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?