10 New Google Algorithm Changes Announced

Google changing its search algorithms is not news to most SEO experts. It’s a fact of SEO life. What is new with the latest algorithm changes is that Google is being more transparent and talking about them openly.

What caught my attention and IMO applies to industrial marketing, are these four changes:

1. Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: Google’s explanation: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
   What this means to industrial marketers: On-page SEO will now require more than just an optimized Title tag and text-based drop-down menus. There are plenty of rumors floating around that Google sometimes (more frequently lately it seems) ignores HTML title tags and creates its own titles in their coveted blue links. This latest change means you need to pay more attention to the content on site pages and make sure it is optimized for search terms.
2. Fresher, more recent results: : Google’s explanation: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
   What this means to industrial marketers: Static corporate websites with rarely updated content may not cut it any more. Add a blog or convert your industrial site into a blog site if you want to satisfy Google’s appetite for fresh content. Social media will play a bigger role in uncovering trending topics that people are searching for.
3. Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: Google’s explanation: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
   What this means to industrial marketers: Do more in-depth keyword research. Wrapping your links with anchor text of the same one or two keywords won’t be effective anymore.
4. Refining official page detection: Google’s explanation: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
   What this means to industrial marketers: Forget about posting the same article all over the Internet to get inbound links. Stick with posting good content on your site and let other bloggers and industry experts link back to your original article when they cite your post (something you should be doing anyway). The question I have is what happens to authority sites that curate and/or republish your blog posts?

Here’s the link to Google’s official post on ten recent algorithm changes if you want to read the rest of the changes.

Bottom line – Don’t try to game the SEO system. Stick to creating original content that your human readers will find relevant to their search terms, persuade them to take action and let the search engines follow. Organic SEO based on this tried and tested principle will never be susceptible to Google’s frequent algorithm changes.