Google’s Latest Algorithm Changes

Landing page quality matters more in image search

As you may know, Google has been putting out a monthly list of algorithm changes it has been making, as part of the company’s initiative to be “more transparent”. Google will never put out the entire secret sauce of its algorithm (without a court order, at least), so webmasters can at least be thankful that they’re being thrown a handful of bones in the form of a monthly list.
Have you seen effects from Google’s most recent algorithm changes? 

Webmasters were quick to point the finger at the old panda, but Google assures us that this is not the case. A spokesperson for the company told there have been no Panda updates in 2012 so far (though I’d expect one to launch before too long).

By the way, now that 2011 is over, do you think Panda has done a good job at cleaning up search results?

In the latest edition of the series, on the company’s Inside Search Blog, they highlight 21 changes made in the month of December. 

1) Image Search landing page quality signals

2) More relevant sitelinks

3) Soft 404 Detection

4) More accurate country-restricted searches

5) More rich snippets

6) Better infrastructure for autocomplete

7) Better spam detection in Image Search

8) Google Instant enhancements for Japanese.

9) More accurate byline dates

10) Live results for NFL and college football

11) Improved dataset for related queries

12) Related query improvements

13) Better lyrics results

14) Tweak to +1 button on results page

15) Better spell correction in Vietnamese

16) Upcoming events at venues

17) Improvements to image size signal

18) Improved Hebrew synonyms

19) Safer searching

20) Encrypted search available on new regional domains

21) Faster mobile browsing

The image search landing page quality signal change is quite interesting. We ran a great article on optimizing for image search by Michael Gray last year, and that’s full of tips to consider for this less talked about element of SEO, but the adjustments, as unspecific as they may be, reflect Google’s Panda-style focus on quality in search results. This, to me, is saying they’re applying same kind of thinking they do with regular web search to other parts of Google, more than ever before.

With regards to the “more rich snippets” item on the list, you may want to check out the series of videos Google recently put out on how to do rich snippets.