As mentioned last month Google is now publishing search quality improvements each month. In January as well as the Search Plus Your World Google we have already discussed Google has made another interesting change.
As part of Google’s commitment to provide the best search results they have released a new Page Layout Algorithm Improvement. This is an improvement that Google has made directly as a result of complaints from searches.
Many searchers have complained that when they visit a website they have to scroll down to find the content that they are looking for; normally this involves scrolling past ads on the page. So Google has now made an algorithm change to help websites that have useful content above-the-fold to rank better than other websites where the content is below-the-fold.
Many websites that do not have ads above-the-fold but offer no or little content above-the-fold may get caught in the cross-fire. Although this sounds very worrying Google have stated that this algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally.
Here are some other changes Google have published on the Google Insider Blog:
- Fresher results;
- Faster autocomplete;
- Autocomplete spelling corrections;
- Better spelling full-page replacement;
- Better spelling corrections for rare queries;
- Improve detection of recurrent event pages;
- High-quality sites algorithm improvements;
- Cross-language refinements;
- English on Google Saudi Arabia;
- Improved scrolling for Image Search;
- Improved image search quality;
- More relevant related searches;
- Blending of news results;
- Automatically disable Google Instant based on computer speed.
For more information on these updates visit the Google Insider Blog