Google Releases Their Recent Search Quality Updates - Read On

[morestar]

So Barry Schwartz was kind enough to put together a list of new search quality updates Google released over the past month or so.

I've taken what I believe is most important to SEOs in that list and listed them below for you:

1. Sitelinks data refresh
2. Better indexing of profile pages
3. Improvements to results for navigational queries
4. High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements
5. More relevant image search results
6. Fresher image predictions in all languages (even Norwegian)
7. Tweaks to handling of anchor text
8. Fewer undesired synonyms
9. Better handling of queries with both navigational and local intent
10. Improvements to freshness
11. Improvements to processing for detection of site quality
12. Better interpretation and use of anchor text
13. Better local results and sources in Google News
14. Better synonym accuracy and performance
15. Less aggressive synonyms
16. Update to systems relying on geographic data
17. Improvements to name detection
18. Updates to personalization signals
19. Improvements to Image Search relevance
20. Remove deprecated signal from site relevance signals
21. More precise detection of old pages
22. Tweaks to language detection in autocomplete (even Norwegian)
23. Improvements in date detection for blog/forum pages
24. Expanded sitelinks on mobile
25. More accurate short answers
26. +1 button in search for more countries and domains

So that's a lot to take in and a lot to talk about. Here's the full list of the changes with explanations directory from Google's search quality highlights.

Are you pleased with these updates? I see the words "fresh" and "fresher" quite a bit, plus "detection of old pages" and the word synonyms in quite a few places. Is Google getting ready to release their semantic search features?

[knysna]

Hi.

That update was a month back, since then there's been a lot more. Without a doubt Semantic Search is been implemented, providing relevant search results. That was witnessed with the titles algorithm update whereby they now display relevant titles and description in the snippets, ignoring spam titles.

Another two algorithm updates that stick out like sore thumbs (enforced in the last 2 weeks). Those are. Unnatural inbound, outbound links and poor quality. In the last 2 weeks Google Webmaster Central has been flooded with sites been penalized for outbound links, excessive reciprocal links and unnatural inbound links from low quality forums and directories including spam and paid links. A lot of director's that follow there links have been de-indexed and the same applies to spam forums. It seems Google have indeed clamped down on spam link building methods. JohnMu gave a couple of examples of nonsensical forum posts that get duplicated in multiple forums on multiple posts (copy) purely for backlinking purposes.

Google have become much stricter in the way they value and penalizing links. They've still got a long road ahead, in my eyes its for the better. MFA sites and dumpster sites will no longer ruin supreme above quality sites. But as I said, the road is long.