In keeping with my habit of keeping you all updated regarding Google’s algorithm changes, I wanted to mention a few updates that took place as recently as over the weekend.

The main gist of the updates seemed to be that freshness remains important, and the aim of achieving more recency and relevance in the search results.

Of the freshness tweak, Google said:

We made several adjustments to the freshness algorithm that we released in November. These are minor updates to make sure we continue to give you the freshest, most relevant results.

So not saying much then. Still, this does show that Google seems to have noticed that their freshness update back in November didn’t quite work as planned.

Users complained that the SERPs were displaying less relevant listings simply because they were more recent than the more relevant content, which might have been a little older. The problem was that the original content for any given issue is inherently going to be the oldest content for that issue, meaning that it isn’t likely to fare very well under Google’s freshness update.

Google did mention that they’ve improved the way in which they ascertain the age of a page, and they point to pages discussing recurring events as beneficiaries of this particular element of the update.

So hopefully this latest tweak will work to counter the problems associated with freshness, although evidently we’ll have to wait and see. Keep an eye on your campaigns as this tweak could lead to the resurgence of content you thought far too old to rank well again.

So what else do we have in this latest box of goodies?

Spellings

Well, Google seem to be particularly concerned about spelling right now, with several changes to the way Google’s autocomplete feature makes corrections for common and rarer misspelled terms.

Panda

They’ve also apparently integrated Panda and everything it stands for more firmly into the Google machine, meaning that, in theory, higher quality sites will be ranking more highly in the SERPs. I haven’t noticed any impacts either positively or negatively on my campaigns yet. I think it’s safe to say that if your sites were hit after the main Panda update and you haven’t rectified the problems yet it might be worth sorting, as it doesn’t look like Google are going to drop Panda any time soon.

Picture Perfect

This change relates to how images are ranked in image search. Apparently, if the landing page on which an image is displayed if off a high standard then the image is more likely to rank well. This means that it’s no longer practical to slap that soon to be viral image on a basic page – you’ll need good quality content accompanying it to rank better.

Realtime & News

The final noteworthy SEO related change is a supposed improvement to news article integration in the SERPs. Google have refined the way their algorithm decides which queries should return news results with a view to getting it right more often. This update is specifically significant as it comes at a time when relations between Google and Twitter is at an all time low – suggesting that re-integration of Twitter’s real time results into Google search isn’t likely for a while yet. It’s probably that Google is doing everything it can to improve the real time aspects of its SERPs in order to make up for this loss.

If you’ve been involved in the SEO industry for very long at all, you’ll undoubtedly be aware of the importance of robots.txt files in certain circumstances.
Robots.txt files can be very useful in determining how your site is viewed by Google and the other search engines out there. Not only can you forbid the search engines from seeing (and therefore indexing) your site at all; you can also hide specific pages from their view.

For bigger sites, such as ecommerce platforms with hundreds and hundreds of pages, this can mean configuring quite a sizeable robots.txt file. And this is exactly where the problem can occur. Via his Google + page, Googler John Mueller recently reminded SEOs that, ideally, robot.txt files should be no larger than 500kb in size.

According to JM, Google’s web spider, or Googlebot for short will only read the first 500kb of any robots file. This means that if you have important information in your file, but it’s larger than 500kb then you could be leading Google to disregard said information. This could lead to serious problems and could even mean that your robots.txt file doesn’t succeed in performing the task that you originally configured it for – potentially causing big problems with your SEO campaign.

More than this, an unnecessarily large robots file could be exactly that; unnecessary and could suggest that the entire build and coding of your site might need a rethink. With Google and SEO in mind, remember to check your robots file after any work is done on the site, and remember that the simpler your site is to navigate, the better chance Googlebot has of doing so successfully.

So the latest twist and/or turn in the rel=author saga has arrived in the form of authorship information integrated into webmaster tools.

According to the official webmaster blog, Google rolled out this new feature in response to requests from online authors. Basically, the tool, which is located in the labs section of webmaster tools, allows webmasters to view basic data about how their authorship linked content is doing in the SERPs. The data that is available is as follows:

1. The URL of the page in question.
2. The impressions that page has had.
3.  The % change in impressions.
4. The clicks received.
5. The % change in clicks.
6. The click through rate as a %.
7. The percentage change of your CTR.
8. The average position of your page.
9. The percentage change of your average position.

While this new element is unlikely to change the face of SEO, there are useful applications for this data. For example, the ability to see the average position of your content could save a lot of time spent checking rankings and calculated averages and percentages, allowing you to more easily monitor your long tail campaign.

The tool will also allow you to monitor the success of your blog and it’s authorship markup over time. In theory, as you build up more respect and authority as an author, your impressions and clicks should grow in number, as should your CTR.

Finally, on the subject of CTR, I can feel an experiment coming on. The inclusion of ‘author stats’ into Webmaster tools now allows you to experiment with different article titles, meta data and author photos in order to attempt to improve CTR.

The resulting info gathered could help you in your wider SEO campaigns, helping you to craft the perfect listing which is more likely to attract clicks and visitors.

Just how important is Google + in terms of SEO and search results? Should we be going through and +1ing all of our sites and clients’ sites in order to improve their rankings. In light of a seemingly insignificant change made to Google’s results pages last week, I thought I’d consider this question for a moment.

On Friday many in the SEO industry noticed that Google had removed the +1 button from its search results. Where previously you could see the button next to every listing, you now had to hover over said listing to even see the button. Only when you hover over the button itself did it reveal itself in colour.

Your response to this might be: who cares? Well, when you consider that in marketing and advertising ‘out of sight’ is very much ‘out of mind’ you begin to puzzle at this latest move from Google. Why go from having your social media platform’s button on 10 listings on the page to having it on none at all? Surely this will diminish the online presence of Google + and work contrary to Google’s well laid plans to challenge Facebook and Twitter for social supremacy?

You could argue that having the button appear when you roll over a listing has more impact as it draws your eye which might be true, but I still feel that this will lead to fewer listings being +1ed.

If Google are content to reduce the impetus on Google +, then it suggests that their intentions to include it as a major ranking signal are less fierce than first thought. Google has of course stated that the amount of +1s is already a ranking signal, but this latest move suggests that’s all it will ever be.

Even if Google aren’t intentionally reducing their focus on the +1 ranking signal, by hiding it from the SERPs their arguably still doing this. Less visibility means fewer clicks and fewer clicks will inevitably inhibit the growth of the social media platform, and without a healthy and well used platform there’s absolutely no use in Google using +1s as a ranking signal, let alone a major factor.

Finally, to throw an additional spanner into the works, Google also announced last week that they were inviting social media platforms and similar networks to work with them to create improved social analytics for users. You can’t help but view the search engine as a cautious player in the online community, moving one chess pieces to distract their opponent from others. What does this mean for social signals in search? Is Google looking to create a social analytics platform which it can use itself and integrate into the ranking algorithm?

I think that although these changes and announcements are an indication of Google’s intentions, we can’t know for sure until we wait to see what happens. In the meantime, I think integrating social buttons into your website, engaging with your customers via social media and maintaining a rounded online presence will all be enough to help your site when it comes to social signals and SEO, at least for now.

Yet another announcement from Google has got my head ticking overtime. Yesterday Google published their “Invitation to social sites to integrate with Google Analytics”. Basically they plan to launch a social data hub within Analytics next year, which is going to show sharing, commenting and voting stats from various social networks. In theory this should allow marketers to measure their social engagement much better as it’s all going to be about seeing social activity on other networks, not just the activity that happens on a website itself.

What intrigues me is the reason for Google doing this when Google Analytics has to date been all about onsite activity. I suppose the first reason is because they need to provide good social stats for Google + anyway, and they’ve realised that the only way one set of stats is useful is if you can get the whole picture – a bit like the way Google Analytics shows all traffic sources so you can benchmark Google against Bing for example. I guess it makes sense for them to integrate other social networks into Analytics when looking at it this way. Which leads me onto the next point which I think will be the main talking point of this announcement – the social networks that are already working with Google.

Or should I say the social networks that aren’t already working with Google… Facebook and Twitter. Why aren’t they included in this? Is it because Google haven’t ‘invited’ them until now, or is it because Facebook and Twitter don’t want to be included? Surely Google will include the two biggest networks if they know what’s good for them. It’s a bit like saying that they’ll show traffic from AOL and Alta Vista, but not Bing and Yahoo!

I have to admit that although I do take interest in the happenings and developments of social networks other than Facebook and Twitter, I don’t spend too much time on other sites such as Digg and Reddit, I leave that to the social media folks or content writers, with the knowledge that sharing helps but .

From my point of view, most SEO’s would rather spend more time on link building than on social networks as they feel it adds more direct value to SEO than sharing signals. However this is something else that’s got me thinking about Google’s reasoning behind this development – does this indicate something for SEO? We know that social signals are becoming more important in ranking factors and Google should take all activity into account, not just Google +, and not just social activity within a site itself. It also makes sense for Google to rank sites that create sharable content, not just sites with content that links back to their site from a page with high PR, which seems to be part of their plan to get rid of bad content.

If this means that we’ll be more able to track the social signals that’ll have an impact on rankings then I’m looking forward to seeing the stats.

What are your thoughts? How many questions marks have I used in this blog post? (!)