Ten Recent Google Algorithm Changes
Ten Recent Google Algorithm Changes As Google continues to improve the quality and relevancy of their search results, changes in the search ranking, evaluation and algorithms are expected to come about as another year ends and the next one comes. But while most of the SEO’s are busy right now with their Googlebot-binding linkbuilding techniques, here you are reading this discrete attempt of exposing the ten recent algorithm changes of Google. These changes should fill up the missing beans why your site’s position sank to 10+ positions downwards and should now serve as your new building blocks for your SEO campaign. Google’s Ten Recent Algorithm Changes: Cross-Language Information Retrieval Improvements: the big G-team is now starting to translate all relevant English pages into various languages. Translated titles will be now displayed in the search results immediately under the English titles. Visitors will be taken to the translated page by clicking the corresponding translated title. Snippets with More Page Content and Less Header/Menu Content: Google believes that their snippets will have more relevant text by picking from the actual content of the page. But the team also suggests that this change will make the header/menu content a fraction less useful. De-Duplication of Boilerplate Anchors to Derive Better Page Titles: the anchor text of links pointing to a page is one of the main bases of Google in producing a page’s title. But the team just found out that boilerplate links with identical anchor text derive not so relevant titles at all. Now the G-team puts less importance on these links. Omission of Length-Based Autocomplete Predictions in Russian: Similar with the English practice, Google Team just made up their minds to omit predictions in Russian that are very long when compared to the partial query keyed in the search box. Extending Application Rich Snippets: The rich snippets for applications unveiled by the team recently allows users who are looking for software applications to view specific info—features, user reviews and pricing—in the search result itself. Application rich snippets will have an extended coverage secondary to this change, making them accessible most of the time. Omitting an Image Search’s Signal: Google does get some of its signals from the previous ones that were launched in the past. However, most of these offer insignificant impacts and relevancy to the search results. So the Team decided to take this signal out from the equation. Fresh Contents, More Results: Google’s push on fresh contents has been amplified as fresh contents now serve as a heavy basis for the search results. Of course, these fresh contents must be relevant to the queries. This change has stirred and created an impact to 35% of total search results. Refining Official Page Detection: In the chase of providing more relevant search results, Google will try to determine official sites and try to place them in good ranking positions. Enhancement to Date-Restricted Queries: Google further improved the way they handle result freshness for queries specifying a certain range of date. This permits users to find more relevant results to their specified queries. Prediction Fix for IME Queries: The previous ugly handling for IME queries—the ones containing non-Latin characters—is now improved by Google. No more nonsense autocomplete predictions for languages such as Russian, Hebrew and Arabic. So above are just some of the changes Google have managed to spill—and we have managed to pick. Perhaps now you can take your SEO game to a prudent step up by checking every pass and throw of your game plan. It’s a tough world out there, but with some help you know you can do it.
The Dramatic Impact of Google Panda
Last October 5, Matt Cutts of Google posted on his twitter that some Panda update will be happening for the next couple of weeks. But this will have a less significant impact compared to the previous updates. Also referred as 2.5, the major Panda update that occurred recently—October 8, 2011—has made a number of sites to bounce back. SearchMetrics shared numbers of how many of these sites have managed to propel their positions upward. While some shared happy testimony on their sites getting back on a competitive stance, others whined on how the Panda updates continuously hurt their sites.
The minor Panda update that happened on October 14, 2011—verified by Matt Cutts—was felt by a score of webmasters. Some of them happened to see improvements in their positions, while some watched their sites spiral downwards. But there are also some who hadn’t felt the changes at all. Google seems to be determined in cleaning the net from domains overly stuffed with keywords and crappy contents. Although quality and relevancy have been one of the deciding factors of a site’s placement in the Google search results, the update just proved that in the end much of the bases of Google will rest on the contents itself.
These recent changes from Google have required most of the SEO’s to improve the quality of their contents and to validate their practices. Most of the SEO tricks before that enable one to propel sites to the first pages of Google overnight appear to be no longer working. Even the latest SEO techniques which was proved to be efficiently working 5 months ago appears not as potent as they were before. This calls for everyone to go back to the drawing board and get something that would not just skyrocket sites to the first pages of the major search engines—like Google—but also stick it there for the longest time possible.
Organic SEO remains the most powerful yet timeless weapon for every internet marketer as most of the major search engine keeps on updating—or should we say changing—their algorithms. But this definitely necessitates one to have a longer span of time spend and trust to build, let alone money to shell out. For a start-up business, one year of waiting before reaping the benefits of SEO can be so long. Although there are proven techniques that can give the shortest time span of generating traffic—like paid advertisements and PPC, the cost of running one or both may present too overwhelming.
5 tips to recover from the Panda Update.
5 tips to recover from the Panda Update.
Google is constantly updating its algorithm to improve is search results. Search results change daily and Google is constantly testing to see which order of search results are better for users than others. Sometimes Google will roll out a big update, and noticeably there is a big shift in results. Forums are flooded with members who have sites that have lost their rankings as a result of the reshuffle.
You may not have even heard of it, but it is big news amongst the SEO community – The Panda update. Yes, as menacing as it sounds, this update was first tried and tested in the US and then recently bought to the UK. It’s aim was to push out low quality sites from the rankings in an aim to improve the over all search results. Sites with low quality content or spun content were targeted as well as sites with too much advertising.
If your rankings have been hit over the last few months, you would know you have been hit, some have dropped many pages for their most important keywords, others just a few positions. If this is the case we recommend to take the following steps to try and recover from the loss in the rankings:
1) Check the content of your site. We recommend using copyscape for everything published on your website to ensure the content is unique.
2) Try to reduce the amount of advertising on the page and only use adds that would directly benefit the user.
3) Go through the pages of your website and try to rewrite/redesign any page with a high bounce rate and lowest time on site – this will bring up the over all quality of your website.
4) It might be the value of your incoming links that have made the difference. Try to focus on high quality link building, making sure the sites you get a link from are not deindexed or using spun content
5) Be sure to use a wide variety of link types to not only make your link building look more natural, but if any site types linking to you are suddenly deemed less important by Google, your site will remain standing strong.
Try not to panic and don’t give up hope, Google can be a funny creature – bringing sites on top leaving you in a state of Euphoria, but overnight you can be dropped like a sack of potatoes. Just try to do things by the rules and you should be OK.
Google Page Rank Is Dead
Well, momentarily that is what 1000’s of web master thought throughout the world when many page rank toolbars suddenly showed 0 for all sites. It nearly had us all thinking we had been hit by the big G until we realized that Google itself was showing a PR of 0. Actually Google has just updated the URl that is used to query the page rank. This means most tool bars that automatically check the PR will also need updating.
PR has been a matter of discussion for many years now, is it important is it not? Well we believe PR has it’s place and should be respected. One can quickly loose any page rank if the website is full of content scraped from other sites, similarly new sites or new pages also have a PR of 0. You can only build up PR though a mixture of age and unique content, throw in some backlinks and you have a recipe for a site with PR higher than 0.
Perhaps it is better to look at PR as a measure of trust in a site, sites with higher trust get a higher P, look to the page rank of Google or Facebook (If you can!)R. This is not directly related to ranking, it is not uncommon to see a site with PR0 with a clever back link profile outrank a site of PR4 – Ranking is all about the keywords.
So what were your experiences today with the PR bar showing 0??
Top 5 onsite factors for SEO you need to include in your Web Design
Top 5 onsite factors for SEO you need to include in your Web Design
When creating a website or getting a web design company to create a website for you there are many different onsite factors you need to take in to consideration when it comes to SEO and getting to the top of Google. Although the bulk of SEO is in the link building, there are many onsite factors to do to ensure your website has the best chance of ranking.
As always there is speculation in the SEO world of what is important and what is not, everybody has had different experiences and might attribute some movement to a change that might not have been the cause. These are the top 5 onsite factors that there is no speculation about, i.e. these are a must.
1) Title Tag. Think carefully about your title tags, the title tag is the single most important onsite factor in SEO. It is not only vital it includes your target keywords in the right order, but it also needs to be appealing to the audience for a higher click through rate. If there is not enough space, I would go keywords over user friendly any day, since it is vital to get good ranking.
2) Content. You will find it pretty hard to rank on the first page if you have not included the keywords in the content. There is speculation of the content density but the going thoughts are somewhere around 2%, however, as long as you mention the keywords a couple of times, you should be OK.
3) URL. Having the keywords in the URL definitely helps. If you have no choice of the domain name as it is the name of the company, then it is not the end of the world, but you can use user friendly URLs for the inner pages that contain the keywords you are targeting for the inner pages.
4) H1 tags. This shows what keywords are most important on the page. Write a good title for your content and make sure these are in h1 tags.
5) Lastly although if we talk about the smaller details we could go on for many points, is the size and the quality of the site. Bigger sites with more content will have an easier time in ranking. It is however important to make sure the content is user friendly and not just there for the sake of it. Recently it has been advised to delete the pages of a website that have lower user stats. This may be as the overall user experience is taken in to consideration when deciding the ranking – e.g bounce rate, time one site, pages looked at etc.
How to choose a domain name for SEO
Right at the beginning of a web project is the choice of domain name. This can be rather confusing. Do you go for an old one or a new one? Do you choose one that contains your keywords or company name? What about domain history? Well all these points need special consideration and there are advantages and disadvantages to all options.
Domain Age. For SEO purposes it is always better to have an old domain. Google prefers simply old domains to new. That being said, it is very important to check the history of the domain name before you buy it. If that domain name has been spammed to death it can be a difficult procedure to let Google know the domain is now in new hands. There are ways to check, firstly if there is a website, make sure the domain is indexed in Google. If the domain has been deindexed there is a problem there. Secondly check the site’s back links. You can see by looking at a sites back links if it has been spammed or not. Thirdly check the history of the domain. A useful online tool called the way back machine takes snippets of the internet as it was in the past. You can look to the history of your chosen domain to see what it was used for in the past. If you can find one in the same industry, all the better!
Keywords in Domain. The is no denying that keywords in domain is a factor of Google’s algorithm. Even though Matt Cutts (head of Google’s spam team) has suggested that the importance will become less, you can still see many domains ranking because of the name and very little else. Yes catchy names are brandable and with more work can by far over take non-keyword rich domains, for simple SEO purposes a keyword rich domain is better.
Right at the start of the project before anything else the best thing to do is to register a domain name. Before you know it several months have passed and your Domain will be suitable for development. With domains costing next to nothing why not register a few?
A few tips for successful back linking
People are becoming more and more familiar with the term “back link” and the importance they mean to get a good position in Google. However there is a fine art in getting the right back links which Google will recognize and will make a difference. We see many examples of clients buying regular back links and that make absolutely no difference to their ranking. So what does make a good back link?
Firstly as the saying goes the focus should be on quality rather than quantity. Perhaps the first most important rule is that the page itself should be indexed by Google. Google de-indexes poor quality sites or sites with scraped content. If you get links from these regardless if they have page rank or not then Google will never see the link to your website.
The purpose of getting back links to your website is to build up its reputation in Google’s eyes. So if you are getting links from websites or blogs that are related in content to yours then it is like getting a stronger vote than ones without related content.
There is a lot of hype about page rank, is page rank important? Well page rank does have its place in the SEO world. An older site with more content and stronger back links will have a higher page rank than a page that is brand new; you can therefore assume page rank does have its own relevance and place.
Google has spent a lot of time trying to make the algorithm ranking system as fair and relevant as possible. Discounting any links that appear to be unnatural or paid, you therefore need your campaign to look as natural as possible. It is better to build your links slowly and daily than all in one go. Google not only looks to the domain linking to you but the I.P.; it is therefore essential to ensure your links are from different I.P.s to make for a more natural campaign.
The concept of back linking may seem simple. However you just need to look at a few top ranking sites to see that there are sites ranking in top positions with relatively few back links compared to ones that have 1000’s that perhaps are trying to hard. The top tip to bear in mind is to make it look natural and relevant. If you follow these two rules in everything you do then you should be heading in the right direction.
Backliking Affected by Google Algorithm Change.
Since the implementation of the new Google Algorithm Google has announced that it has affected just 10% of the search results. 10% may not seem that much but if you think of the trillions of pages Google has indexed 10% means that the number of people affected by the Google update are in the billions.
For the moment the change has just been implemented in the US, but as one of the biggest internet user and producers of sites, if you have back links from websites that have been affected by the Google update, then this would undoubtedly affect you. There has never been a more important time to look carefully at where you back links are coming from and the quality of the sites linking to you.
There was much speculation in the SEO world that ehow was going to be affected by this recent change. This site employs many online writers throughout the world and posts more than 700 new pages daily. Actually if you check the Alexa site stats of this site today you will find that this site has been largely unaffected, actually you could say it has seen an increase in traffic.
Sites that have been affected which have been incorporated in to millions of back link strategies are: Enzine articles down 90%, find articles down 90%, articles base down 94%, buzzle.com down 85%, although these sites have been affected massively by the new algorithm change it doesn’t mean they still can’t be used as a back link technique if used in the correct fashion.
Google has been shouting about it for years but it seems this last algorithmic change has really hit those hard who have had their ears closed shut – Make sure your content is original.
Change in Googles Algorithm
Matt Cutts the head of Google webspam team has just announced a plan in the change of Google´s algorithm to tackle spam sites. It will affect just over 2% of websites primarily sites with low levels of unique content. The algorithm is such a way that you will only see sites which published the original content, not sites with the copied content. It is a positive move from Google following the high rise in spam over the past few years that will give the end user a more positive searching experience.
“Content is king” has never been something that has been hidden from Google in regards to ranking well and creating good quality backlinks. To rank well for certain keywords it is vital to have good quality original content onsite, plus quality external linkage. There are always people that use this to their advantage, cutting corners and producing content farms which do nothing but scrape the content from other sites, producing poor quality sites for the reader. These types of sites are created purely to monetize from Google´s natural traffic, offering the reader very little in return.
Google will never release all the ranking aspects to it´s algorithm. What it defines as quality “unique” content is open to interpretation. It is certainly good news that unique content is playing a bigger part of Google´s algorithm but will it change things in the SEO world? Perhaps 70% of all blogs and directories use copied or scraped content, in many cases the scraped content can rank higher than the original if the site over all is stronger. Obviously this is completely unfair if the original writer did not give permission for their work to be used in this way, and they are loosing out on their site rankings also. Will Google look to date the post was published? Or the page that has been first found? As always there are many questions left open to be discovered through practice and experience.
What does this mean for SEO? There is no shadow of a doubt that content is still king, but the emphasis needs to be on quality content. Be wary of link building from poor content created sites and anything automated; If Google hasn´t discounted it yet, it soon will do. What may seem like a good cheap option could end up being money down the drain. Good SEO involves creating good content and building up awareness from related sites, this has always been the case; Google as ever is only working to keep in line with this.
PageRank Update Is Finally Here
Yes is has been nearly over a year but today has seen the pagerank update on the toolbar for many websites.
If you have been working closely with page rank you will be feeling the joy (or sadness) of your sites updation and the long awaited change in page rank has been well over due. For those of you who have no idea of the importance of PR, or even don’t even know what pagerank is, let’s have a look at it more closely……
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))
Lol, don’t panic guys, page rank is basically a measure of the number of links pointing to a page. Not only external links are important here, internal links also have a part to play. This is the formula that was created when page rank was first invented and probably Google uses something based on this.
Page rank is thought to be a part of Google’s algorithm amongst over 200 factors which is the formula behind Google’s rankings. It is a formula never shared by Google but something most SEO professionals dream of knowing. Certainly in the webmaster world it can be used as a measure of a site’s value. So how can you increase page rank? Firstly content helps, add fresh, unique, relevant content to your site and concentrate on your internal linking. Your content should link to your most important pages. Secondly look to the external linking. Page rank can be passed from one page to another like a “vote” from one site to another. It is important to remember that the page rank is divided amongst a sites outbound links, so a link from a page that has a page rank of 3 and 2 outbound links is more valuable than a link from a page with a page rank of 4 and 10 outbound links.
Sometimes Google can take away a site page rank if it has lost some of it’s inbound links, the inbound links have lost some page rank or the site been penalized by going against Google’s guidelines.
