Google has recently published their monthly “Search quality highlights” post. In March, Google made 50 changes. What are the most important changes? Do you have to change something on your web pages?
Actually not all of Google’s changes affect your rankings. Most of the 50 changes that Google did in March won’t affect your search engine rankings. For example, Google’s auto-complete feature now supports math symbols. This makes it easier to search for popular equations such as E=mc2 but it doesn’t affect the majority of the searches.
Below are the big changes having the biggest impact on search results:
1) Tweaks to handling of anchor text and better interpretation and use of anchor text
Two changes regarding anchor texts were announced by Google:
“We turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.”
“We have improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.”
What do these words mean for your website?
Google doesn’t go into detail, unfortunately. So one can only guess. It might be that an anchor text now only counts if the surrounding content is also related to the topic of the anchor text.
The value of these links might be lowered if the links to a web page overuse the same anchor text.
2) Better handling of queries with both navigational and local internet
“A navigational query is a search where it looks like the user is looking to navigate to a particular website.
Where if the user doesn’t actually know the right URL? What if the URL they’re searching for seems to be a parked domain with no content? This change improves results for this kind of search.”
“This change improves the balance of results we know, and helps ensure you will find highly relevant navigational results or local results towards the top of the page as appropriate for your query.”
What does this mean for you website?
These changes mean that Google will prefer navigational and local results on the top of the results list if Google is sure that you are looking for a local service or a particle website.
3) Other interesting changes
Google has improved the algorithm for direct answers, which means that searchers will get the answer to their question on the search result page. Many won’t list the listed sites then.
Google also improved the image search features and the index now also contains fresher sites.
Google is continually tweaking the algorithm. Therefore, cool tricks that work today might not work tomorrow. For that reason, it is important to optimize your website with techniques that last.
That’s all! Hope it helps!
Article from:
http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter520.htm
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