» Panda update

Google’s April Search Changes: 50+ Reasons Why April Was A Tumultuous Time in Search

Amie Baumwell — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:55:24 +0000

2 rollouts of Panda and 1 rollout of Penguin created an atmosphere of anxiety and tension among many in the interactive marketing world last month, with many of those sentiments carrying over into May. A multitude of people saw their sites drop in rankings, not knowing whether it was a Panda hit, a Penguin hit, or both.

Now, as site owners, SEOs and business owners work to correct their mistakes and recover their rankings, other search changes during April come to light. On Friday of last week, Google revealed that more than 50 changes occurred in search during the month of April (including the larger scale ones mentioned above), with some of them concerning international search functionality, but with many of them affecting search results here in the US. Let’s go in-depth with a few.

Domain Diversity

Google has tweaked the algorithm such that search does not, in the future, return too many results from the same domain. The tides are certainly shifting, and some strategies that allowed certain sites to dominate the first page of Google with multiple search results on one page may no longer be applicable (or possible). How to mitigate this change? With Google focusing on local so much more, with people using their phones to search while on the go all the time, you might restrategize and try focusing on hyper local keywords, and, instead of dominating the results for only a few queries, rank your site for as many hyper local keywords you can. If all goes well, you could rank for your general service area, plus all the areas surrounding it – and gain more reach this way.

Local Navigational Homepages

Speaking of local, Google made some tweaks to the way local navigational searches return results so that searches that include locations (like, for instance, “Buckhead bakery”) return results that are more likely to top rank local navigational homepages (even if those pages don’t mention the location!). It does make sense that Google would want to return results that display a site’s localized content, as the person searching with a keyword that includes a specific location is obviously looking not for general content, but rather for content that is locally focused. How should you respond to this change? If your site isn’t already structured in such a way that local navigational homepages are prominent and prepared for search engine consumption, stop reading this and go make some changes! Make sure your local navigational homepage is existent, relevant, that the content might encourage users to take action or, at the very least, stay on your site by clicking on a hyper-local link that brings them to hyper-local, helpful content.

Search Terms/Keywords

A vague improvement to how search terms are scored is mentioned, and it is based on whether and how they appear on the pages users are searching. However, and perhaps more importantly in light of the Penguin update, an additional keyword stuffing change is also listed (interesting note – the codename for this project is “Spam”): “We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.” While the relevance of links and the diversity of anchor-text is incredibly important with the new Penguin update, this little change is a reminder that the over –optimization portion of Penguin targeting spam has a wider span that includes the quality of on-page content and the links within it. How to respond? This little tip should not be new to you at all: If your keywords don’t flow naturally with the content on your site’s pages, remove them. Use them a max of 2-3 times if possible, and only use them if they make sense in context! If you are going to link internally to another page, or even if you are going to link to an external site, do not stuff links with your keywords, either.

Freshness
Google made some changes so that the freshest content is delivered for users’ search queries. You might remember back in November that Google announced an algorithm change that ensured the freshness of results; April’s update applies a more “granular classifiers” that works to promote fresh content in the form of more breaking news. On the other side of the coin, Google also made some changes so that low-quality content does NOT get promoted via the freshness classifier – even if breaking news is identified, if the site is low-quality, it will not show up in the fresh results.

Titles

This change, according to Google, sharpens the process that goes into selecting a Title to show with each search result. Google’s goal is to return more concise/informative titles by making a change to the factors that are used to decide what is used as the title of a particular result. Only time will tell how this change will affect things; some sites do experience this at work already when the Title they created for their site is changed by Google to something the search engine takes from the site and feels is more relevant. This seemingly will become a more widespread phenomenon. Obvious takeaway: The title you create for your site should be not only relevant, but also easy to read and should make sense to the reader. Google places heavy emphasis on user experience, so when creating your Title, try moving away from ones like: “Atlanta Bakery-Bakers in Atlanta-Cakes in Atlanta| Atlanta Bakery Co.” Try replacing it with something that would capture the interest of a user like “Try The Best Cakes in Atlanta | Visit Atlanta Bakery Co.” Most importantly, if you have some evidence of having the best cakes in Atlanta, include it in the copy on the page for which you created this title. Keep the title relevant to the copy, but also intriguing to the searcher.

Speaking of content, Google mentions: “We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.” How do you prove your content is authoritative? Blogging often, posting on Google Plus, gaining comments and connections there (and also doing so on other social networks, though obviously these would carry less weight than Google’s own social network), having an abundance of trust links, having quality links coming into your site (it’s less about quantity, as you likely know, and more about quality), etc.

Previous Searches Impacting Your Current Searches

Remember that privacy policy change that freaked everyone out? In my blog post about it, I wrote: “It has many people concerned about the privacy of their information – almost giving them the feeling that big brother is watching, which I think Google actually understands. However, the search giant brings it all back to “user experience,” as in, we’re only watching your every move while you’re signed in to better your experience as a user.” Well, social search was one way that Google acted on this, and a small tweak in April is another way Google is doing so: “This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.” Big Brother (as in your over-protective, way older, way more successful older brother) is watching – and guessing that you search according to a pattern (which you probably do).

Creeped out? And if you’re thinking now that Google is out to change the world (if not destroy it), you ain’t seen nothin’ yet…the first self-driving cars may hit the roads of Nevada soon, courtesy of the search engine giant.

Google: “We’ll watch your every move online, but you can watch ours on the road.”

More Information

Want to learn more about the Penguin or Panda updates? Interested in SEO? Check back with our blog for regular updates about what’s going on in the interactive marketing worlds or give us a call at 770-481-1766.

Related Information:

Google’s Penguin Search Algorithm: Wrap Up

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Google Search Algorithm Changes Today

Google Announces Most Recent Algorithm Updates

Amie Baumwell — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:16:15 +0000

New month, new changes. This according to Google in the latest blog post on the search engine’s Inside Search blog. If you’re an SEO, you can start breathing again – it’s nothing too earth shattering (there’s no Panda-scale change!). However, these changes are still significant for us to pay attention to.

Usually, in some way shape or form, Google’s algorithm changes and updates impact our SEO strategy. That’s why it is so important to stay up to date with these changes and keep your eyes open for anything that may be changing in the industry (or changing the industry as a whole, as the Panda update did).

So, that’s why we’re blogging about Google’s most recent announcement about all the changes that have gone down recently (Google notes, in the Inside Search blog post, that they will be doing this monthly. So far, they have kept to that promise). The most drastic change was the “Freshness” change, though its projected impact on35% of queries was obviously not enough to keep this algorithmic change in the spotlight. The only reason it only had a short-lived “fifteen minutes of fame,” though, was because Google + Brand Pages were released shortly (only days) after the freshness algorithm change was announced.

Notable Algorithm Changes

The changes that received solo coverage include the verbatim search change (read about it here) and the revamped Google bar (read about it here), as well as an update to the Google IPAD search app. So we won’t be covering those here. The changes we will talk a little bit about concern original content, related query results, more long-tail indexing, top result selection and “parked” domains.

“Original Content”

Matt Cutts hinted at PubCon 2011 that there would be an upcoming change related to content and scraper sites ( he proposed that in the future there would perhaps be a way to send information to Google when you publish content, so that scraper sites couldn’t rank higher than the original content). Google describes an algorithm search related to this comment: “We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.” We would guess such signals might include links, the authority of those links (obviously, the more authoritative, the better) and domain authority.

Related Query Results

This change will refine search results so that they are more closely related to the query you actually typed into the search box. Google uses the following example: “if you are searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions ‘red widgets.’” For SEOs, this likely means that the pages on your website should be more specific – you should pay more attention to on-page optimization and URL structure for exact match keywords.

Long-Tail Indexing

Referring to this change as “more comprehensive indexing,” the algorithm will now be able to index more long-tail documents so that they can rank more for relevant queries.

Panda Update Is Now Running In Most Languages

Amie Baumwell — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:23:45 +0000

With the exception of Korean, Japanese and Chinese, Google has launched Panda internationally, across all languages. Announcing the new adaptation across languages on their official Google blog, the search engine refers to Panda as the “high-quality sites algorithm,” which they say has received a positive response from users who have experienced its effect on English language queries.

What’s Panda’s History?

Panda’s primary purpose is to improve user experience and thereby make the internet a more user-friendly place. Panda was first released in the United States February in order to crack down on content farms (and other “low-quality” websites that did not provide a good user experience). In April, Google ran another iteration of the “high-quality sites algorithm,” which applied the changes to everything searched in the English language (so, those who do searches in countries where English is the primary language have seen Panda’s effects, as have those in non-English speaking countries who have used the English language to do Google searches).

Panda, Now

Panda is now being run for all non-English queries except for the three noted above.

According to Google, “For most languages, this change impacts typically 6-9% of queries to a degree that a user might notice. This is distinctly lower than the initial launch of Panda, which affected almost 12% of English queries to a noticeable amount.” Regardless of its lower percentage impact, those who experience this update for the first time (especially international SEOs) will certainly experience ripple effects from the update. However, it is likely this now worldwide update will make search results in almost every language more relevant to the queries being searched, as Panda has done so far with English language search.

What Does This Update Mean?

Like many others, the world as our Atlanta SEO Company knew it changed drastically with Panda’s release (and continued iterations – in fact, there was a rumor this week that Panda 2.4 had been run, but Google vehemently denied it). This means that international SEOs (as well as those in the United States who are still grappling with Panda’s effects) will have to modify their sites so that they adhere to Google’s high-quality content guidelines.

More Information:

If you have any more questions about Google, the Panda update, or SEO, please revisit our blog for daily posts about the goings on in the search engine and SEO worlds. For more specific questions for our Atlanta SEO Company that are related to your business, give us a call at 770-481-1766.

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Related Information:

Google Rolled Out “Panda” Algorithmic Improvement – Now What?

Google Panda Update – Can You Please Explain What This Is and How it Affects My Site?

Why are Copywriting Services In Demand After Google’s Panda Update?

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