Google Algorithm 10 Changes

Inside Search Blog



http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html

The 10 changes, in plain English

1. Better cross-language search
   • For searches in languages with relatively little web content, Google began showing relevant English pages with translated titles.
   • Languages included Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Welsh, Icelandic and others.
   • Purpose: Give users access to useful information even when little content exists in their own language.
2. Better search-result snippets
   • Google became better at extracting the actual useful text from a webpage.
   • It reduced the tendency to display navigation menus, headers and other boilerplate in the snippet.
   • SEO implication: The text Google displays underneath your page title doesn't necessarily come directly from your meta description; Google may select relevant page content.
3. Better page titles
   • Google reduced the influence of repetitive/boilerplate anchor text when generating search-result titles.
   • Purpose: Make titles more representative of the individual page rather than generic text repeated across a site.
4. Better Russian autocomplete
   • Google improved its autocomplete system so that Russian suggestions weren't unnecessarily long compared with the query being typed.
   • This was essentially an autocomplete-quality improvement.
5. More application rich snippets
   • Search results for software applications could show additional information such as cost and user reviews.
   • Google expanded the number of searches where these rich snippets could appear.
6. Removed an old Image Search signal
   • Google stopped using a ranking signal related to images being referenced from multiple documents.
   • Important: This is an example of Google removing a ranking factor when it determined it was no longer useful.

7. Freshness update

   • This was arguably the most important SEO-related change in the list.
   • Google substantially improved its ability to determine when a search requires recent information.
   • Google said the change affected approximately 35% of searches, although only about 6–10% were noticeably affected.

   Google gave three major categories:

   • breaking news/current events
   • recurring events such as elections and sports
   • frequently updated information such as product reviews
8. Better detection of official websites
   • Google improved its ability to identify the official/authoritative page for an entity.
   • Official sites could therefore receive a ranking advantage.
   • SEO implication: Being the authoritative source for your own organization, product, brand or entity became increasingly important.
9. Better date-restricted searches
   • When users specified a particular date range, Google improved how it determined which results actually belonged in that period.
   • This made date-filtered searches more useful.
10. Better autocomplete for non-Latin languages

• Google fixed problems affecting IME (Input Method Editor) queries.
• Intermediate keystrokes used for languages such as Hebrew, Russian and Arabic could previously generate nonsensical autocomplete suggestions.

What was really important for SEO?

If you're looking at this article from an SEO perspective, I'd rank the changes roughly like this:

Change	SEO importance
Freshness/recent content	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Official page detection	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Better snippets	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Better page titles	⭐⭐⭐⭐
More application rich snippets	⭐⭐⭐
Cross-language search	⭐⭐
Date-restricted search	⭐⭐
Image ranking signal removed	⭐⭐
Autocomplete improvements	⭐
Russian/IME autocomplete fixes	⭐

Google Algorithm Tweaking; the canonical tag

Search quality highlights: new monthly series on algorithm changes
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/12/search-quality-highlights-new-monthly.html briefly; 


Multiple URLs, one page
Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page. This can come up for lots of reasons. An ecommerce site might allow various sort orders for a page (by lowest price, highest rated…), the marketing department might wanttracking codes added to URLs for analytics. You could end up with 100 pages, but 10 URLs for each page. Suddenly search engines have to sort  through 1,000 URLs.

This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.

• Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
• Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value  the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

Using the new canonical tag

Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

That’s it!

• You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
• You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.

This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.

• Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
• Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.

Canonical URL best practices

The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use  it if the URLs use best practices, such as:

• The  content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
• The canonical URL is the shortest version
• The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)