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.

SEO is an excellent method of improving your website’s visibility online and ultimately generating traffic. However, organic traffic has some drawbacks:

• You can’t easily test landing pages, headlines, and templates
• You can’t get rapid feedback
• You don’t get traffic on certain keywords until you rank for the terms

This is where PPC campaigns can help out your SEO by allowing you to conduct testing which heralds instant feedback.

Please see below my top 3 ways a PPC account can help you gather the data you need to make the right SEO decisions.

Testing Home Pages

If you’re thinking about changing your homepage or making some adjustments to the existing one with the aim of increasing your site’s performance, one of the first things you’d want to do after designing the new page would be to test it to check it is actually an improvement on the old one.

Unfortunately, you can’t simply upload a few homepages and tell the search engines to rotate which one the traffic goes too. You also don’t want all of these homepages indexed as that can cause issues with your existing rankings.

Never fear as there is a solution; simply put your new homepage designs in their own folder and use robot.txt file on them to disallow any crawling by the search engines to prevent these pages being indexed and affecting your existing SEO rankings.

Then send your desired traffic to these pages via PPC and monitor the results via analytics or alike.

Testing Title Tags

Webpage title tags serve two major purposes:

• Tell a search engine what your page is about
• Serve as a headline on the search engine result pages

What your headline says when displayed on the SERPs is the difference between your page gaining the click or not.

The main goal of a PPC adverts headline is to showcase your product/service, offering and drawing attention to itself with the ultimate aim of gaining the click. Therefore the overall goals of an organic title tag and a PPC adverts headline are very similar.

Most page titles are 55 – 65 characters and a PPC adverts headline, when shown above the search results with extended headlines activated, can be up to 60 characters which means you can test a variety of page titles via PPC to determine which have the best click through rate before you place them on your website. This is a really simple tip but can make a big difference to the amount of traffic your organic listing generates.

Test New Keywords

If you’re thinking of adding some new keywords to optimise for organically but are not sure if they are the right keywords for you site or if the return they’ll bring will warrant the investment of optimising for them, then PPC is a great way of finding out if they will work for your site without having to update your onsite and offsite SEO.

By setting up ad groups for your potential new keywords and then monitoring your sites analytics, you can gain a valuable insight into whether these keywords will be worth targeting via an organic campaign.

As Google announced yesterday that they have launched the new Google+ Business Pages, I thought I’d run through the reasons I like the new pages…or should that be why I ‘plus one’ the new pages…

+1 They exist!

The first plus point is simply the fact that business pages are available on Google+ now. If you’re wondering why there is so much fuss at the moment about these business pages, it’s because Google didn’t allow businesses to create profiles, they could only be personal accounts when Plus launched.

+2 Reducing noise

I get the feeling that Google have taken a back seat and listened to user feedback on Facebook and Twitter and tried to take the best of both worlds to create the ideal scenario for businesses on social networks. Facebook users would complain that they ‘liked’ a business page but then ‘unliked’ them after feeling that their news feeds were full of too many posts from that business. A recent study found that 36% of their respondents “unliked a brand because they felt that they heard from them too often.” With Google+ Business Pages, users are able to ‘plus one’ (a sort of alternative to Facebook ‘likes’) a business page without ‘following’ (adding to circles) the page. An effective way to allow business pages build up credibility without users having to make too much of a commitment and getting annoyed.

+3 Less spamming

Following on from the idea that Google have picked the best bits of Twitter and Facebook – it seems that Google want to reduce spamming techniques and create a more credible network. On Twitter, businesses can follow as many users as they like in the hope that those users will follow them back, which is a spamming ‘technique’ used too often. On Facebook, businesses aren’t allowed to ‘add’ or ‘follow’ their fans, meaning they can’t see the status updates of those people. I think Google+ have got it pretty right with their rules – a business can follow a personal user, but only those who have followed their business first. A nice way for users to verify that they’re happy for a business to follow them I feel, and obviously beneficial for the business to be able to see what their fans are talking about.

+4 Easy access

By introducing ‘Direct Connect’ Google will now return a business page in the search results if someone searches for a business name with a + symbol before e.g. “+pepsi”. A neat feature that allows users to jump to business pages without having to go into Google Plus first, and perhaps a more useful purpose of the + sign function in search. However to make sure your page does show in Direct Connect, you have to link your website to your page which is fairly straight forward and Google have provided simple instructions.

+5 Verified pages

Many businesses got caught out with Twitter, in not claiming their username quick enough and losing it. Although Twitter now offer a way to claim your username back, it’s not the smoothest of processes in my opinion. At the moment anyone can make a business page on Google+ but they won’t be able to add icons or badges, or appear in Direct Connect until the page has been linked to the right website. My guess is that the initial users of Google+ are savvy enough to work out whether the business page is real or not, and by the time the less savvy users move over from Facebook (will this really happen?) Google will have proper verification settings in place.

Of course, there are many negative points about the new business pages, but I thought I’d give Google a break, after all, they are saying goodbye to their previous social network… Buzz who?

Are you on Google+? Check out our Creare Communications page and let us know your thoughts on the new business pages.

Google Updates Search Algorithm to Include Freshness Factor

So I thought it would be rude not to mention the recent update to Google’s algorithm, the significance of which I’m still deliberating on. On Friday (04.11.11) Google announced that they had amended their search ranking algorithm in a way which would affect approximately 35% of search results.

When you consider that almost 80% of online search is done through Google (according to some reports), this 35% represents an awesome number of results.

So what exactly has changed? Well, Google are calling it ‘freshness’. Basically, they’ve amended their algorithm so that it differentiates more finely and more intelligently between old and more recent or “fresh” results.

The idea is that someone searching for the results of the world’s greatest football club’s* last game wouldn’t want to be greeted by information on the 1960-61 League and FA Cup Double when they typed ‘Spurs results’ into Google. They’d want details of the latest game (a 3-1 win over Fulham away if you must know), or at the very least the results from the current season or cup competitions. It’s precisely this kind of recent (and presumably more relevant) result that Google is aiming to provide more often.

And…?

Many of you will be wondering at this point – so what? I must admit, when I first heard about the update last week I had to double take – hasn’t Google already achieved this? Search for anything and you’re able to adjust the time parameters at the side of the SERPs, specifying anything from the past hour to the past year. This allows you to filter out older results or indeed specify results from years gone by.

Well the difference with this latest update is that Google have tried to imbue their search algorithm with the ability to discern how important ‘freshness’ is to any given search term. That’s because freshness doesn’t always equal relevance. Many searches are aimed at gathering information on historical events, such as the keywords ‘what team has won a major trophy in all of the last six decades?’

So in theory, when you make a search, the Google search engine should now be more able to make a good decision regarding whether you want the very latest pages in the results or are less bothered by freshness.

What Now?

With this in mind then what does all this mean for us in SEO? Well, it’s early days yet, but many people in the industry are worried that this will lead to an increase in spam. The argument is that businesses will simply take to creating low quality blogs with duplicate content which is simply designed to be published according to a schedule, with the express aim of appearing in search due to its ‘freshness’.

Whilst this is a danger, I don’t think that it will lead to a flood of low quality sites ranking well in search. Don’t forget that this is an update, not a complete overhaul – Google will not have forgotten the lessons learned and fixes implemented in its Panda update. In the early days especially, I anticipate that the affect of freshness on rankings will be downplayed, it will simply be another factor which is thrown into the mix to decide where to rank your site.

Freshness Friendly

Having said that, I think there are a couple of points to make regarding how to make sure your sites are ‘freshness friendly’.

The first one is something we’ve been harping on about here at Creare since time began – regularly updated content. If your site hasn’t been updated since Spurs became the only non league team to win the FA cup back in 1901 then it’s not going to benefit much from Google’s freshness update. However, get yourself a blog, start publishing good content relevant to your site on a regular basis and Google could realise that you’re providing good quality content at the time when users are searching for it.

The second point is a little more technical, but according to WebProNews, a lot of webmasters are all but rushing to integrate timestamps into their xml sitemaps. This little additional tag could help show Google that your content is recent and fresh, therefore helping it to rank better in search results.

Finally, with these new changes it’s important to make sure that your site is being crawled quickly, easily and regularly. If Google can’t index your content quickly or at all, then it’s going to be out of date in terms of freshness by the time they finally are able to crawl it. Drop by webmaster tools for crawl diagnostics, improve your internal linking and update your site regularly to make sure Google drops by often enough to pick up your pages hot off the press.

Ironically, only time will tell how much of an affect this update will have. I anticipate that the end result will be an improvement in the quality of search results for the end user, and will probably mean a little more work for us in SEO!

*This is not necessarily the view of the management.

I don’t often like to gloat; those who know me well would describe me as the anti-gloat. However, I told you so, I told you so!

Those of you who may have read my blog post on October 26^th about Google displaying PPC ads at the top and bottom of the SERPs will have been informed as to how Google were running tests on PPC adverts at the bottom of the page and how I thought this could be the future of PPC on the SERPs.

I was right! Google announced on Wednesday afternoon that after successful testing, in some cases, ads that would of traditionally being shown at the side will now show at the bottom below the organic results.

Google stated that, ‘In many cases, we have found that displaying ads below search results fits better into the user’s flow as they scan the page from top to bottom. On average, this placement performed better than side ads in terms of click-through rate in our tests.’

With the launch of the new display position, all side, bottom and experiment impressions will now be classified as “Other”. As a result of this, the ‘Top vs. Side’ comparison will be renamed to ‘Top vs. Other.’

If you would like to read my post from last week showing examples of Google displaying adverts at the top and bottom of the SERPs please click here.