10 Recent Changes to Improve Google Search

Google is constantly upgrading and improving the processes which drive their algorithms, evaluations and search rankings so that Google Search can continue to be the search engine of choice. Within the space of a single year, Google may make hundreds of changes in order to provide the best search results. Google recently released a list of just 10 changes to let customers get a peek into how the company is refining their methods.

1.   Get What you Want in the Language you Understand Best

*Queries in languages with limited Web content will now get translated responses

There is an amazing amount of information on the Web, but it isn’t readily available in every single language. Some languages (eg. Afrikaans, Swahili, Icelandic, Welsh) have precious little Web content representation. Consider Hindi – a language spoken by millions yet only one percent of Web content is available in Hindi. Google search wants to help eliminate the barriers language can cause when it comes to searching Web results. Now, when a user types in a query using a language that has limited Web content, the search will provide relevant English pages translated into the query language. This is a gold mine for marketers who bumped up against the language barrier when seeking to reach into limited language markets...

Companies with an online presence have a vested interest in Google activities as the company’s algorithms can have an effect on their ability to achieve high rankings. In fact, if a company tries to manipulate the algorithms, Google often finds out and kicks that site to the garbage bin. This is good news for you if you are trying to operate a legitimate company with quality offerings online, but with the emergence of Panda, you’re likely feeling the crunch.

The purpose of Panda, of course, is to identify low-quality pages and sites that offer little more than the right combination of keywords and eliminate them from top search rankings. The focus is to ensure quality sites get the attention they deserve. Google is trying to increase the overall user experience by ensuring the search terms entered into its site return what it considers to be “high quality” sites.

It is easy to assume that sites guilty of “keyword” stuffing will quickly be identified as low quality sites, but Google’s Panda is a little more detailed than that.  It can actually affect you rather easily if you have done certain things to try and gain a competitive advantage in the search results. Some of these activities may seem innocent, or even to be good business strategy. Google, however, sees them as poor business practices...

It's the never-ending guessing game of what is acceptable or not in the eyes of Google. It's unfortunate, but the business world has to continually adjust to the whims and ideas of what the most popular search engine may or may not want. The latest update named "Panda" has yet again caused upheaval and distress with webmasters pulling out their hair wondering, “what's next?”

The problem has not just been Google's lack of transparency, but their unwillingness to even give the "Good Guys", as they put it, a push in the direction of knowing how to optimize their websites. Although Google definitely denies tweaking their algorithms to give their major advertisers the advantage in the search engine rankings, what is anyone to really know?...

Fans of Google AdWords Quality Score, listen up: Microsoft adCenter has recently announced the launch of an improved Quality Score feature that will reveal to advertisers key elements of a successful keyword campaign.

Available this spring, Microsoft developers are confident that their new Quality Score tool will provide advertisers with invaluable feedback on how competitive their keywords are in the online marketplace.  Preliminary features include...

If you have any part of your business online, I'm sure your main objective is find your target customers and sell your products and services to them.

The difficult part is finding a way to position yourself, so your potential prospects can find you. Today we're going to discuss Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and how it may effect your page ranking in the search engines.

What Exactly Is LSI?

We're not going to get into the science of LSI, but give you a big picture of how you should consider adjusting your marketing to gain an advantage over those that don't understand it.

Latent Semantic Indexing is a mathematical algorithm that recognizes related words and their patterns. It breaks down, for example, an article and determines what words are  similar in nature according to a particular subject. Basically, what similar words people include in their article that are considered related to each other.

If you had an article on tennis for example, the algorithm might see patterns of words like tennis, court, ball, Roger Federer, instruction, competition etc. Words that are taken and grouped according to massive amounts of data gathered from information on the web and then given importance according to these words in a document. LSI does not take into effect the meaning of any words, just patterns...