Yesterday on Google’s official blog, Ben Gomes spoke about the evolution of search in an article entitled ‘The evolution of search in six minutes‘, sharing at the same time a video that dates back to earlier in the year which explains the methodology behind search ranking and evaluation.

Have a peek:

Gomes explains that through this methodology, Google make roughly 500 improvements to search in a typical year. In a November blog post they detail 10 of these that span over the course of just 2 weeks, including:

• Cross-language information retrieval updates
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content
• Better page titles in search results (Google are paying less attention to anchor text as an indication of a suitable title for a page)
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian
• Extending application rich snippets to show details, like cost and user reviews in the search results.
• Retiring a signal in Image search.
• Fresher, more recent results – fresh content is more important than ever with this change impacting around 35% of all search results.
• Refining official page detection – ranking ‘official’ pages higher in the results.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries.
• Prediction fix for IME queries.

With all this change to Google’s algorithms, how can website owners and indeed, search engine optimisation experts, manage websites and plan campaigns or evaluate whether their changes are effective? It can certainly be difficult – Google’s PANDA algorithm changes have seen sites jumping all over the rankings this year and have left both businesses and SEOs in despair.

But whilst everything is changing constantly, nothing is really changing at all when you consider these changes alongside what Google are fundamentally trying to achieve.  Google state that their goal is to “get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek“.  Google just wants to deliver the content you want to see in the fastest way possible.  So whilst Google makes its tweaks and adds features like Instant which display results as you type, for website owners, creating that content (all of it – pages, videos, images…) in a well-optimised way is your best shot at good rankings.

Let’s take some of the updates above as examples.  Google has figured that a lot of people use keywords in their anchor text (e.g. in the text of links from other websites) to get their site ranked better for those terms.  This is just another form of search engine manipulation which, let’s face it, we all do (to be fair, Google’s webmaster guidelines do encourage link building).  Since we all do it, those anchor text links aren’t necessarily the best indicator of what the page is about. So Google is now taking that into account. Now, if your page already has great content, with accurate title/meta information formatted in the way that Google asks for it, does this matter to you? Not really.

Another update here is the fresh content update.  Google wants to display relevant, up to date content, to people who are looking to find that (hence why it only affects 35% of result, because some people are looking for the news, others are looking for the history of the Wombles, and that doesn’t need to be fresh).  We’ve known for years that Google likes fresh content, right? We know that sites rank better when they’re kept up to date.  It’s nothing new really.

In other words, if you’re following Google’s webmaster guidelines – recommendations for design, content and technical practice – these updates are highly unlikely to have killed your site.  Yes I’ve heard the PANDA horror stories and Google made quite a number of adjustments to get these updates right which saw some perfectly good sites disappear into oblivion for a while.  But I’d hazard a guess that if you’ve fallen victim to some PANDA trickery and not much has improved, if you take a good long look at your site somewhere there’ll be something that you’ve done to cause your rankings and traffic to fall. Hence my statement that not a lot changes. The algorithm changes are all designed simply to identify sites (and now, specific content like images, books and vids) that appear most relevant because they comply with best practice and bump them up the search results or bring them to the user’s attention in some way.  Of course, it does mean that if you’ve got a static business website, you’ve got to keep it updated with commentary on industry-relevant news and content, to stay ahead of the competition.

Google is simply about better results, faster.  It likes good content, speed, freshness, relevance – the cornerstones of Google search as an effective product.  The only thing that changes is how good Google gets at picking out the wheat from the chaff and how it displays its wheat to the user.