Google Announces Algo Changes for March 2012

[netmeg]

Google announced 50 changes for March.

[insidesearch.blogspot.com...]

---

1. Autocomplete with math symbols.
   
2. Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing.
   
3. Better scoring of news groupings.
   
4. Sitelinks data refresh.
   
5. Improvements to autocomplete backends, coverage.
   
6. Better handling of password changes.
   
7. Better indexing of profile pages.
   
8. UI refresh for News Universal.
   
9. Improvements to results for navigational queries.
   
10. High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements.
    
11. Live results for UEFA Champions League and KHL.
    
12. Tennis search feature.
    
13. More relevant image search results.
    
14. Fresher image predictions in all languages.
    
15. SafeSearch algorithm tuning.
    
16. Tweaks to handling of anchor text.
    
17. Simplification to Images Universal codebase.
    
18. Better application ranking and UI on mobile.
    
19. Improvements to freshness in Video Universal.
    
20. Fewer undesired synonyms.
    
21. Better handling of queries with both navigational and local intent.
    
22. Improvements to freshness.
    
23. Improvements to processing for detection of site quality.
    
24. Better interpretation and use of anchor text.
    
25. Better local results and sources in Google News.
    
26. Deprecating signal related to ranking in a news cluster.
    
27. Fewer “sibling” synonyms.
    
28. Better synonym accuracy and performance.
    
29. Retrieval system tuning.
    
30. Less aggressive synonyms.
    
31. Update to systems relying on geographic data.
    
32. Improvements to name detection.
    
33. Updates to personalization signals.
    
34. Improvements to Image Search relevance.
    
35. Remove deprecated signal from site relevance signals.
    
36. More precise detection of old pages.
    
37. Tweaks to language detection in autocomplete.
    
38. Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages.
    
39. More predictions in autocomplete by live rewriting of query prefixes.
    
40. Expanded sitelinks on mobile.
    
41. More accurate short answers.
    
42. Migration of video advanced search backends.
    
43. +1 button in search for more countries and domains.
    
44. Local result UI refresh on tablet.
    

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:02 pm (utc) on Apr 3, 2012]

[edited by: tedster at 1:30 am (utc) on Apr 5, 2012]
[edit reason] added links - split thread [/edit]

[Panthro]

Does anyone else here deal with non-ecom sites?

I'm professional services, mostly local and I've seen a good bit of shakeups too. One of the more interesting things I've noticed is one of our over-SEO'd sites that hasn't gotten love from Google in years suddenly rose to the first page for about a day (this happened a couple days ago).

It has now disappeared again, and the SERPS seem to be a little different overall. Our conversions have also been a little quieter this week and last, but we're usually pretty cyclical and traffic hasn't changed much, up if anything.

[venti]

Things are still jumping around for us. One day, up 20%. Other days down 10%. Seems we are about 5% down now.

[ken_b]

I wonder just how different 16 and 24 are?

[zeus]

SafeSearch algorithm tuning. - once again they are overdoing it, i added some new images a month ago half is filtered which has noting to do with adult/erotic or whatever, its car related, machines......

Image all in all has also suffered after panda in April, i suggest bing for image search

[Rick_M]

I noticed for my forum pages Google seems to be showing the first post date instead of the most recent. On some threads this could span a few years, and I know visitors are less likely to click what they assume is an old post.

One of may sites lost 30% of its traffic since around March 10. The sites ahead of me are either the main company site for the search term (on some searches up to 4 listings for the main company) and a few searches have keyword matching domain names with only a few generic pages on the site.

[wingslevel]

wondering about freshness - there were several posts about older sites getting hurt in the march update thread

[wokka]

Hmmm think No.16 and No.24 have affected my site.

[CainIV]

I think number 16 and 24 were the changes we seen for many sites in March that we debated on a separate thread.

[wingslevel]

@wokka - maybe around the tenth?

[Planet13]

And of course, the most important update was:

Live results for UEFA Champions League and KHL.

Having live updates to the Russian Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) scores is really going to cement google's reputation as a world-class search engine.

...and a few searches have keyword matching domain names with only a few generic pages on the site.

There's a lesson to be learned in there somewhere.

[scooterdude]

Well, they would like us to dissolve into gushes of admiration for the new changes

jabber about fuzzy logic,

speculate about the latest Gtech

Some how get an article on page one of NYT about how G pulled further ahead of the others

lets not oblige :)

[Whitey]

There's some repetition around 3 key groupings, quality and freshness , anchor text handling and synonyms [ more a user experience thing ]

Would you call this Panda related ?

- High-quality sites algorithm data update and
- freshness improvements.
- Improvements to processing for detection of site quality
- [repeated a 2nd time here ] : Improvements to freshness.

Anyone have a clue how these manifested themselve in traffic /rankings?

Was the following the Matt Cutts, "major" upcoming over optimization related changes, or was this just a lower level rankings disturbance tweak?

@CainIV - I think number 16 and 24 were the changes we seen for many sites in March that we debated on a separate thread.

Was this internal , external or both?

-Tweaks to handling of anchor text.
-[ Repeated 2nd time ] Better interpretation and use of anchor text.

Makes me think this report was not contributed by one person , rather a group collation of multiple elements to one solution ; ie. anchor text , and quality/freshness.

[garyr_h]

Traffic has went back to pre-March-Panda update. Exactly the same numbers. Exactly the same keyword traffic.

[reseller]

I like the present SERPs of Google Korea [google.co.kr...] . How about you?

[Shaddows]

Ok, I think I detect a good reason for the big shifts some of us have seen in traffic, but without corresponding ranking changes.
20. Fewer undesired synonyms
27. Fewer “sibling” synonyms
28. Better synonym accuracy and performance
30. Less aggressive synonyms
39. More predictions in autocomplete by live rewriting of query prefixes

(And possibly:
32. Improvements to name detection
33. Updates to personalization signals
37. Tweaks to language detection in autocomplete)

I suspect search volumes will have been somewhat distorted by this raft of "hidden" query handling and behaviour nudges.

Edit for speeling

[edited by: Shaddows at 7:59 am (utc) on Apr 4, 2012]

[wokka]

The Paul Simon Update: 50 ways to leave your lover.

Minus 2

- Live results for UEFA Champions League and KHL.
- Tennis search feature.

50 ways to run to Bing.

[garyr_h]

@reseller .co.kr looks a lot like .com.hk a week ago.

To be more specific, yes, they are by far the best results.

Here's what it looks like to me:

Pre-March 21 update + Post-March-Panda pre-April 3 update. Probably to see what the user reaction is to the updates.... I don't see it staying for long.

The current .com results are very puzzling to me. They look very, very close to pre-March-panda update. That's just crazy.

[MikeNoLastName]

This is a continuation of the prior thread? Looks like it started over. Someone should put a link back to the prior one.
Anyway I was polite enough to read the ENTIRE whole preceding thread so my comments include that.
I agree largely with the apparent degrading of internal anchor links and possibly even a negative effect if over done. We had one particular 3 word keyword which we were at #6-7 for in 2010, it got highly pandalized and had FINALLY climbed back to #22 and still climbing after some G bug fixing and internal link optimization. Suddenly April 1 it is back at #299 which is lower than it's lowest panda low last August. Which is funny because it is one of the most useful information pages on our site and doesn't sell ANYTHING (in fact it gives stuff away.) Overall a number of internally link- optimized pages seem to have dropped the magic number of about 250 (those of you who think you "disappeared" from the ranks check in that vicinity). On the other hand one page on the same domain which I've been struggling to get back into the top 10 is now suddenly #4-5 since most of it's anchor links are external.
There was a mention in the former thread about regional aspects and ecom sites coming up more for searches in their own geographic area than worldwide. I wonder if G thinks LOCALS are more likely to stay in a hotel in their own local area or visit WallyWorld in their own backyard versus folks from... ANYWHERE else?
Overall, I can't believe the latest results, especially in my niches (regional travel mostly). It seems they've erased almost ALL ecom sites (i.e. anyone who would be willing to PAY for an adwords link) and replaced them with various wiki's and barely related news articles from major feeds.

[chrisv1963]

I like the present SERPs of Google Korea [google.co.kr...] . How about you?

I agree. Very good and clean results.
The .com results are a mess.

[irishsolar]

I have noticed exactly the same thing happen to one of my sites that happened to backdraft7. It slowly fell down to page 3 then yesterday disappeared from the SERPs. However the same site has only slipped from position 1 to position 2 in google.co.uk.

What we have noticed is that the sites at the top (and all over page 1 & 2) rely heavily on just one type of backlink - blog comments!

It's possible Google has either turned up the relevance of this indicator or turned down the relevance of others to weed out blog spammers.

Blog spamming is certainly an over-optimization strategy that mostly leads to spamming.

I would be interested to know if this can be confirmed by other people on the thread. If you look at the top 2 or 3 site's backlink profiles for your keywords in Open Site Explorer (or similar) you may find they rely heavily on blog comments.

There is a free tool called link detective that can give you a visual pie chart to see the distribution of backlinks more easily.

I would love to see if other people are seeing this phenomenon.

[scottsonline]

I guess the reason we aren't hearing from people in the US is they had a better day Tuesday?

I saw the duplicate sites fall Tuesday. Monday the bounce rate was at historic lows. Conversions at highs. That reversed 24 hours later and we have no idea why.

We see no changes.

[SnowMan68]

@ Scotts....saw another 10% drop in G referrals Monday. US based ecom site. Down about 25-30% since late Feb.

[albo]

I often see webmasters here suggest migrating to Bing, perhaps out of their frustration with the Gorg. Yet is there evidence of a *user* migration to Bing? Some have even migrated to DuckDuckGo, which, as you know, is a mask for Gorg results. The Gorg must still figure in a robust SEO strategy, no?

[SnowMan68]

@albo

Have to go where the users are . Big G is definitely holding the majority stake in the US.

[Rasputin]

The idea of being informed about google updates sounded promising at first.

A bullet point list with, say, 10 items written in clear English is interesting, a 50 point list of items that don't mean very much to a user like 'Remove deprecated signal from site relevance signals' and 'Simplification to Images Universal codebase' rather less so...

I'm afraid it fails several of the panda 'high quality page' tests such as:
- Does the article describe both sides of a story?
- Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Was the article edited well?

[mslina2002]

A bullet point list with, say, 10 items written in clear English is interesting, a 50 point list of items that don't mean very much to a user like 'Remove deprecated signal from site relevance signals' and 'Simplification to Images Universal codebase' rather less so...

You need to click through and read the full post. The full post has explanation to all the bullets.

[Marshall]

I'm so confused any more :-/

Marshall

[Rasputin]

I've seen the full post, it says for example:

Remove deprecated signal from site relevance signals. [launch codename "Freedom"] We’ve removed a deprecated product-focused signal from a site-understanding algorithm.

and

Simplification to Images Universal codebase. [launch codename "Galactic Center"] We’ve made some improvements to simplify our codebase for Images Universal and to better utilize improvements in our general web ranking to also provide better image results

Personally I don't think that even with full explanations they provide useful information for webmasters (presumably the target of these posts) although I agree that some of the entries are slightly more informative.

[night707]

traffic still the same, but adsense has become worthless and is now getting replaced at all sites. Real joke!