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Showing posts with label Google Search Algorithm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google Search Algorithm. Show all posts

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Effects of Google Hummingbird Search Algorithm on Content

Google has revealed Hummingbird Search Algorithm, the latest algorithm update since 2010's Caffeine update. It can be called another search results overhaul. But it is just a small part of an overall evolution to bring better information to consumers for the moments that matter.


Google is putting an effort to practice what they advocate all the time. Google has its sights set on becoming as the ultimate source of information. This new update is a clear indicator that Google is making bold moves to become an increasingly integral part of the life of people. This is not limited to supplying information that people want. But also provides intelligence that people did not even know they needed. Google is becoming to information, what Apple is to devices, in old school SAT analogy.

Content should satisfy Intent

Two years back, a shift was seen in web search from "plain" keyword optimization to a more "intent" based channel. Search Engines tried to "best guess" the intent of a search user. They matched it to the relevant content that most probably provided best answer of the query of a user. "Context" has entered search strategy lexicon recently, which accounts for more personalized search tactics based on location, platform, device and/or hyper local factors.

Announcement of Google Hummingbird update, which is incorporated for search ranking from last month, is a right step in this direction. Google is more emphasizing the importance of user intent over pure keyword based interpretation. This new update now better acknowledges context, timeliness, conversational search location cues, Knowledge Graph data and understanding of complex queries.

Content should be Rich

How marketing experts should concentrate on their content to fulfill complicated customer intent? Content is required to be unique, rich, in depth and explanatory, to be considered the most appropriate type of information for almost any search term. Websites which are presently creating rich content that try to response more extensive questions, instead of keywords or phrases, will improve their possibilities of positioning better with the new update. Although sites have to depend greatly on rich content, they also should continue to be properly-developed, which cause it to simpler for Google bots to discover that quality material.

Authorship markup by Google is Important

Because content seems to be the biggest emphasis for this update, it also likely means that authorship will become an even more important factor in optimization. It's interesting that this update is coming right on the heels of several recent notable changes. The first being the complete integration of secure search, which eliminated keyword data from analytics, and the second being Google+ rolling out a change to authorship, which will make it easier on Google to attribute content back to the author. So, while you start thinking about you content program, and whether or not it supports the new algorithm update, don’t forget to take authority into account. Make sure profiles are created, updated, and attributed for all pieces of content.

What will be the Future of Google Search after Hummingbird update?

It is difficult to estimate accurately what the future will be, because Google is obviously unforeseen, but it is easy to state that this upgrade is a obvious shift in the direction of far more Semantic Web, which targets obtaining improved realization of "aboutness" – not only from markup of entities, but in the capability to draw out message from the composition of a phrase – hence there may be possibly on its way in future. Probably the reply is within much more "implicit" search.

Regardless of whether Hummingbird basically alters search in future, its launch passed rather un-observed as just a minor enhancement in search results. Although Google mentioned that the update handles almost 90% of queries around the world, it will seem step-by-step improvement from user viewpoint. Nevertheless, the Marketers must be careful because since the enhancement delivers significant effects from both functional and technical perspectives. Google keeps on moving to a world in which "Content is King" and realizing end user search intent is the objective. Perhaps eventually it will be capable to solve our questions prior to we even inquire about them.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Google Unveiled Hummingbird Search Algorithm & Other Changes At 15th Birthday

Google announced a new "Hummingbird" search algorithm being live and especially designed to handle complex queries, celebrating the company's 15th birthday in the garage it was born. Big G also revealed a new design for tablets and phones, richer direct answers with comparison, a new song exploration feature and notifications of Google Now information for iOS 7. Hummingbird is especially useful for longer and more complex queries. It affects about 90% of Google searches worldwide. It is the first major upgrade for three years and has already been in use for about a month.


Hummingbird Search Algorithm replaced Caffeine

Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President of Search at Google said:
It took a long time to get results back then. More often than not, you forget what you were searching for in the first place. Now you can speak for searches and with Google Now get the right information at the right time. You should not be spending your time searching. You should be spending your time living.

We just changed Google's engines mid-flight again. Hummingbird is the company's most significant algorithm change since it switched to "Caffeine" in 2009.
Caffeine emphasized at better indexing of websites while focusing on speed and integrating social network results into search. Unlike its predecessor, Hummingbird is more focused on ranking information based on a more intelligent understanding of search requests.


Google stressed that a new algorithm is important as users expect more natural and conversational interactions with a search engine. They are using their voice to speak requests into mobile phones, smart watches and other wearable technology.

Hummingbird allows Google to more quickly parse full questions (as opposed to parsing searches word-by-word), and to identify and rank answers to those questions from the content they have indexed. It is more capable of understanding concepts and the relationships between them rather than simply words, which leads to more fluid interactions. In that sense, it is an extension of Google's "Knowledge Graph" concept introduced last year aimed at making interactions more human.

How the Hummingbird search algorithm affect Search Results?

Hummingbird algorithm is incorporated by Google for search positioning from about a month already. If any huge jumps or drops in your search engine placement have not been noticed, probably there would not be in near future also. If rankings did change, it could be due to Hummingbird. But it could also be due to some of the other parts of the Google search algorithm, which are always being changed and improved.

Google improved Voice Search

Google also showed off more advanced voice queries, in which your computer or tablet will answer back to you. Users can ask Google to compare two items, generate a list of songs from a particular artist, or pull statistics about the Eiffel Tower and receive a voice response. In the case of the Eiffel Tower, a user would need to say "Eiffel Tower" only once in a series of questions, and search will remember the context. Amit Singhal explained voice search further: "Voice will be fundamental to building future interactions with the devices [we use]".

Google disclosed Updated Version of Google Search app on iOS soon

Google also announced an updated version of the Google Search app on iOS, which is coming soon, according to Tamar Yehoshua, VP of Search for Google. The new app will allow users to more clearly see their calendar or events cards from the app's home screen, and reminders will now carry over between iOS and Android devices.

Happy Birthday Google

Search giant Google has turned 15. Huge progress and enormous developments have been made so far on coarse of turning Silicon Valley garage startup into the Search Engine leader. Timeline of Google presentrs a broad peak at the lifecycle of the brain child of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Matt Cutts announced Google's new Penguin, Panda & Link Networks Updates

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, announced Google's upcoming Penguin, Panda algorithms updates and new link network targets in 2013. He informed about it during The Search Police, SEO Track of the SMX West.

Panda Update Coming on this Friday or Monday
Matt revealed that a Panda Algorithm update will be released anytime from this coming Friday (15 March 2013) till Monday (18 March 2013). The last version was Panda Update 24, out on 22 January 2013. So the new Panda Update 25 is set to come after 8 weeks approximately.

Major Penguin Update in 2013
Matt Cutts also said that there will be a significant Penguin update in 2013. Google's search quality team is working on a large update to the Penguin algorithm. He thinks that it will be one of the more talked about Google algorithm updates of the year.

Penguin Update 1 was released on 24 April 2012 with 3.1% impact. Penguin Update 2 was out on 26 May 2012 with less than 0.1% effect. Penguin Update 3 came on 5 October 2012 with 0.3% change.

Link Network axing Confirmed
Matt Cutts confirmed that Google targeted a Link Network a couple weeks ago. Matt emaphasied that the Search Engine giant will go after more in 2013. He revealed that Google will release another update in the next week or two, that will specifically target another big link network.

Google penalized Russian Backlinks Network in first week of March 2013. Although the Big G did not reveal the name of the affectee, but it was rumored in Webmaster forums to be Russian based SAPE Links.

Reference(s):
Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-upcoming-penguin-panda-link-networks-updates-151273
Search Engine Roundtable - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-four-16486.html

Friday, September 28, 2012

Google Panda Update 20 Released with Impact on 2.4% of English Queries

Google confirmed on Thursday, 27 September 2012, that they have released a Panda algorithm update. This is the 20th Panda update and thus it is named Panda 20. It is a fairly major Panda update that impacts 2.4% of English search queries and is still rolling out. Late Friday afternoon, Google announced a EMD (Exact Match Domain) update that removed the chances of a low-quality exact match domain from ranking well in Google. But over the weekend, many non-exact match domain site owners noticed their rankings dropped as well. What was it?

Google confirmed that they pushed out a new Panda algorithm update that is not just a data refresh but an algorithm update. Google told us this "affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice." There is more to come with this update, where Google promises to roll out more to this Panda algorithm update over the next 3-4 days. Here is the comment Google's Matt Cutts sent us after asking about this update


Google began rolling out a new update of Panda on Thursday, 27 Sep 12. This is actually a Panda algorithm update, not just a data update. A lot of the most-visible differences went live Thursday, 27 September 2012, but the full roll-out is baking into our index and that process will continue for another 3-4 days or so. This update affects about 2.4% of English queries to a degree that a regular user might notice, with a smaller impact in other languages (0.5% in French and Spanish, for example). The sad part is that there are many sites affected by either this Panda update or the EMD update and it is hard to know which update you were hurt by.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Google changed Link Evaluation criteria

What exactly did Google announce?
Google announced several changes of the ranking algorithm. The most important change was the change of the backlink analysis:

"Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often re-architect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable."

What does this mean for your web page rankings?
Unfortunately, Google doesn't go into detail. As mentioned in Google's statement, Google uses "characteristics of links" to figure out the topic of a linked page.

Analyze Google

Characteristics of Links
We'll take a look at the characteristics below. Then we'll try to find out which element could have been changed.

Characteristic 1: the text of the link
The anchor text of a link has been the most important factor for a long time. If many sites link to a page with the anchor text "green apple" then the page will get high rankings for the term "green apple".

Characteristic 2: the link power of the linking page
Links from pages with many inbound links have a higher influence than links from pages with few backlinks.

Characteristic 3: content and page proximity
If you sell shoes on your website then the link to your website will have a bigger impact if the text that surrounds the link to your page is about shoes. If the link to your website is surrounded by totally unrelated text then the link won't count as much.

Characteristic 4: link attributes such as nofollow and title
Links that use the rel=nofollow attribute don't affect the position of your web pages on Google. Some webmasters think that using title attributes can have a positive effect if these contain the targeted keywords. Others think that this could trigger a spam filters.

Characteristic 5: redirects and shortened URLs
Redirects and shortened URLs such as http://bit.ly/a4X4th are URLs that redirect to another URL. Should these URLs carry full weight when it comes to calculate the position of a website?

Characteristic 6: the age of a website
The older a link is, the more Google tends to trust that link. Links that remain for a long time seem to have a bigger impact than links that come and go.

Characteristic 7: the affiliation of the linking sites
Links from websites that have the same owner and links from affiliates may have a different influence on the rankings of a web page than links from websites that are not affiliated with the page.

Of course, we can only speculate what Google has changed. It is likely that Google now only considers the anchor text of a link if that link is placed in the right context (page and content proximity). Another possibility is that affiliate links (redirected or with page variables) will have less influence on the rankings of a page. If you have followed the tips and tricks of this newsletter in the past then Google's change won't have any negative influence on your website rankings. Just continue to get good backlinks and optimize the content of your pages. You can analyze the different links that point to a website here.

References:
Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February
Google Changes How It Evaluates Links
How Google evaluates links: 7 characteristics

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Google extended Panda Search Algorithm update to English queries

Google has extended its Panda Update in search algorithm to English queries. Google had announced search algorithm change (known as "Farmer" or "Panda") in February 2011 for the US. Google Panda update has now been implemented on all English language queries. This includes both English speaking countries (such as searches on google.co.uk or google.com.au) and English queries in non-English countries (for instance, for a searcher using google.fr or google.de who's chosen English-language results).

The launch impacted nearly 12% of queries in the United States. The impact may be similar for English-speaking searchers across the world. Google claimed that they've gotten a lot of positive responses about the change: searchers are finding better results, and many great publishers are getting more traffic. Google said that based on testing, they've found the algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality. Google has launched two ways for searchers to block particular sites from their search results recently. The first of these was a Chrome extension.

Google has now launched a block link directly in the search results that appears once a searcher has clicked from the results to a site and then return to the search results. Google said after the initial Panda launch, that they didn't use data about what sites searchers were blocking as a signal in the algorithm, but they did use the data as validation that the algorithm change was on target. Google found an 84% overlap in sites that were negatively impacted by Panda and sites that users had blocked with the Chrome extension.

Google are now using data about what searchers have blocked in "high confidence situations" as a secondary factor. With the initial launch of Panda Update, large sites were primarily affected, as the larger sites; with more pages, traffic, and links, have more signals available. By the latest update, smaller sites will see an impact. Amit Singhal, in charge of search quality at Google said: "this change also goes deeper into the "long tail" of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before".

References:
High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback - Google Webmaster Central Blog
Panda 2.0: Google Rolls Out Panda Update Internationally & Incorporates Searcher Blocking Data - Search Engine Land

Friday, February 25, 2011

Google Panda Search Algorithm - Incorporated for Finding High-quality Sites in Search

Google has just modified its search algorithm and announced war on Content Farms. Amit Singhal (Google Fellow) and Matt Cutts (Principal Engineer) wrote in a blog post; the search upgrade, which will impact 11.8% of all Google search, "is developed to decrease positions for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for customers, duplicate content from other sites or sites that are just not very useful. Simultaneously, it will provide better positions for high-quality sites — sites with unique content and information such as research, in-depth reviews, careful research and so on."

Google can't launch a significant enhancement without impacting positions for many sites. Google is determined by the high-quality content developed by amazing sites around the world. Google has a liability to motivate a healthy web environment. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be paid, and that's exactly what this algorithm modification is all about. This means that some sites will move up and some will drop after this modification.

Google Panda update does not depend on the reviews that Google obtained from the Personal Blocklist Firefox expansion, which was released earlier last week. But it definitely features the Blocklist information for the evaluation with the sites determined by the algorithm modification. Google has released this modification in the U.S. only right now; and plans to throw it out elsewhere eventually.

For more information about algorithm change refer to the post on Google Blog by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer:
Finding more high-quality sites in search - Official Google Blog