Website owners and web developers pay close attention to the latest news about search engine optimization (SEO), especially when it comes out of the mouth of Google. The tech giant announced on November 14, 2011 that it has made ten recent changes to it algorithm over the past several weeks, ranging from the way it retrieves cross-language information on the web to canceling a certain signal that no longer has a major impact on ranking and SEO.
In a blog post on the announcement, Google Distinguished Engineer, Matt Cutts, reminds readers that although Google makes nearly 500 changes to its algorithm every year, the company is always searching for new ways to provide readers with a more intimate look at these changes. This post is just one part of the company’s effort to share the methodology and process behind Google’s “search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic changes.”
One of the ten changes to its algorithm includes offering snippets with more page content and less header/menu content. According to the blog post, this improvement allows Google to provide more relevant information in snippets, such as text from the actual page content than text that is part of a header or menu.
Your professional SEO company should have the tools and knowledge to incorporate the new changes into your SEO campaign. However, Cutts also reminds site owners that the ten changes are merely, “a sampling of the hundreds of changes we make to our search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine. We’ve decided to publish these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.”