As you have likely noticed by now, Google merged Google Plus and Google Places. This has changed the way that Places listings are showing up in a few ways. One of the changes that is most noticeable is the review system – it used to be an easy to see 5-star system. What happened?
Today Google announced a change that’s going to be gradually rolled out starting today, called the Knowledge Graph. This is an effort to connect more with the variety in meaning all keywords tend to have, and help people find what they’re looking for a little more easily.
The Googlebot is Google’s automated program for searching and indexing content on the Internet. In the realm of SEO, the first part of good optimization is all about crafting textual content that’s visible and makes sense to Googlebot. After Googlebot indexes a page, the Google algorithm takes the content text and automatically ranks it on the search results page according to the search terms that the user enters into Google search. If your optimized website performs well for the term “electronic widgets,” for example, the Google algorithm will place your site near or at the top of the search results whenever someone uses Google to search for “electronic widgets.” Did you know that in addition to its automated components like Googlebot and the algorithm that Google also uses human site raters in the ranking of websites?
Google employs hundreds of site raters who rate a huge number of websites on relevancy. The input collected from this team doesn’t directly influence the search results, but it does influence the Google engineers in changing the algorithm to better serve more relevant results to the search engine user.
In this great video, Google senior software engineer Matt Cutts, demystifies this process by explaining how human website raters are used in testing changes to the Google algorithm. Essentially, after a change to the automatic search ranking is made, Google performs many test queries and evaluates what has changed in the results. The new search results are checked against the results before the change, and then presented to the human raters – in what Matt Cutts calls a “blind taste test” – to determine which set of search engine results are more relevant and useful. Only after analyzing and evaluating the feedback of the human raters are the new search results then tested with a small, carefully selected number of Internet users. Only if this last round of surveys on the algorithm change prove the results more accurate and useful will the updated algorithm be integrated into Google Search for the use of the public. It’s an exhaustive process, but that’s how much Google wants its search engine to be the most relevant on the web.
Watch the video here:
Google’s made some very big changes in the past couple of weeks, and it’s affecting more sites than previously expected. In what way? Depending on how SEO has been done, some sites are dropping a few positions, some are dropping by multiple pages.
Google made their main site (Google.com) more secure a few months back by adding SSL security to all searches inside of personal accounts. Well now they’re stepping it up a level further and adding SSL search to all of their other sites.
If it’s a priority enough for Google, we may see this start happening across many more sites before too long.
Google announced yesterday that they’ll be changing how they track users across all of their different sites, including YouTube, Gmail, and the big G’s search engine. There is some concern from various places (including the Washington Post) that this is tracking that can’t be opted out of, but the truth is, you still have that option. It goes live March 1st, you can see all details here.
If you haven’t heard yet, some major, major sites are taking action to protest two major acts that are being run through congress. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) in the House and PIPA (Protect IP Act) in the Senate are both set up to change the internet in a huge way if they pass. Essentially – the freedom we enjoy to express ourselves and communicate freely online may be in jeopardy.
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