SEO Expert

Currently Google is leading to have more authoritative results and with this they have launch the Penguin update last April 24 targeting web spams but before that there are many changes that have been applied in order to improve its algorithm. And they actually posted it with their insidesearch blog having 52 changes for April. According to Matt Cuts who is the one who posted it, one of the major developments to him was the latest algorithm change which is currently helping them in finding relevant and quality sites. It is not only the major change; there is also improvement in terms of spelling updates, indexing, sitelinks, sportscore features and many more.

Below are the updates from Google for the Month of April.

• Categorizing Paginated Documents. Applicable on sites having documents in paginated series where in a rel=”next” and rel=”prev” sequence is applicable.
• Taking into account language in helping to show most relevant search outcomes.
• Identification of a Country for a webpage, where in location is important in identifying the relevancy of a search result where in some subpages can be consider related to a country.
• Fixing Anchor bugs
• Having diversified domain where in sometimes search queries turn outs to have more results from same domain but now it turns outs that content coming from a more diversified set.
• Increasing the presence of local sites coming from organization, where in this site from an organization of a country can dominate the search results of that location, for example if we are here on the Philippines most of the organization results come from the Philippines or .org.ph.
• Improving local results for local search queries, where in local keywords have possibility to rank for a local website on top of the searches even not mentioning the place.
• Improving scoring of search term in rankings.
• To simplify and increase consistency in snippets generation they are able to launch disabling saliency in snippets.
• Showing more text in the first part of snippets.
• Prioritizing results from webpages that have fresher content where in it create a significant change in rankings which shows more sites having fresher content on top results.
• Launching a minor change in freshness signal helping in identification of fresher document.
• Exclusion of low-value content on the freshness signal update where in even though you have posted a fresher content but it’s consider low quality it cannot be included on the top results.
• Change in the Instant preview where in you have to move closely to and pause the icon in the right of the search result until you can see the preview.
• Having new 33 languages for Sunrise and sunset search attribute.
• Improving Turkish currency conversion search attribute.
• Improving Serbian news clusters.
• Makes better interpretation on your query based on the last few queries.
• Having more unified system architecture which showing improvement in search results.
• User Interface improvements on breaking news topics aligning a large two image thumbnail while searching with breaking news.
• Improving the completeness of projections for search queries on local searches.
• Changes that brought improvements in seeking for public information which broadens the range of queries which can give helpful unemployment and population data.
• Detecting Japanese and also Korean error pages.
• Improvement on efficiently generating Alternative Titles.
• Showing specific and/or relevant information to search results.
• Designed algorithm for lesser “bad spell” correction internationally. For example if that term is localized or a term of a particular country is being search they don’t want to give spelling corrections or suggestions.
• Extending spelling corrections feature globally in over sixty languages.
• Showing more spelling corrections even to long queries even if it’s longer than 10 terms.
• Sometimes even if you search for a term having a different spelling it is automatically corrected and shows a corrected results wherein you can see below the “showing results for” the original term you are searching for and this feature was made more comprehensive and goes internationally.
• Controlling “Did you mean” in the search feature which goes internationally wherein the algorithm first check if the correct spelling is applicable to your search query.
• Refreshing the spelling model and increasing its quality.
• Giving lesser autocomplete suggestions that can turn out lower value results.
• Improving safe search signals to images and videos where in adult materials are filtered when you are not searching or finding it.
• Safe search Signals extended its improvement in Russian.
• Currently increases the size of search base index by 15% and also continuing to make development for increasing the size of indexing process.
• Keeping index in “tiers”, the indexing process of a document is at various rates based the relevancy of these documents to the users which continues comprehensiveness for search queries.
• Improving serving systems.
• Improvement that brings sub-sitelinks rather than giving only normal snippet.
• Giving better rank for expanded sitelinks .
• Showing relevant links through refreshing sitelinks data.
• Reducing snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks.
• Expanding mobile movie showtimes search attribute for China, Korea and Japan.
• New MLB search attribute.
• Expanding sport search queries up to Spain football (La Liga).
• Introducing new Formula 1 race search attribute in helping to find leatherboards and results.
• Improving NHL search attribute.
• Designed a classifier that can detect keyword stuffing.
• Showing more trusted and reliable results.
• Enhanced mobile HTML5 resource caching
• Changes on rich snippets including rich snippets testing tool.
• Prioritizing more high-quality sites on top of search queries.

You can see above that there are a total of 52 changes which bring minor and bigger changes that lead to the latest algorithm improvement. Although that list above is so long enough but as you can see it is a proof of achievement of how technology can bring development to make a relevant search query. And recently you can see lots of comments over the new penguin updates which greatly affect many websites it only shows that there is a possibility of more and bigger changes in the future which means for us SEO experts we don’t need to resist the change but follow the flow of change by observing it and creating a strategic action plan.

“Great content has to be the foundation of any good site.” – Matt Cutts

As google algorithm evolves, the balance between authority and topicality is the most crucial issue in getting exceptional links or backlinks. An interesting question was raised.
According to Matt Cutts, there has to be a balance between authority and topicality. You cannot have exceptional links while having mediocre content at the same time. You got to have quality and authority. For example, Viagra gains fame through promotions, online advertising, automated e-mails, etc. They know that people or the users online want something about Viagra, something that is interesting and popular. So, they kept promoting. Most of us do not want contents that are less interesting like Newsweek or Time. We want something like Viagra. When in fact, having sites with authoritative contents are the best way to gain exceptional links.

You may want your content that is not only trustworthy and reputable but also you want topicality. You may want something for your site that is off-topic that most readers or online users could relate into. So, Google tries to find a good balance between authority and topicality. Not authority alone or the otherwise but the balance of both, a well-rounded site.

So, Google wants exceptional content to get exceptional links because it is truly impossible to get exceptional links from a crappy content. It is like you gonna be pushing uphills. It is so hard to get those links. As a result, you will be pushed to do some sort of campaigns that google consider bad or scuzzy, like spamming.

It is better to have great content without causing pain to the web. You are going to get those links naturally. Then, you have both, great content and great links. One of the best ways to get a well-rounded site is to have fantastic, interesting and useful content as well as great resources and great information. And then the web will think that your site is interesting and that, it is important or helpful to the audience.