Google make hundreds of changes to their search ranking algorithm each year and this year is no exception – over 500 changes were made to help improve the way Google delivers results to the end user.

In line with Google’s efforts to keep the search results fresh and current, I thought I’d list some of the most recent changes Google has made to the search results to improve the quality even further.

In brief, here are 5 of the changes Google has made to the search results over the last couple of weeks that affect the vast majority of us:

Fresher Search Results

Affecting over 35% of all search queries, Google have made changes to place emphasis on more resent content. This would affect news items, blogs and also recently updated pages so now it’s more important than ever to keep your website current and update it regularly.

Date-Restricted Search

As a result in part of the above changes to place emphasis on fresh content, date-restricted search – whereby a user selects a date range to display results from – Google have made changes to make their search results for these dates more consistently accurate.

Official Page Detection

We know that Google places a lot of emphasis on brands to determine which site should be displayed for a particular brand search, such as the actual home page for a particular company, club or brand name. Google has announced that this has now been refined to make their judgement more accurate and consistent.

More Comprehensive Search Results

Snippets that appear within the search results have been made more comprehensive as the crawlers begin to understand page structure better. Google are now able to include more page content and less information from headers and/or menu systems allowing us to see more relevant information in the search results to help us make a better decision on whether we want to visit each particular site.

Better Page Titles

Looking at a number of signals when generating a page title for the search results, Google is now placing places less emphasis on duplicated anchor text in links pointing to a particular page. The result of this is being able to display titles that are more specific to the content of the page itself.

When it comes to creating your homepage, whether you get it professionally developed or are doing it yourself, it’s easy to focus on what you want from a website and what you want to put across to your visitors, speaking of the content and its message specifically.

Unfortunately, this message doesn’t always match up to the questions that your visitors need answering when they first land on your site. Sometimes you need to take a step back from the message you want to put across and think about things a little more the way your visitors would see it.

More specifically, answer those age-old questions that date back way before the internet arrived. The 5 W’s (and a H); Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Addressing these questions on your homepage will ensure that the majority of your visitors’ questions will be answered and – if done in the right way – should also give them trust in your website and give them more reason to get in touch, place an order or – at the very least – stick around longer to view more of your site and what you offer or have to say.

Think of it as your first meeting with a prospective client. You want this to be as positive and effective as possible while keeping the client interested and answering their most common and foremost questions quickly.

Once that’s out of the way you can start selling to them by answering other questions or working your own message on what’s important into the main message.

Your website should be your online sales tool and (again, if done right) will be selling to prospective clients in your sleep and you should be doing everything you can to ensure that the right message is put across in the right way and as effectively as possible.

Normally, hiding your backlink isn’t something that you should really have the need to do – or want to do – but if you have competitors that relentlessly scour your backlinks month on month to pick up the best links on the back of your hard work.

If you find them compulsively cheating instead of doing their own research and utilising their own knowledge of the industry you both work in then you may find the need to give them a hard time. How? By hiding your little nuggets of gold in piles of dirt. Or, in English, hiding your great links in a list of lesser quality links.

Hiding backlinks isn’t something I tend to make a habit of… In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever built links to disguise others from lazy rivals but it does happen. In all honestly I try to build links in a variety of different areas of varying quality to ensure that my backlink profile remains as natural as possible and not ‘forced’ – if that’s the right word to use… probably not.

Directories

Online directories are a good place to start. You can get some really good quality directory links while others don’t offer much value at all and the SEO value isn’t always relative to price. A lot of directories offer a free review and are easy to complete. Many have long waiting lists so you can ensure that the links will go live over a period of months so will appear natural and can be used to build links to internals pages of your site as well as long-tail variations of your keywords to help things look natural.

Blog Comments

Again, these are quick and easy and you can link to internal pages of your site to help push variations of your keywords to help with your SEO campaign while also muddying up your link profile.

Nofollowed Links

Although links with the nofollow attribute will not help you in terms of SEO or ranking, they do get listed regularly by sites that list inbound links to a site, meaning that your competitors will have to sift through a load of links to get any real gold out of your hard work.

I can’t say that it’s massively important for anyone to go to these lengths, as it isn’t really what real SEO is about in my opinion, but if you do feel the need to hide or disguise your backlink profile it can help slow down your competition. At the same time you can sift through their backlink profile as well as some of your other competitors and other industry sites and grab the best from their worlds while covering your own tracks, helping you to speed ahead and win the race to the top of Google.

It’s widely thought in the world of SEO that the deeper the page into a sites structure the less importance it’s given by Google but that isn’t necessarily true.

Firstly, I’d be a little reluctant to move pages deep in the site to a more accessible location without good cause. Obviously if something works it works and there is rarely much point in trying to fix something that isn’t broken.

Not only that, but from what we’ve seen recently with 301 redirects not passing over the full authority I’d be even more wary about pulling off such a tactical SEO manoeuvre for potentially little gain – or no gain, as SEOMoz has kindly highlighted.

They suggest that:

“… people often think that URL structure signals site structure. Just because your URL is 3 levels deep doesn’t mean the crawlers will treat the page as being 3 levels deep.”

So it looks like it comes a lot down to how your site is linked internally too – both in your main navigation and links within your content.

For example, let’s look at two different but feasible URLs for an online shop. One page is several levels deep while the other sits in the root:

http://www.shop.com/paper/post-its/yellow /square.html and
http://www.shop.com/paper-post-its-yellow-square.html

Just because you’ve created a page in the root for page it doesn’t give it any more authority in the eyes of the search engines. You could have all of your pages sitting in the root thinking you’ve created a flat site architecture but you haven’t.

It all boils down to the way the page is linked to that creates the site’s architecture. A page that is linked to 3 clicks away from the home page but sits in the root is considered to be 3 levels deep and is given a lower authority, whereas a page 3 levels deep in terms of URL architecture but is linked to on the home page is considered to be only 1 level deep and is given more authority.

Google still has to crawl your site by following links and if a page that is important to you isn’t immediately accessible within a link or two it will be devalued, in the same way that having a page that isn’t easy to find for your visitors suggests that you don’t really find it relevant to actively ‘push’ people to seeing.

In short – a prominent page is an important page. Whether it’s for visitors or search engines, it’s important.

There are, of course, other arguments when it comes to using long URLs as opposed to those in the root, some of which can be seen over at SEOmoz.

In your quest for search engine dominance it is often easy to overlook certain areas within the vast sea of SEO techniques and ranking factors. This can sometimes be down to a lack of an all-round knowledge of SEO, being fed poor quality information or just lack of experience in particular areas of SEO.

Either way, I’ve created a short list of factors that could be affecting your ranking that you may have overlooked for whatever reason and should be looked at seriously (and addressed wherever possible) if you are looking to improve your SEO campaign.

Server Down Time

A site that is frequently inaccessible is a turn-off for any potential buyer. It doesn’t give a good impression and it means that when they do want to buy something from your site it could potentially go down at any time. Google sees this and, in its efforts to provide the highest possible quality search results, isn’t going to list a site that is only available 70% of the times it tries to visit.

If your site is selling anything you should be spending at least some of your profit on providing the best possible user experience and ensure you are doing everything you can to convert your visitors. If one thing stands in the way of the shopping experience it severely reduces the chances of that buyer coming back. They’ll just go elsewhere.

Linking to Poor Quality Resources

Poor quality links that come into your site are devalued and won’t affect much in the way of your rankings, but it appears to be a very different story when it comes to the sites you link out to.

At the end of the day, if you are linking out to a site you deem it a worthy resource for your visitors to visit. Google looks at this as a way of measuring the authenticity and authority of your site. Obviously a site that has any degree of authority within a particular niche will know of some great resources that would be useful to a visitor and potential buyer to learn more about a product or service or particular industry.

A link to a spammy site full of duplicate content or low quality articles not only gives the wrong impression to your visitors – which in itself should be enough to want to point them to better resources – but also shows that you know your industry and are working to give the user a better user experience to help them make a better informed decision.

Masking Content

This can be done in a variety of ways, but essentially boils down to delivering one set of information, however small, to your visitors while showing search engines other information and has been used in the past to ‘stuff’ keywords into a page without putting visitors off – which, I might add, was defunct years ago due to the abuse the method received.

This can be as simple as having text set to the same colour as the background so that it comes ‘invisible’ or working keywords into the coding of the site in a way that will not be displayed to users but will still be read by search engine spiders.

There are many other factors that can affect a site and its rankings within the search engines but these are some key areas that can be looked at to help bring up the overall standard of a poorly performing site.