Today I was reading an interview from a couple of weeks ago with Scott Huffman and Amit Singhal of the Google Search Evaluation team, and I was fascinated by the details of the search algorithm updates. We’ve known before that Google makes hundreds of updates per year to the search results it serves, but this is some further information on the number of changes involved.
Big updates, as we know, get a lot of publicity, such as the recent Panda update (there is a great infographic from Level343.com showing them all that you can see here and there is another more detailed graphic from ElevateLocal on 2009 and 2010 updates) but the news that Google test out 6000 changes a year with 500 remaining permanent is more than a little interesting. Huffman said “At any given time, some percentage of our users is actually seeing experiments.” Which is why we do see so many blogs popping up reporting seeing some new feature, not all of which remain live.
I doubt that anyone at Google has a good handle any longer on what actually ranks a website. After all, they are not interested in what gets the sites to those positions, just that the sites that rank are good quality. As SEOs we know they use signals from backlinks, social signals, content, internal links, title tags, site speed and more. But the over-riding factor for the Googlers is that the site that gets listed is one that the searcher really wants to see.
Of course an SEO’s job is to spend our time improving the sites we work on to get more search engine traffic. Fortunately at Vertical Leap we are lucky enough to be (mainly) working on good sites that deserve to rank, so we can use content driven SEO techniques to help our clients get that extra traffic. This means that our clients’ sites have weathered the storm of recent updates, major and minor, really well. Here’s to the rest of 2011 going the same way.
But enough about us… this blog was supposed to be about Google’s algorithm updates. I’m glad to see that Google are still innovating, and as the original article said, they don’t see the search results as a finished article, just something to be refined, and refined again, seeking always to provide better results.
