Google’s Quality Control Changes: What Does it Mean for Your Website Ranking?

Google is continually making changes to their algorithm and updating their products. About every other month they announce all of the changes in a “quality control changes” update on Google’s Inside Search Blog.  At the end of February, they listed a lot of updates. Today we will focus on the updates that specifically affect search results and underneath each are some bullet points on what each update means for your website ranking, or search engine optimization strategy:

1. More coverage for related searches. This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

• The related search section might show other keywords, especially long tail keywords that you might rank for
• Be sure to optimize your site for multiple related keywords and long tail, more specific keywords

2. Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks.  This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.

• Duplicate snippets can occur when you have the same meta data on more than one page.
• Make sure that all of your pages have unique content both on page and in the meta data.

3. Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets forexpanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.

• Investigate if this change in the snippets shown has affected your page listings.
• Test multiple pages for different page content and meta data to see how you can best show your web pages in Google’s search results pages.

4. More locally relevant predictions in YouTube.  We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

• This change makes it more important than ever to have videos representing your local business in YouTube.

5. “Site:” query update. This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

• If you did not know, searching site:yourdomain.com in Google will return all of the pages Google has indexed of your site.
• This can help you identify any missing pages or see how each page looks in Google’s SERPs and trouble shoot any issues.

6. Improvements to foreign language synonyms.  This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.

• Quite a few of the changes this past month included language updates. This language synonym improvement is something that you should definitely pay close attention to if your site targets multiple regions or audiences of different languages.

7. International launch of shopping rich snippets. Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).

• This is, of course, very important if you have an ecommerce site and are listed in Google’s shopping index.
• Be sure that your product listings have all of the details updated properly so that Google has the information it needs to show your products in all relevant searches possible.

8. Improvements to freshness.  We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

• One of the major things Google has been focusing on in the last year is providing relevant fresh content, when it comes to news and realtime events.
• If your website is news or media related, you will want to update it as often as possible with fresh content for Google to pick up with their new algorithm changes.

9. Improvements to ranking for local search results. This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

• Just as the local YouTube improvement was listed above, this change affects universal local search and includes local results for news, images, video, shopping and more.
• If you have a local business, make sure to have updated, fresh news content, video, images, and as much variety as possible indexed into Google.

10. Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

• Because of information released this week, we now understand that this update refers to the fact that Panda updates will now be an automatic, ongoing algorithm update that will take place over a few days instead of the instant, manually driven update it has been in the past.
• As you likely already know, Google’s Panda update tackled link farms in an effort to give better ranking to higher quality information sites, and not reward sites with shallow information and a lot of links, or those sites attempting to achieve ranking with webspam.
• The way to avoid a Panda penalty is to maintain unique, quality content on your website and do not trade links with unrelated websites or use misleading anchor text.

If you require further information or have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to give a member of the GoPromotional team a call on 0800 0148 970 or simply email us today.