Google's "Search Quality" Highlights for April 2012

[SuperLinks]

Google just posted about their Search Quality highlights for April 2012. As we all know, Google Penguin, and several other visible changes were rolled out in the month of April. You can view Google's original post here.

Here are some of the key highlights I noticed:

Anchors bug fix. [launch codename "Organochloride", project codename "Anchors"] This change fixed a bug related to our handling of anchors.

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.

Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you?re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.

Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch codename "sep", project codename "Freshness"] We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.

Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename "citron", project codename "Freshness"] This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.

No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch codename ?NoRot?, project codename ?Freshness?] We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.

More comprehensive predictions for local queries. [project codename "Autocomplete"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of autocomplete predictions by expanding coverage for long-tail U.S. local search queries such as addresses or small businesses.

New index tier. [launch codename "cantina", project codename "Indexing"] We keep our index in ?tiers? where different documents are indexed at different rates depending on how relevant they are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.

A lot of talk about on-site variables being analyzed in this post, including keyword stuffing, low-quality content analysis, freshness indicators, etc.

Also, another interesting topic is the fact that they regularly are discussing anchor text, in this regard fixing a bug that they had.

What are some of your takeaways from Google's search quality highlights for April?

 

[crazedspyker]

One thing I've noticed, I'm not sure if anyone else has.

If you have a site with h1 + title "Blue widgets" and h2 "red widgets",

If your site ranks for "blue widgets" and "red widgets", when you search for "blue widgets", the title in the serp will be "Blue Widgets", but if you search "red widgets", google will modify your title to "Red Widgets - Site name" (I noticed this for my web 2.0 properties).

I'm not sure if this affects search quality relating to title tags. Maybe google is placing less emphasis on user generated titles now? Too soon to tell.

EDIT: Looks like its covered in this post:

More efficient generation of alternative titles. [launch codename "HalfMarathon"] We use a variety of signals to generate titles in search results. This change makes the process more efficient, saving tremendous CPU resources without degrading quality.

More concise and/or informative titles. [launch codename "kebmo"] We look at a number of factors when deciding what to show for the title of a search result. This change means you'll find more informative titles and/or more concise titles with the same information.

 

[ComputerEngineer]

One thing I've noticed, I'm not sure if anyone else has.

If you have a site with h1 + title "Blue widgets" and h2 "red widgets",

If your site ranks for "blue widgets" and "red widgets", when you search for "blue widgets", the title in the serp will be "Blue Widgets", but if you search "red widgets", google will modify your title to "Red Widgets - Site name" (I noticed this for my web 2.0 properties).

I'm not sure if this affects search quality relating to title tags. Maybe google is placing less emphasis on user generated titles now? Too soon to tell.

EDIT: Looks like its covered in this post:

Pretty good catch

 

[bobgoe]

Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch codename "sep", project codename "Freshness"] We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.

So what about a micro neiche site with content that is not upated regularly for eg:- if you have a site named "garminnuvi255.c0m " that site is specifially for garmin nuvi 255 and how in the world that we can provide fresh content if the product itself is not updating ( i mean the same product and not the new version ) and a person who is searching for garmin nuvie 255 need that info and not garmin latest version .