Blog/News Section

Google Announces Quality Search Updates

Posted from SEORoundtable

Last night, Google announced a 50 changes they made to search over the past month or so. Prior to this, 40 changes in February, then 17 changes in January of this year.

Matt McGee summarized the most important changes, as he sees fit, which include anchor text changes, image search changes, indexing symbols, navigation query changes and more.

One thing that I think really stands out is this one:

Improvements to processing for detection of site quality. [launch codename "Curlup"] We’ve made some improvements to a longstanding system we have to detect site quality. This improvement allows us to get greater confidence in our classifications.

Here is the full list for the most recent updates:

1. Autocomplete with math symbols.
2. Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing.
3. Better scoring of news groupings.
4. Sitelinks data refresh.
5. Improvements to autocomplete backends, coverage.
6. Better handling of password changes.
7. Better indexing of profile pages.
8. UI refresh for News Universal.
9. Improvements to results for navigational queries.
10. High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements.
11. Live results for UEFA Champions League and KHL.
12. Tennis search feature.
13. More relevant image search results.
14. Fresher image predictions in all languages.
15. SafeSearch algorithm tuning.
16. Tweaks to handling of anchor text.
17. Simplification to Images Universal codebase.
18. Better application ranking and UI on mobile.
19. Improvements to freshness in Video Universal.
20. Fewer undesired synonyms.
21. Better handling of queries with both navigational and local intent.
22. Improvements to freshness.
23. Improvements to processing for detection of site quality.
24. Better interpretation and use of anchor text.
25. Better local results and sources in Google News.
26. Deprecating signal related to ranking in a news cluster.
27. Fewer “sibling” synonyms.
28. Better synonym accuracy and performance.
29. Retrieval system tuning.
30. Less aggressive synonyms.
31. Update to systems relying on geographic data.
32. Improvements to name detection.
33. Updates to personalization signals.
34. Improvements to Image Search relevance.
35. Remove deprecated signal from site relevance signals.
36. More precise detection of old pages.
37. Tweaks to language detection in autocomplete.
38. Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages.
39. More predictions in autocomplete by live rewriting of query prefixes.
40. Expanded sitelinks on mobile.
41. More accurate short answers.
42. Migration of video advanced search backends.
43. +1 button in search for more countries and domains.
44. Local result UI refresh on tablet.

There are several places this is being discussed such as at Google on Google+, Matt Cutts on Google+, HackerNews and WebmasterWorld.

Lots of things here, some of them we covered previous in our April Google Webmaster report.

Forum discussion at Google on Google+, Matt Cutts on Google+, HackerNews and WebmasterWorld.