for certain queries, without losing your original intention.

Translation: Keyword relevance is more important than ever, particularly when it comes to Google suggesting search results based on queries. If you have been slack with your keyword research it will now show with a real dip in traffic.

05. Fresher and more complete blog search results: We made a change to our blog search index to get coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.

Translation: Blogs which update their content more frequently (and this also applies to websites) are more likely to get indexed more frequently and have their pages show up faster on search. This may also affect the depth of indexing which is carried out by the Google bot.

06. Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.

Translation: Article spinning, content rewriting, spam content and scraped content has had its day. What Google wants to see is content which is fresh, relevant and provides real value to online visitors. If you fail to deliver this, traffic volume and website ranking will suffer.

07. Live results for Major League Soccer and the Canadian Football League: This change displays the latest scores & schedules from these leagues along with quick access to game recaps and box scores.

Translation: Goode news for websites which carry sports related content. In recognition of its global importance in search Google has made changes to how its algorithm pulls data from there.

08. Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.

Translation: Newsworthy images and images which are relevant to topical content are now capable of being discovered by Google and displayed in the Google images section for the search results page for that search term.

09. Layout on tablets: We made some minor color and layout changes to improve usability on tablet devices.

Translation: Mobile search is becoming an increasingly important source of traffic for websites and sales for webmasters. The way Google displays search results on mobile devices, including tablets, has a definite impact on click-through-rates (CTR) and end-user behaviour.

10. Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.

Translation: Host Crowding is an old SEO technique which lies in that grey area between White Hat and Black Hat SEO. It has not really worked for some time and, with Google’s final code rewrites has now received the last nail in its coffin. If you really want to dominate Google’s first page, get in one of the top three positions based on the authority of your website and the quality of its content.