Google Algorithm Changes – An Overview

On Monday, Google Distinguished Engineer, Matt Cutts, posted an Inside Search blog detailing 10 recent algorithmic updates made to Google. These changes largely surround the display and relevance of search results.

In a bid to offer users an “even deeper insight into the 500+ changes we make to search in a given year”, Cutts has provided a top 10 list of the most important developments in the Google algorithm over the past few weeks. I thought we would take a look at each of them below.

Smarter snippet content - If you don’t ascribe each of your site pages with a meta description tag, Google will do it for you. In the past, Google’s snippet provisions have been pretty meagre, often taking some of the initial text from a page such as the main navigational menu headings. Now, Google will be able to draw more relevant content from the page content, rather than just headings or navigational text. Of course, we would advise that, similar to page titles, website owners determine their own meta descriptions. This allows you total control over your site representation in the SERPs. The update does however, provide a more preferential temporary solution until you get round to adding your own description.

More Relevant Page Titles - 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.” – Matt Cutts. So why not just use the HTML page title tags as created by webmasters? In the majority of cases this is not going to be a problem. However, according to Barry Schwartz there are a growing number of cases in which HTML title tags are being overridden by Google with a title they deem to be more appropriate.

Rich Snippets for Applications - Rich snippets are already available in shopping, music, recipes, and events searches; Google has extended this offering to software applications as well. The snippet will now display user reviews and costs alongside the SERP, allowing users to determine the application’s worth at a glance in the search results.

Cross Language Information Retrieval - For queries typed in a language for which a restricted amount of web content is available, Google will now offer translated versions of relevant English language pages. These will be located below the original English versions. This service was previously available only in Korean, but has now been rolled out to Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, and Icelandic.

Autocomplete Improvement for Russian Queries - In the past, partial queries typed in Russian resulted in long, and often arbitrary suggested queries for Russian users. This has been updated and brought into line with the current autocomplete best practice for the English language.

Autocomplete Fix For IME Queries - This change improves how Autocomplete handles queries containing non-Latin characters. Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which could often result in nonsensical predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Fresher Results - This change has been the subject of much discussion over the past week or so. It is believed that this update will affect circa 35% of all searches, making this a particularly significant factor to take into account going forward. Fresh content was always an important factor. With this development it becomes even more vital for webmasters and SEOs.

More Relevant Date-Defined Queries - Carrying on from the idea of fresh content as a major ranking factor, Google have improved their algorithm to better display the most relevant results for date-restricted queries.

Refining Official/Original Page Display - The idea of displaying the most relevant search results includes returning the official or authoritative site over others for a specific query. Prominence is already given to such sites, with more SERP estate being allocated to the respective company site for brand related search terms. This update will look to build on such objectives.

Retiring an Algorithm Signal in Image Searches - “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.”– Matt Cutts

As Matt Cutts warns webmasters however, despite the selection of these 10 updates for public sharing, there are hundreds of updates being made on an annual basis. Though we should take these into account, an increased focus on the above developments should not be at the expense of our attention to other, perhaps more important aspects of the Google algorithm.

What do you think of Google's latest algorithm changes? Have the affected you? Contact us and let us know what you think!