Google lists algorithm tweaks, SMEs urged to keep on top of changes

Google has published a number of changes to its algorithm that have been made in the past few weeks, although it has warned website operators that they shouldn’t necessarily make huge, sweeping changes to their sites.

However, SEO experts say the search giant has made a few tune-ups that businesses should be aware of.

“The greatest test of how you’re doing in search is really seeing where you’re ranking. If you make sure you’re ranking for the search terms you want, then you’re probably doing fine,” Stewart Media chief executive Jim Stewart said this morning.

Overnight, Google posted a number of changes made to the algorithm on its Inside Search blog, including cross-language information updates, protection for IME queries and improvements to date-restricted queries.

Others included adding length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian, along with extending “application rich snippets”.

“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,” it said.

“We’ve decided to publish these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.”

But Stewart says there are a couple of changes here that businesses should pay attention to – specifically the update that adds snippets with more header content and less menu content.

“What this is talking about is where it shows your actual search title in the results. The blue link you click on, that’s the title of the search result that’s built into the page.”

“A lot of the time these will be auto-generated based on back links, so Google is now choosing to pay less attention to that, and more attention to the actual content of the page and possibly auto-generate the link based on that content.”

As always, Stewart says, this means businesses need to focus on creating rich, relevant content in their pages. But he also points to a new change which states that Google will be spending less time on “boiler plate” content.

“What might happen is that companies will go out, buy a whole bunch of back links, or they’ll have anchor text that points back to one page in the hope of ranking that page.”

“If that link is across the whole site and is part of the structure of the site, it doesn’t necessarily add any value. Google is going to pay less attention to it as a result.”

Although businesses should keep on top of what Google is doing, Stewart says ultimately, you just need to be ranking well for the terms you want.

“As long as you’re creating content and ranking well, then that’s what businesses need to be focusing on.”