If you run a website or otherwise operate online, then keeping a watchful eye on Google is highly advisable. After all, Google is the most popular search engine of all with a massive global market share of around 80%. For that reason alone it has the ability to ensure that your website is either a big success, or conversely that it is not seen by anyone.

If Google makes a change to its algorithms or policies and you should happen to miss that this happened, then you might find your site suddenly penalized and your traffic halved or worse.

And Google does make changes to the way it operates – a lot actually. Furthermore, this is truer now than it has ever been before and of those changes made recently there are several that have already had a big impact on the rankings of sites. Here we will look at just some of the many big changes that have happened in the last year or so.

Google Panda

This is the big one that had a lot of webmasters quaking in their boots when it was first announced and the shockwaves of the original and ongoing Panda updates are still being felt across the web. Here Google basically dialled down its preference for quantity and dialled up its preference for quality. The value of links from social networks went up, while content farms like eZineArticles were hit in a big way and duplicate content became more frowned upon than ever before.

Google Plus Your World

This recent idea was somewhat controversial when first announced, but has had little impact for most of us in reality. The idea is that Google integrated its Google Plus offering with search so that if you searched for ‘Croatia’ and your friend on Google Plus happened to have a whole lot of pictures from their recent holiday there, then you would see those pictures in your results.

While the impact of Google Plus Your World hasn’t yet been felt by everyone, it does suggest a move by Google into a much more socially oriented territory – and might increase the importance of social media marketing for businesses.

Ad Limit

After encouraging the Google Adsense publishers to place as many adverts on their site as humanly possible, Google made a sudden turnaround that would now penalize anyone for adding more than two adverts above the ‘fold’ of their pages (the visible area of the page without scrolling). If your site loads up to present users with more ads than content, then this is something you might want to reconsider now.

Symbols

Google recently announced that it would be including symbols more effectively in its search so things like ‘-‘, ‘+’, ‘%’, ‘>’ etc., would all be recognized more as part of the search. Handy for people searching for code online, and also for funky brands that like to incorporate Ascii into their title.

Local Results

If you search for a service such as ‘haircuts’ then the first page will not only be populated by ads and organic results, but also by listings for local businesses.

Semantic Search

Semantic search is the term used by Google for an ongoing attempt to make Google almost “AI-like” in its approach to search. Already users might have noticed Google substituting words for suggested synonyms, and in the future we are told to expect to see Google directly answering questions based on its huge bank of information.

 

Jeet is server admin at directoryroll.com and an expert in and VPS management. An avid blogger, when not busy at work he likes to share tips about managing and virtual servers.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,