How The New Google Updates Affect Your Ranking On Google

Previously Google published a post detailing 10 recent changes to its algorithm following criticisms over their lack of transparency with their algorithm formula. Due to popular demand, Google will now publish a monthly blog series dedicated to smaller algorithm enhancements (See the latest changes below).

Scott Huffman, Engineering Director of Google Search, explains:

“We know people care about how search works, so we always want to push the envelope when it comes to transparency… The good news is that we make roughly 500 improvements in a given year, so there’s always more to share. With this blog series, we’ll be highlighting many of the subtler algorithmic and visible feature changes we make. These are changes that aren’t necessarily big enough to warrant entire blog posts on their own”.

Before I list the algorithm enhancements, I want to address an issue a reader brought up in our previous post “10 Google Algorithm Changes That Affect Your Ranking On Google”. They asked, “How should we adapt our websites to keep up with these changes?”. I want to clarify that these are one of hundreds of minor algorithm updates and you should not attempt to adapt your website to every algorithm change Google publicizes. It would be impossible (and unnecessary) to do so. Rather have a look at the list and see if there is any new update that could penalize your website and adjust your website accordingly, or if there is one you could perform simple actions to take advantage of and increase your ranking on Google. Most of the updates allude to simple actions that can be performed. For example, the new updates introduce a “parked domain” classifier to identify and remove parked domains from search queries, as well as signals to identify fresh and original content and blogs. What does this mean for webmasters? Well, if you want to rank highly on Google, it’s clear you need to continuously create substantial and fresh content for your website (and that includes adding images which should be appropriately named).

Remember all these minor updates just reaffirm the actions every SEO expert will recommend you undertake.

• Regularly create new, high quality content for your website.
• Choose the right keywords to target after spending time on research.
• Create as many quality backlinks to your website as possible on high PageRank social sites and websites.
• 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).

It is only the major updates such as the 2011 Panda algorithm update that you should close attention to, and we will always provide specific actions to take as it affects a large portion of webmasters.

So enough rambling from me, here are the latest algorithm enhancements.

• “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.”
• More comprehensive indexing: This change makes more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.
• 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.
• 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.
• Layout on tablets: We made some minor color and layout changes to improve usability on tablet devices.
• 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

And here’s a recap of improvements we’ve already blogged about since last time:

• New verbatim tool
• Updated Search App for iPad
• New Google bar”

What really caught my eye was the update focused on “more comprehensive indexing”. This means long-tail documents are even more likely to rank for relevant queries. I’ve always recommended new clients add long-tail keywords to their strategy. Remember they may be less popular than short tail keywords, but they are easier and quicker to rank for (which is great for those who aren’t ranking highly for short-tail keywords or those that have recently turned to online marketing). Long-tail keywords are also highly specific, and tend to draw more quality traffic, which leads in more conversions than short-tail keywords. So this new update is great news for webmasters adopting this strategy.

If you have any questions or thoughts you would like to share, please leave a comment below!