A Quick Tour of Google’s 39 May Updates – What’s Really Important

On June 7, 2012 Google released a summary of their (39) activities throughout May. We have divided these into 8 short but important highlight categories:

1.     Auto Complete:

Google continues to refine the autocomplete suggestions by:

• Adding predictions below the search box as the user types
• Reducing arbitrary predictions to remove low quality suggestions
• Better handling input such as caps lock and a better adaptation to user language.
• Tweaks to autocomplete in mobile as well

2.     News:

Google improves the ranking algorithm for news search results, enabling fresher and more accurate results to appear on the 1st page. (Improvements to ranking for news results)

3.     Ranking Signals

Google continue to tweak their ranking algorithm:

• Improve their ‘inorganic backlinks’ detection mechanism, to better identify link schemes (and purchased links, as those go hand in hand), to make sure it is less likely that a page ranks for those links. ‘This change ensures we’re using those signals appropriately in the rest of our ranking.’
• Penguin tweaks – minor changes done to the Penguin algorithm to improve signals and refresh their data (this is probably a result of the amount of feedback forms received, judgment of what is a ‘fair complaint’ and bringing back a few of the sites that got hurt)
• Tweaks to their scoring of results, with a minimal impact on the results quality.
• A better display of results from diverse domains, as relevant as possible to the user’s query [project codename "Other Ranking Components"]

4.     SERP Titles

• Improving their mechanism to display truncated or irrelevant titles in the SERPs – shortening or changing the titles so they are relevant and sensible. They also remove irrelevant bits of text such as ‘go back’

5.     Freshness:

This is an important element Google are constantly trying to improve in order to affect their rankings:

• A better detection of new events
• Improvements to their algorithm designed to set the threshold of what fresh content really is.
• A better identification of queries which would most likely include fresh results

6.     Google Plus:

• Updates to +Pages [project codename “Social Search”] algorithm to decide which are the relevant Google Plus pages to display on the right hand side of the search results has been improved (make your G+ as relevant as possible and up to date and users could get it as a suggestion even if they didn’t mean to search your site).

7.     Mobile

• Precise location option on tablet. (personalized search results relevant to your more precise location on mobile)
• Improvements to local search on tablet.
• Internationalization of “recent” search feature on mobile.
• Improvements to autocomplete on Mobile.

8.     Sports

• Unified Soccer feature. This change unifies the soccer search feature experience across leagues in Spain, England, Germany and Italy, providing scores and scheduling information right on the search result page.
• Improvements to NBA search feature. This launch makes it so we’ll more often return relevant NBA scores and information right at the top of your search results. Try searching for [nba playoffs] or [heat games].
• New Golf search feature. This change introduces a new search feature for the Professional Golf Association (PGA) and PGA Tour, including information about tour matches and golfers. Try searching for [tiger woods] or [2012 pga schedule].

This edition of Google’s monthly changes truly reflects what really matters to Google, and which topics are of high priority. Upgrades to freshness, autocomplete, mobile compatibility and ranking signals are issues that are tweaked on a monthly basis.

There are, however, a few points we should follow up on:

Ranking factors: Google is constantly improving the way they can detect purchased links. If that is the tactic that works for you, make sure you link like a human, this study will provide useful insights on natural linking. Also, despite Matt Cutt’s denial of a new Penguin update, the algorithm tweak was important enough to appear on the summary.

Freshness: Update your site frequently to rank much quicker and easier, as freshness is one of the most important ranking signals, tweaked constantly.

Mobile: Mobile accessibility is becoming more crucial than ever – adapt your site to mobile users to be favored by the mobile bot.

Google Plus: It’s very reasonable that we’ll see more and more updates in the Google Plus category. Google are trying to encourage SEOs to use Google Plus with the underlying promise of the future evolvement of this social media into a powerful ranking factor. The more join – the more reliable is this factor, and the stronger its effect.

The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Revolution Flyers, Inc.

Tags: Google Updates, Penguin Update, Ranking Factors

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 at 8:43 am and is filed under SEO/Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.