Google - Ten recent algorithm changes

Today we’re continuing our long-standing series of blog posts to share the methodology and process behind our search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic changes. This summer we published a video that gives a glimpse into our overall process, and today we want to give you a flavor of specific algorithm changes by publishing a highlight list of many of the improvements we’ve made over the past couple weeks.

We’ve published hundreds of blog posts about search over the years on this blog, our Official Google Blog, and even on my personal blog. But we’re always looking for ways to give you even deeper insight into the over 500 changes we make to search in a given year. In that spirit, here’s a list of ten improvements from the past couple weeks:

• Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
• Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
• Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
• Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
• Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

If you’re a site owner, before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes we make to our search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine. We’ve decided to publish these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.

For those of us working in search every day, we think this stuff is incredibly exciting -- but then again, we’re big search geeks. Let us know what you think and we’ll consider publishing more posts like this in the future.

30+ Search Engine Optimization Techniques You Cannot Miss

Here are a few of the most important things that you can do for search engine optimization:

1. Use keywords throughout your web site

Many people do a good job putting a good description and group of keywords in their meta tags, but they do not use these same keywords throughout the rest of their web site. You must continue to use your keywords throughout the content on the rest of your web site if you would like to get high search engine rankings.

2. Create a sitemap

Many search engines will try to index your site’s pages by following links to all of the different pages. However if a search engine is unable to follow a link, then a page might not get included in the search engine’s results. To make sure all of your pages get indexed, make sure that you have a text-based sitemap that includes all of the major pages of your web site.

3. Use Flash sparingly

Flash is a very neat technology and it has its place on the web. However you do not want to overuse Flash, because a search engine will not be able to read the text that is embedded in the Flash elements, which could hurt your ranking if you have keywords in that area.

4. Get inbound links

One of the best things that you can do for search engine optimization is to get inbound links to your web site. If you are able to get high quality web sites that relate to your business to link to your web site, then your search engine ranking is sure to climb.

5. Domain Name

Your domain name should be brandable (example: Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, etc.), easy to say, and even easier to remember. Don’t worry too much about stuffing keywords into your domain name. Keywords in domain names no longer have the punch they used to.

6. www or not www

The choice is yours, http://www.webdeveloperjuice.com/ or http://webdeveloperjuice.com/, pick one and stick with it. I recommend using the www.

7. Simple Design

Don’t reinvent the wheel. If your design is complex, chances are it will hinder your visitors’ ability to navigate and view the site plus it will slow down development. The simpler the better.

8. Don’t create directories further than three levels down from the root directory

The closer pages are to the home page in the directory structure the better. Keep things organized but don’t overorganize. If you have one file or sub-directory in a directory there should be a VERY valid reason.

9. File/Directory Names Using Keywords

Your filenames and directory names should contain keywords. If your page is about Idaho potatoes then the filename should be idaho-potatoes.

10. URLs

Static URLs are URLs that are not dynamically generated. A static URL looks like http://www.webdeveloperjuice.com/file-name.html and dynamic URLs look like http://www.webdeveloperjuice.com/tag/jquery/. You can make dynamic URLs spiderable by search engines but it’s a lot easier to get things indexed with static URLs.

11. Think Small

The smaller your Web pages are, the faster they load. A single page should be less than 15K (unless absolutely necessary) and the entire page including graphics should be less than 50K (unless absolutely necessary). Remember, not everyone is on a high-speed Internet connection; there are still people without a 56K modem.

12. Hyphens

Use hyphens ( – ) and not underscores ( _ ) to separate words in directory and file names. Most search engines parse a hyphen like a reader would parse a space. Using underscores makes what_would_you_do look like whatwouldyoudo to most search engines. You should definitely separate words in your URLs.

13. Navigation on Every Page

You should place consistent navigation on every page of your Web site. Your navigation should link to the major sections of your Web site. It would also make sense for every page on your Web site to link back to the home page.

14. Title

The title of the page should be used in the TITLE tag and at the top of every page. The title should be keyword rich (containing a max of 7 to 10 words) and descriptive.

15. Description META Tag

Some people say META tags are dead but some search engines will actually use them underneath a pages title on search engine result pages (SERPs). Use no more than 150 characters including spaces and punctuation. Your description should be a keyword rich, complete sentence.

16. Keyword META Tag

A listing of keywords that appear in the page. Use a space to separate keywords (not a comma). Arrange keywords how they would be searched for or as close to a complete sentence as possible. This tag is basically dead but by creating it when you create the page it allows you to come back eons later and realize what keywords you were specifically targetting. If the keyword doesn’t appear at least twice in the page then it shouldn’t go in the Keyword META Tag. Also, try to limit the number of total keywords to under twenty.

17. Robots META Tag

Some search engine crawlers abide by the Robots META Tag. This gives you some control over what appears in a search engine and what doesn’t. This isn’t an essential aspect of search engine optimization but it doesn’t hurt to add it in.

28. Heading Tags

Heading tags should be used wherever possible and should be structured appropriately (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6). You shouldn’t start a page with an H2 tag. If H1 by default is too big then use CSS to style it effectively. Remember that most search engines like to see a heading tag then text or graphics; not H1 followed immediately by H2.

19. TITLE Attribute

Use the A HREF TITLE attribute (example: <a href="page.html" title="This page contains links to other pages.">). The TITLE attribute improves usability/accessibility. Be sure to include keywords as you see fit but remember it should tell your visitors where they will go when they click the link.

20. ALT Tags

Every image should have an ALT tag. Use a keyword rich description of what the image is. If the image contains text use the text in the image. This is also a usability/accessibility tool.

21. More text than HTML

A page should have more text content than markup language.

22. Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text used to link to a page. Using keywords in anchor text is a very good idea and will improve a page’s performance in SERPs.

23. Use Text Links, Not Images

If you’re going to link to something use text. Text in images can’t be read by search engines. The only time this rule doesn’t apply is when you’re linking to something with a well known logo. Even then it’s still better to use a text link. If you must use an image as a link then make sure you give it a good ALT tag.

24. Gobs of Content

The more content, the better. Having pages upon pages of original, relevant content is the best form of search engine optimization.

25. Add New Content Often

If you can add a new page of content every day then your site will stay fresh and give search engine crawlers a reason to keep coming back day in and day out.

26. Keyword Density

This is a touchy topic among Web developers and search engine optimizers. Some say 5% is more than enough. Chris Short says your main keywords shouldn’t have a density of more than 30% and should be higher than the densities of other phrases and words.

27. Build It, Put It Online

Your site should be built and in "update mode" once it’s uploaded to your Web server. Don’t add a page at a time to your Web server when you’re first building your Web site. Build your Web site first then upload it. Add new content as needed.

28. Use a robots.txt File

Every good crawler looks for a robots.txt file in your root directory. I would highly recommend creating a valid robots.txt just to appease these search engines and at the very least eliminate 404 errors from building up in your log files.

29. Validation

Every page on your Web site should adhere to W3C standards as closely as possible. Some say page validation can help your ranking in SERPs (the jury is still out on that one). But, standards compliant Web pages do help with cross browser compatibility.

30. Link Popularity

Once your Web site has been well established, it’s time to build up your link popularity. The more relevant inbound links a Web site has, the better its rankings will be.

31. Analyze Traffic

Read your log files often. Make sure you’re not getting traffic you don’t want and getting traffic you do want. Keeping a pulse on your traffic allows you to better optimize your pages.

32. No tricks

If it doesn’t seem ethical, then it isn’t a good idea. If it doesn’t help your visitors, then don’t do it.

33. No frames

Don’t use frames, ever.

34. No broken links

Linking to pages that don’t exist is a very bad thing. Search engines and people alike hate that.

Understanding Twitter Basics

If you’re an avid Twitter user, or if you’ve had social media training, you know there’s a whole Twitter language to decipher and understand. While you might think your Twitter messages (known as “tweets”) are reaching each and every one of your followers, that’s not always the case. It all depends on how you’re typing your tweets, and if you’ve unlocked the code of the Twitterverse.

Thankfully, Twitter is not as complicated as you might think. With just a few simple keystrokes, you’ll have the ability to speak directly to one follower, or blast a tweet to all of your followers (even if you’re only responding to one). Check out these handy Twitter tips:

1. Twitter 101

First, let’s clarify the various types of tweets.

• In general, a tweet is a message you send to all of your followers. It is not private and is not usually directed at one person.
• A private tweet is called a Direct Message, or DM. This tweet is sent to only one person and goes to a separate inbox, not included in the Twitter newsfeed.
• If you send an @ reply to a Twitter user, and you’ve placed the @ symbol at the beginning of the tweet, this tweet may not go to everyone that follows you. If your followers also follow that specific Twitter user, they will have the ability to see those tweets, and those tweets will also be in newsfeeds and in the “Mentions” tab of the recipient.

2. Placement of The @ Symbol

The use of the @ symbol can be a bit confusing. Again, if your intent is to publicly speak directly to one Twitter user, then starting a tweet with the @ symbol and their handle is correct. Twitter may send that tweet to only that user and those who follow both of you. However, if you want all of your followers to see the tweet, but you also want to mention a specific user, you’ll have to make some adjustments to the way you type your tweet.

3. The @ Workaround

A simple way to make sure everyone sees a tweet is to include a character before the @ symbol. For example, start your tweet off with a period, and then type the @ symbol and the Twitter handle (ex. .@schemjo Did you see that article about the UK SEO agency?) . Twitter will read this as a general tweet and publish it to all of your follower’s news feeds. Any symbol or character will work, but a period is as unobtrusive as it gets – remember, you’ll want to keep it simple so it doesn’t eat some of your 140-character allotment.

4. Alternate @ Symbol Placement

If you simply cannot spend one extra character to make sure your tweet is seen by all of your followers, just rearrange the Twitter handle so it is placed somewhere within the tweet. Using this method will serve as the flag to Twitter to send the tweet to all of your followers. For example,Did you see that article about the UK SEO agency? @schemjo

Because the use of Twitter for marketing and branding purposes has exploded in the past few years, these tips can help you effectively communicate with all of your followers and customers, as well as aid in the growth of your brand, products and services. Soon, you’ll reach hundreds of people (maybe thousands), and garner a devoted following – 140 characters at a time.

Google Launches Voice Search And Search By Image Features

“Most awesomest Google search feature ever.”

If your vocalized search gets you the resulting links, it means you already have the answer. But chances are you don’t as it was only this past Tuesday that Googleannounced their voice-recognition technology for desktops. Add to that the two other snazzy features Google’s integrating into its search engine and you’ve got a three-pronged approach to bolstering what’s already the world’s most popular internet search tool.

The first of the features will enable users to search the web simply by speaking their requests. Called Voice Search, the speech-to-text application will be activated by clicking on a microphone icon located next to Google’s query box. Voice Search has already gone mobile as an App for Android phones, but Google wants to enable its users to search via speech recognition on their laptops and desktops as well. In addition to the convenience of not having to type, Voice Search will be a helping hand in those hard-to-spell searches. It’ll also be easier to, as Google puts it, enter “long queries, even really, really long queries, just by talking.” Initially, Voice Search will only be available on Chrome browsers, but they plan to make it compatible with other browsers in the future.

Not only is Voice Search already being used on Android phones to search, it’s also enabling voice command control of applications. In the time since Android adopted the App in 2009 Google has built a voice-activated search database of more than 230 billion words spoken by users. The database was used to hone Voice Search’s speech-recognition capabilities. Not only does the program learn how people pronounce words but it also learned what phrases people commonly used in their queries. For now Voice Search only understands English, but Google plans to eventually add more languages.

The video below includes a short demonstration.  If you don’t have Chrome, download it today and wait for the little microphone icon to appear next to the search window–you’ll need a mic too, of course.  But if fellow Hub writer Aaron’s experience with Google Translate is any indication, we may find ourselves wanting to kill the guy in the next cubicle over who keeps yelling at his computer, “Cirque Du Soleil tickets…Du Soleil…DU-SO-LEIL!”

Assuming it works the way it’s supposed to, Voice Search will certainly make our searching that much easier. But Google knows that a picture is worth a thousand words, which is why they’ve also launched a feature called Search by Image. The desktop version of Google Goggles that have been on mobile devices since 2009, Search by Image allows you to query with digital pictures. If you haven’t seen it already, check it out by going to images.google.com and clicking on the camera icon next to the search box. You can drag and drop, upload an image from your drive, or cut and paste an image’s URL. It’s a great idea and, hey, for completeness Google should be able to search images, right? I tried it out with a few images. It was pretty much as if I’d typed in “komodo dragon,” except many of the resulting links contained the image I’d used. The results are actually broken up into “Pages that include matching images” and “Visually similar images.” Google encourages users to plug in vacation photos and see if Search by Image can recognize where you’ve been. Pretty awesomely, when I tried it, Google nailed Paris’s Gare de Lyon, even though mine wasn’t a particularly good photo. It got the Eiffel Tower too, but that seems easy to me. However it mistook the Greek island of Santorini for jets of all things–maybe too much silhouette. And apparently I don’t have a single distinguishing feature on my face. A picture of me returned pretty much any and all men, women, and children of all shapes and sizes with pictures on the internet. Actually, the image-recognition technology can recognize faces, but for privacy purposes Google has thus far decided to disable that capability.

With Voice Search and Search by Image, Google has made the user search more versatile and, potentially, more convenient. To compliment these improvements, the last goodie in their bag of tricks improves the way Google returns their results. You think Google’s fast now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The search giant’s new Instant Pages will bring you results–much of the time–instantaneously. As you type, the Instant Pages feature predicts what sites you’re most likely to be looking for and begins loading the web pages before you’ve even clicked on the link. If it’s right, the page essentially loads instantaneously, saving users two to five seconds per link clicked, according to Google. Check out the side-by-side speed test in this video.

The technology that gives Instant Pages its speed is called prerendering. Whatever web page it thinks you want, “the browser fetches all of the sub-resources and does all of the work necessary to display the page.” Often, the user won’t even notice a loading time. The prerendering technology is not Google’s alone, it’s available for use on other sites. But Google’s unique capability to predict what site the user is searching for means Instant Pages won’t spend its time queueing up the wrong pages which could lead to slower loading times for the link the user does actually click. Google is offering third party services to sites that use or might want to adopt prerendering. There’s a sample page on the Chromium blog where interested parties can test drive Google-powered prerendering for their own pages. Chrome even has a new experimental page visibility API that developers can access to determine the “visibility status of their page: whether it’s in a foreground tab, a background tab, or being prerendered.”

For most of us, three to five seconds per click isn’t going to make much of difference in our daily schedules. The main goal behind Instant Pages is not to increase user efficiency but to make web searching a more rewarding overall experience. Making the search experience more enjoyable is consistent with Google’s mission of “Knocking down barriers to knowledge.” Frustration is distracting. Faster searching makes for a happier–and more focused–user.

But I wonder how long it’ll take for the novelty of speaking our searches, or searching images, or retrieving pages in the blink of an eye will last. Pretty soon we’ll be yawning and asking, “What else ya got?”

Whatever it is, my bet is that Google’s already working on it.

In case you haven’t seen enough footage of Google’s new features, the following is a video of Tuesday’s media event in which they were unveiled.

[video credits: Google via YouTube]