10 Google Algorithm Changes That Affect Your Ranking On Google
Google makes about 500 changes to its search formula every year. As a webmaster it can be confusing trying to keep up with all these changes. Fortunately, Google have published a post detailing 10 recent changes to its algorithm which affect its secret process of ranking Internet websites. Note, Google have chosen to detail these particular updates as they are less vulnerable to being gamed (or exploited).
Here is a rundown of the changes from Google’s Inside Search Blog as written by Matt Cutts, Engineer and spokesman for Google Search:
- “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”.
My personal thoughts
Of the hundreds of changes it makes every year to its algorithm, it does not usually publicize many of the changes, let alone aggregate them into one blog post. This helped prevent websites from exploiting Google’s search results with black hat techniques. However, with the recent Federal Trade Commission anti-trust investigations into Google favoring its own businesses in search results, Google is aiming to be more transparent about its algorithm changes.
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This post is really helpful to all the web masters. I really pay thanks for that.
Thanks! It was a informative post.
I’ve started disliking google products. Being the king of Search Engines, Google is using its homepages to promote its new services. Its just the search which is making all google services succeed.
If Chrome wasn’t promoted on the homepage, it would’ve been a lot far behind than where it is at present.
That’s going strange. Google wants to offer everything. Where would others go???
Thank you for the email and the blog post, but there saying 500 changes, wow. But I guess once you can not move past a certain rank looking at these tiny factors will help get you moving. But I like this and I will remember this when doing my link building strategy b/c it is important to know where to put the priority.
good information, thanks for this share.
Actually it wasn’t that helpful, instead of just re-stating what they said, you should’ve explained what it means for us. How should we adapt our websites to keep up with these changes?
Hi Omar,
I’m sorry you feel that way. Most of our clients don’t regularly read the Google Blog so this is just a way to keep everyone up-to-date with important Google updates they may have missed.
Most of the algorithm changes are small ones (over 500 changes) that you shouldn’t get too caught up in as it would be impossible to keep up! With big changes like the Panda updates, a simple Google search will provide you with steps you can take to ensure you maintain your ranking.
Generally, you need to regularly create new, high quality content for your website. Choose the right keywords to target after spending time on research. Create as many backlinks to your website as possible on high PageRank social sites and websites. Make sure you regularly analyze your website’s statistics to see if there is any changes in ranking you should be aware of. Google Webmaster’s Tools and Google Analytics are great free tools that will also offer suggestions to better optimize and keep track of your site ranking.
And if you’re still worried, I suggest you monitor the Google Webmaster Blog – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ – to get the latest information.
I hope that helps.
- Siv
I didn’t understand the third point. Does it mean that anchor text for all backlinks should not be same?
Thanks.
Hi Vineet,
No, Google are just referring to boilerplate anchor links. Boilerplate links are links that can be found:
– (Sitewide) global navigation (home, about us, etc)
– In certain spacial areas, especially if including links, (blogroll, navbar)
-In Markup (javascript, CC id/class names such as header, footer)
You’ll notice that the links above – “boilerplate links” are found on all pages. For example, if you visit http://www.apexpacific.com/download2.html#SES and scroll down the page, you’ll see a whole bunch of boilerplate links. These appear across all our webpages and doesn’t mean that the links are related to this specific download page for SEO Suite.
So basically, what Google is saying is that:
Sometimes Google will change a page’s title tag in their search engine results if they think the title tag given by the website owner isn’t good. One of the ways it decides on a new title tag for the webpage is – Google uses the anchor text in links pointing to the page. But Google doesn’t like to use the anchor text from “boilerplate links” because these links often aren’t relevant to that specific page as they appear on most or all webpages in a website. So they will often not use anchor text from “boilerplate links” to determine the new title tag.
I hope that makes sense.
- Siv
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very intresting news, and since I use Xgen Seo this news is very important, so thanks
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