What do the changes in Google algorithm mean for SEO

Ever wondered what the updates that Google makes to its search ranking mechanism do? Well this time it seems that Matt Cutts is telling us, with a list of ten changes that Google made to its algorithm recently. Of course two big changes that they’ve made recently have already been discussed on these pages – they’ve defaulted to secure search and they’ve personalised paid search.

But a couple of changes that they made here caught my eye, so I thought I’d expand on them and talk about how they’ll effect you:

Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors

This is an interesting change because of its implications. The suggestion is here that not only is going to start thinking about reducing the ranking of pages that appear to use computer generated titles (bad for those people who have auto generated landing pages), but also it is going to reduce the value of inbound links if it looks too generic.

What does this mean for the optimiser? Well firstly you need to think about how you create your landing pages – automatically generated landing pages with similar titles may not get the ranking you were expecting (although these should be aimed at long tail searches anyway). You should be mixing this technique with creating tailor made, hand crafted landing pages with unique content on them.

Secondly you should no longer be looking at link building by sending out hundreds of emails with the same anchor text and link url in the hope that they stick. You should be selecting the individually for their worth and putting effort into making them unique and relevent to the page. Spam blog comments probably aren’t going to cut the mustard either (I bet this post gets it fair few of those as well).

I also think that this will affect websites that use infographics and lists as link bait. Those generic titles of pages that produce many links may result in less value than a specific page on a subject.

Fresher, more recent results

Another big change is to promote fresher content towards the top of rankings. This is something that has been happening for more popular search terms for a while with ‘News’ and live tweets for particular terms. It should now be happening more across the board (up to 35% of searches, according to this article).

What it means for you is that you need to think about updating content frequently. Landing pages are all well and good, but new, unique, fresh content linking back to that landing page will be better from a search perspective. Of course the new, unique, fresh content should be able rank for long tail keywords as well, so it is doubly of value. This essentially means the days of getting a page to number 1 and sitting back to admire your work are gone.

Refining official page detection

Another change is that ‘official’ pages are going to be pushed higher up the results. Traditionally you had to be from a .gov to do this, but I think this change is going to mean that more pages are going to be classed as official. If you have a product that nobody else does, make sure that it has its own unique page, ditto with your brand name.

This is important because it might mean that things like wikipedia are going to be pushed down the rankings in favour of the official page. Of course if the user has personalised search turned on this will immediately be negated by the fact that there are so many things without an official page that wikipedia is the most common link clicked and will push it back up.

But it is an important step. Make sure you have those product pages set up!