Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
It seems Google releases a new ranking algorithm update every week. Last week, Google’s Matt Cutts announced there is another algorithm update targeting web spam. What does this mean for your rankings and how must you react?
Google doesn’t like web spam
“In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.
We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.
While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.”
Things that Google considers spam
Google’s announcement shows two examples. The first example is a page that is stuffed with hundreds of keywords in a comma separated list.
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Friday, March 23rd, 2012
As a company, Google does a lot of things. They’re in the news almost weekly with something new or interesting their Labs or other departments are working on. Their core business, search, however, is only changing slowly, steadily, with few ‘big news’ changes hitting it. When relatively big changes do come, they become topics of discussion in the press and online for months as those who make a living courting Google’s search algorithms struggle to figure out what the changes mean to their business.
Now, the search giant has once again announced that major changes to its way of finding and displaying data about websites are coming. Those changes are going to make a big different to a certain segment of search marketers – those who aim for question answering, specifically.
Answering Questions
You may recall a new search engine poised to change the world that debuted in 2009. WolframAlpha.com was touted heavily by various members of the media as a ‘Google killer’ despite its founder’s statements to the contrary. What made Alpha so great? It answers questions. Literally.
If you’ve been on the Web for a few years, you probably remember Ask Jeeves. This was also a search engine that, in a rudimentary way, attempted to answer plain English questions directly. It was marginally successful in its time, though technology was not quite ready for that kind of human:machine interaction yet. Wolfram has been able to do it for the most part, though it may take a little more time for semantic parsing to become everyday.
The tech behind taking human language terms and using them to find information in context is called ‘semantic search.’ Asking ‘Do you have ice cream’ versus ‘How is ice cream made’ contains roughly the same keywords (‘ice cream’ being prevalent), but has vastly different response expectations from the person asking. A semantic search parser might pull the keys ‘you,’ ‘have,’ and ‘ice cream’ to find a list of responses that match the intent of the user by searching through its ‘ice cream’ database and pulling only those items that match a ‘find’ or ‘buy’ or ‘get’ type search.
As the Internet proliferates and more and more untrained people use it, the ability to interact with those who do not make their living in computer-related fields and who instead are only casual users of the Web, is extremely important. While Google has gotten really good at finding the answers (or at least links to them) that people want, the chief complaint amongst its users is that it too often comes up with irrelevant items.
That, of course, is annoying to Google, who wants to be always on top and whose very survival requires that it be. So some changes are coming to Google’s search presentation and internal semantic tech.
The Changes
These changes are, of course, only being vaguely mentioned by the company. Rarely does the search giant give away anything until the day of its launch. But it’s obvious from statements and releases that what they’re planning is to add another search results area to user’s screens whenever Google thinks they’re asking a direct question. This area will contain direct answers to the assumed question.
To do this, Google has been quietly amassing a huge database of entities – people, places, and things – for the past two years. The idea seems to be that they’ll tie these things together so that queries into, say, ‘Who made Google?’ will produce answers like ‘Larry Page and Sergey Brin.’
Amit Singhai, a top executive at Google, seems to be the man behind this plan. Talking to the Wall Street Journal recently, he gave a rough idea of the plan, which is being implemented in a way that will not likely affect 99% of Web users or websites out there.
But it will affect some.
Who Will Probably Lose
The changes are very obviously going to affect a small niche search market in which webmasters and SEO marketers target specific questions with answers. Right now, there is a subculture of SEO marketers who take relatively common questions like ‘Who invented the Wankel Rotary Engine?’ and create websites targeted entirely on that term with titles that are the answer.
It’s an interesting little niche and it can potentially drive huge amounts of traffic. Those sites may see themselves pushed down in the results. Honestly, however, this niche has already been seeing a lot of downplay anyway, thanks to popular question answering sites like Wikipedia getting ranked at the top of Google for most common questions.
The good news? Most of us will gain because it will make finding information much easier and it won’t change our results otherwise – it just decides to put direct answers at the very top.
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