Twenty Google Algorithm Changes and What They Mean

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Monday, 23 January 2012 00:46

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In addition to the ten SEO developments Google implemented last month and the 500-odd changes it has planned for this year, the first of which was a change in the algorithm to begin filtering out heavy Google-ad sites, here are an additional 20 changes that Google has carried out.

Image search is becoming a source of increased SEO traffic for many websites and this includes news sites and eCommerce sites which sell products. Google is now looking at the image placement and image to text ratio on the landing page to deliver not just the best image for a product but also the best landing page for that product. Behind it is, as always, its drive to guarantee the end-user experience. Click Through Rates (CTRs) will probably come into play here as well as bounce rates from Analytics. Basically if you see that you have landing pages with images which score poorly in terms of bounce rates or are heavy with ads above the fold, now’s the time to either kill them or re-work them. If you don’t the damage they do will start to seep through to the rest of your site.

Google has changed its algorithm to analyze a site’s structure and show site links related to that structure and the search query right on the search page. The easiest way to understand this is if you type helpmyseo.com in the Google search box and look at how the site appears with a main listing and a number of sitelinks beneath it. The huge advantage here, beyond the fact that it allows those looking for your site to navigate to something specific straight from the search results page, is that provided you have used geolocation correctly, Google can show sitelinks specific to your location and that of the user.

This is particularly relevant for webmasters running multi-lingual websites. Pages not found usually return a 404 which is a “page does not exist” response from the server. When sites are configured to return different codes (and Google has an entire list of these which it calls ‘soft’ 404s). Again, these can be problematic in terms of the end-user experience and how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ your website is in that respect. Basically soft 404s are a grey area Google does not like so if your site is configured to return these (or even if it isn’t specifically, but it does and Webmaster Tools should help you in this regard) you should make sure that you set it to return hard 404s.

When users go to Google.com and do a search they do not really want to see results from the Google.com.au (Australia) index nor from Google.co.uk and vice versa. This is a significant change in Google to help it deliver country specific results. It is important because if you depend on a specific nationality for your visits (for instance a holiday website based in the Netherlands that needs to attract US tourists) you now need to make sure that your website is optimised to show up for searches in the US, otherwise you may well find yourself losing the precise segment of the online population you have been trying to attract.

This is applicable to specific websites such as those which have reviews (hotel sites for instance) and shopping sites. Rich snippets is extra code which allows the way your site appears on the Google search page to deliver more information which in turn allows those searching to make a decision based on more information. If you are confident messing with your site’s code the instructions are on Schema.org. It is worth remembering that this only improves the data your site presents on the Google search page, it does not affect your site’s search rank but it may well affect the Click Through Rate (CTR) as more of those who see it will click on it and that will have a benefit upon your SEO. If you are not confident dealing with your site’s code, talk to your developers about it. The Google video below gives a quick overview of Rich Snippets.

Google has carried out changes in its algorithm to affect the way words and sentences typed into the Google search box are autocompleted. Again, this is not a change which will affect a site’s ranking but it will have an (as yet unquantified) effect upon the online user behaviour which, in turn, will have some impact on SEO.

Sites which use Image Spam (spam messages presented in Images) in an attempt to get round Google filters will now be detected and filtered against. Similarly sites which present multiple images which are similar even though the site may be legit, risk being filtered against. This is, again, Google’s drive to safeguard the end-user experience and make sure it delivers only good quality landing pages. If your landing pages might be a problem now’s the time to take a look at the images you are using and try to improve them.

This is Google’s focus upon returning fresh, relevant results. It has now tightened up the way it looks at the date associated with a web page. The attempt here is to return true results for a search like “Olympic Games 100m 2008”. This makes it critical that you put dates when you create pages on your site which will allow Google to determine if they are relevant to particular date-relevant search queries and whether they are fresh when freshness is called upon in the search results.

While Google is focused on delivering accurate, relevant, fresh results on its search results pages it also knows the value of widening search parameters and enriching the end-user experience. To that end it has improved the way it looks for related search results based upon the search queries. For webmasters working in particularly competitive fields the emphasis now is on making sure that pages they create on their websites are optimised with specific added-value parameters in mind. For example, a site selling SEO Books will be of value to those looking for books on SEO but it will also be of value to those who may be looking for online practical business books. Too narrow a focus risks losing valuable, related traffic which is still relevant to what a website does.

Sites selling music or ringtones or even Google ads, frequently rely on lyrics to attract search engine attention. These sites now have better indexing and more traffic.

The Google +1 button which appeared next to each listing on the Google search results page has been tweaked to appear only when a user hovers over that listing with a pointer or if the listing has already been +1’ed. This is an important visual change as it declutters the Google search results page and allows the end user to focus on what is there faster, leading to a faster response and a better end-user experience.

Real-world places like restaurants, bars and places where specific venues are held, now benefit by having up to three upcoming events in the right hand-side panel which comes up in Google search when the venue shows up in an organic search on the Google search results page. This is a great opportunity to attract exposure and promote forthcoming events (like conferences, parties and special occasions) which should help any and all websites which depend upon the promotion of specific dates and real-world custom.

Google now uses the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. This is an important trend in Google for some time now and they have finally taken the step which has made it official. Image optimization now plays an important role in a website’s rankings not just in Image Search, which itself has begun to deliver traffic to websites, but also in the text-driven search results page. If you using images which are of low quality for instance Google will rank your site lower on the Image Search page.

In the name of guaranteeing that all-important end-user experience Google is providing tighter tools for Safe Search for parents and those working in office environments. This is a very important consideration for webmasters now as the optimisation of their websites and images must be such as to safely pass through these (obviously when this is warranted). Failure to do so will mean a loss of traffic from an important set of the online population.

In a move which has upset many SEOs and webmasters used to analysing the source of signals on their sites and the way specific keywords refer traffic and lead to conversions Google has started to offer encrypted search by default on Google.com when users are signed in and, in this change, encrypted search by opt-in for other regions (such as google.co.uk) for instance. This means that webmasters who used to optimise their websites for specific keywords, track the results in Analytics and refine further using the data they had now will have to operate in the dark, more or less.

Google says that the drop in Analytics data should be between 7% and 9% at most, meaning it won’t be critical enough to make webmasters feel they cannot see what is happening. SEOs I have spoken to believe the drop is more and a couple have put it as high as 25% - 30%. Without getting into the politics of this (interestingly the same restriction does not apply where Google Ads are concerned, but we could argue that this is a paid-for service which serves closer attention) the emphasis on SEO now has to be on producing a total-quality website governed by the end-user experience.

It’s no secret that mobile search traffic is growing and that mobile devices from cell phones to tablets deliver an increasingly important slice of the online visitor pie. Most sites HelpMySEO.com included, use specific code to redirect the mobile user to a different part of the site which delivers fewer heavy graphics and a more mobile-friendly version of the site. Google now understands mobile URLs and can skip all the redirect steps taking the end-user to the mobile page faster.

Google is beginning to pay particular attention to foreign-language search. With the shrinking of the globe Google is not as English language-centric as it used to be. It understands the value of gaining early market share in developing markets like non-English speaking countries using non-Latin character alphabets. IME-aware browsers can now detect Japanese queries in Google Instant.

By the same token as above Vietnamese queries benefit from better spelling suggestions in search.

Context matters a lot for translation, so this change in the Google algorithm prevents Google from using translated synonyms that are not actually relevant to the query context. This should also serve as a warning to webmasters whose sites use multi-language translations, those which have been translated poorly will begin to suffer as a result of Google’s focus on non-English search results quality.

Finally, great news for football lovers. Google now serves live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results right in search. Nothing at all there for SEOs or webmasters who do not have any football related websites but at least it shows that Google is taking steps designed to grow its efficiency and brand power and as more and more people use it for search as the de facto search engine on the web, it has implications for other parts of SEO which have to do with search queries which are outside Google.

Make search something you are good at. Get your website ranked on Google's first page with a tried-and-tested, practical, 20-step method that works. Now updated for Google Panda's search algorithm update. Low on cost, high on value.

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