Google announced the first big update to their search algorithm since the infamous “Panda” update of earlier this year. This new so-called “freshness algorithm” is designed to provide more relevant information for searches that Google thinks are actually looking for timely results. Their example is that a person searching for the term “Olympics” is probably looking for information on the upcoming Olympic games, not for historical information.
As with any sweeping change to their search algorithm, the effects can readily be seen in a number of searches, but just how far-reaching this change proves to be remains to be seen. Following in the footsteps of the Panda update, it seems that Google is committed to following this path of dynamically updating their search results, now not just by location but by timeliness of content. Not that Google’s search results have ever been particularly static, but this latest update continues a fragmentation trend that Arizona SEO is keen to test and adapt to.
Important changes to note:
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content (page description): 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. Google is extending these for pages with specific technical information. Snippets will now include more samples of the direct information sought such as prices and consumer reviews. Along these same lines Google is now culling the content for these snippets from the greater context of the body copy or text of a page. This is as opposed to grabbing a handful of header info and forming a page summary with it.
• 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.
“What this is talking about is where it shows your actual search title in the results. The blue link you click on, that’s the title of the search result that’s built into the page.”
“A lot of the time these will be auto-generated based on back links, so Google is now choosing to pay less attention to that, and more attention to the actual content of the page and possibly auto-generate the link based on that content.”
“What might happen is that companies will go out, buy a whole bunch of back links, or they’ll have anchor text that points back to one page in the hope of ranking that page.”
“If that link is across the whole site and is part of the structure of the site, it doesn’t necessarily add any value. Google is going to pay less attention to it as a result.”
