10 Most Recent Google Algorithm Changes

Google has published hundreds of blog posts about search over the years on their blog, and Official Google Blog. But they are always looking for ways to give you even deeper insight into the over 500 changes they have made to search in a given year. In that spirit, here’s a list of 10 improvements from the past couple weeks:

10 Most Recent Google Algorithm Changes

1. Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), Google will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
2. Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps Google to choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As Google has improved their understanding of web page structure, they 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.
Proof of above point is my own blog title in Google: See below image in which Google search snippet showing title as Geek Blogger Logo when i have searched for GeekBlogger, just because of having an anchor pointing to the blog url.

3. Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: Google look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. Google found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so Google are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
4. Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. Google will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
5. Extending application rich snippets: Google recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
6. Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, Google often revisit signals that Google launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, Google decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
7. Fresher, more recent results: As Google announced just over a week ago, Google has made a significant improvement to how Google 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.
8. Refining official page detection: Google has tried hard to give the users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, they have adjusted how Google attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
9. Improvements to date-restricted queries: Google has changed how they were handling result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
10. Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

If you’re a site owner, before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes Google make to our search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine. Google have decided to publish these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.

Let us know what is your view on this algorithm changes?