As expected, Google has finally
released its big list of algorithm changes
for the month of April. It’s been an interesting month, to say the
least, with not only the Penguin update, but a couple of Panda updates
sprinkled in. There’s not a whole lot about either of those on this
list, however, which is really a testament to just how many things
Google is always doing to change its algorithm – signals (some of them,
at least) which could help or hurt you in other ways besides the hugely
publicized updates.
We’ll certainly be digging a bit more into some of these in
forthcoming articles. At a quick glance, I noticed a few more
freshness-related tweaks. Google has also expanded its index base by
15%, which is interesting. As far as Penguin goes, Google does mention:
“Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We
have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing.
This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.”
Keyword stuffing is against Google’s quality guidelines, and was one
of the specific things Matt Cutts mentioned in his announcement of the
update.
Interestingly, unlike previous lists, there is no mention of Panda
whatsoever on this list, though there were 2 known Panda data refreshes
during April.
Here’s the list in its entirety:
- Categorize paginated documents. [launch codename "Xirtam3", project codename "CategorizePaginatedDocuments"] Sometimes, search results can be dominated by documents from a paginated series. This change helps surface more diverse results in such cases.
- More language-relevant navigational results. [launch
codename "Raquel"] For navigational searches when the user types in a
web address, such as [bol.com], we generally try to rank that web
address at the top. However, this isn’t always the best answer. For
example, bol.com is a Dutch page, but many users are actually searching
in Portuguese and are looking for the Brazilian email service,
http://www.bol.uol.com.br/. This change takes into account language to
help return the most relevant navigational results.
- Country identification for webpages. [launch
codename "sudoku"] Location is an important signal we use to surface
content more relevant to a particular country. For a while we’ve had
systems designed to detect when a website, subdomain, or directory is
relevant to a set of countries. This change extends the granularity of
those systems to the page level for sites that host user generated
content, meaning that some pages on a particular site can be considered
relevant to France, while others might be considered relevant to Spain.
- Anchors bug fix. [launch codename "Organochloride", project codename "Anchors"] This change fixed a bug related to our handling of anchors.
- More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde",
project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many
results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a
more diverse set of domains.
- More local sites from organizations. [project
codename "ImpOrgMap2"] This change makes it more likely you’ll find an
organization website from your country (e.g. mexico.cnn.com for Mexico
rather than cnn.com).
- Improvements to local navigational searches. [launch codename "onebar-l"] For searches that include location terms, e.g. [dunston mint seattle] or [Vaso Azzurro Restaurant 94043],
we are more likely to rank the local navigational homepages in the top
position, even in cases where the navigational page does not mention the
location.
- Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch
codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search
is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re
searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.
- Disable salience in snippets. [launch codename
"DSS", project codename "Snippets"] This change updates our system for
generating snippets to keep it consistent with other infrastructure
improvements. It also simplifies and increases consistency in the
snippet generation process.
- More text from the beginning of the page in snippets. [launch
codename "solar", project codename "Snippets"] This change makes it
more likely we’ll show text from the beginning of a page in snippets
when that text is particularly relevant.
- Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch
codename "sep", project codename "Freshness"] We want to help you find
the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web
content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that
appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier,
leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.
- Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename
"citron", project codename "Freshness"] This change is a minor
improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better
identify fresh documents.
- No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch
codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We have modified a
classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content
identified as particularly low-quality.
- Tweak to trigger behavior for Instant Previews. This change narrows the trigger area for Instant Previews so
that you won’t see a preview until you hover and pause over the icon to
the right of each search result. In the past the feature would trigger
if you moused into a larger button area.
- Sunrise and sunset search feature internationalization. [project codename "sunrise-i18n"] We’ve internationalized the sunrise and sunset search
feature to 33 new languages, so now you can more easily plan an evening
jog before dusk or set your alarm clock to watch the sunrise with a
friend.
- Improvements to currency conversion search feature in Turkish. [launch
codename "kur", project codename "kur"] We launched improvements to the
currency conversion search feature in Turkish. Try searching for [dolar kuru], [euro ne kadar], or [avro kaç para].
- Improvements to news clustering for Serbian. [launch
codename "serbian-5"] For news results, we generally try to cluster
articles about the same story into groups. This change improves
clustering in Serbian by better grouping articles written in Cyrillic
and Latin. We also improved our use of “stemming” — a technique that
relies on the “stem” or root of a word.
- Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.
- News universal results serving improvements. [launch
codename "inhale"] This change streamlines the serving of news results
on Google by shifting to a more unified system architecture.
- UI improvements for breaking news topics. [launch
codename "Smoothie", project codename "Smoothie"] We’ve improved the
user interface for news results when you’re searching for a breaking
news topic. You’ll often see a large image thumbnail alongside two fresh
news results.
- More comprehensive predictions for local queries. [project
codename "Autocomplete"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of
autocomplete predictions by expanding coverage for long-tail U.S. local
search queries such as addresses or small businesses.
- Improvements to triggering of public data search feature. [launch codename "Plunge_Local", project codename "DIVE"] This launch improves triggering for the public data search feature, broadening the range of queries that will return helpful population and unemployment data.
- Adding Japanese and Korean to error page classifier. [launch
codename "maniac4jars", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals
designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages
that return valid text to a browser, but the text only contains error
messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be
looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them.
This change extends a particular classifier to Japanese and Korean.
- More efficient generation of alternative titles. [launch
codename "HalfMarathon"] We use a variety of signals to generate titles
in search results. This change makes the process more efficient, saving
tremendous CPU resources without degrading quality.
- More concise and/or informative titles. [launch
codename "kebmo"] We look at a number of factors when deciding what to
show for the title of a search result. This change means you’ll find
more informative titles and/or more concise titles with the same
information.
- Fewer bad spell corrections internationally. [launch
codename "Potage", project codename "Spelling"] When you search for
[mango tea], we don’t want to show spelling predictions like “Did you
mean ‘mint tea’?” We have algorithms designed to prevent these “bad
spell corrections” and this change internationalizes one of those
algorithms.
- More spelling corrections globally and in more languages. [launch
codename "pita", project codename "Autocomplete"] Sometimes
autocomplete will correct your spelling before you’ve finished typing.
We’ve been offering advanced spelling corrections in English, and
recently we extended the comprehensiveness of this feature to cover more
than 60 languages.
- More spell corrections for long queries. [launch
codename "caterpillar_new", project codename "Spelling"] We rolled out a
change making it more likely that your query will get a spell
correction even if it’s longer than ten terms. You can watch uncut footage of when we decided to launch this from our past blog post.
- More comprehensive triggering of “showing results for” goes international. [launch
codename "ifprdym", project codename "Spelling"] In some cases when
you’ve misspelled a search, say [pnumatic], the results you find will
actually be results for the corrected query, “pneumatic.” In the past,
we haven’t always provided the explicit user interface to say, “Showing
results for pneumatic” and the option to “Search instead for pnumatic.”
We recently started showing the explicit “Showing results for” interface
more often in these cases in English, and now we’re expanding that to
new languages.
- “Did you mean” suppression goes international. [launch
codename "idymsup", project codename "Spelling"] Sometimes the “Did you
mean?” spelling feature predicts spelling corrections that are
accurate, but wouldn’t actually be helpful if clicked. For example, the
results for the predicted correction of your search may be nearly
identical to the results for your original search. In these cases,
inviting you to refine your search isn’t helpful. This change first
checks a spell prediction to see if it’s useful before presenting it to
the user. This algorithm was already rolled out in English, but now
we’ve expanded to new languages.
- Spelling model refresh and quality improvements. We’ve refreshed spelling models and launched quality improvements in 27 languages.
- Fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results. [launch
codename "Queens5", project codename "Autocomplete"] We’ve rolled out a
change designed to show fewer autocomplete predictions leading to
low-quality results.
- Improvements to SafeSearch for videos and images. [project
codename "SafeSearch"] We’ve made improvements to our SafeSearch
signals in videos and images mode, making it less likely you’ll see
adult content when you aren’t looking for it.
- Improved SafeSearch models. [launch codename
"Squeezie", project codename "SafeSearch"] This change improves our
classifier used to categorize pages for SafeSearch in 40+ languages.
- Improvements to SafeSearch signals in Russian. [project
codename "SafeSearch"] This change makes it less likely that you’ll see
adult content in Russian when you aren’t looking for it.
- Increase base index size by 15%. [project codename
"Indexing"] The base search index is our main index for serving search
results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this
index. This change increases the number of documents served by that
index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different
indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.
- New index tier. [launch codename "cantina", project
codename "Indexing"] We keep our index in “tiers” where different
documents are indexed at different rates depending on how relevant they
are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional
indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.
- Backend improvements in serving. [launch codename "Hedges", project codename "Benson"] We’ve
rolled out some improvements to our serving systems making them less
computationally expensive and massively simplifying code.
- “Sub-sitelinks” in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename "thanksgiving"] This improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet.
- Better ranking of expanded sitelinks. [project
codename "Megasitelinks"] This change improves the ranking of
megasitelinks by providing a minimum score for the sitelink based on a
score for the same URL used in general ranking.
- Sitelinks data refresh. [launch codename
"Saralee-76"] Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search
results and link deeper into the site) are generated in part by an
offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine
the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data
through our offline process. These updates happen frequently (on the
order of weeks).

Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks. [project codename "Megasitelinks"] We’ve adopted a new technique to reduce duplication in the snippets of expanded sitelinks.
- Movie showtimes search feature for mobile in China, Korea and Japan. We’ve expanded our movie showtimes feature for mobile to China, Korea and Japan.
- No freshness boost for low quality sites. [launch
codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve modified a
classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude sites identified
as particularly low-quality.
- MLB search feature. [launch codename "BallFour",
project codename "Live Results"] As the MLB season began, we rolled out a
new MLB search feature. Try searching for [sf giants score] or [mlb scores].
- Spanish football (La Liga) search feature. This feature provides scores and information about teams playing in La Liga. Try searching for [barcelona fc] or [la liga].
- Formula 1 racing search feature. [launch codename
"CheckeredFlag"] This month we introduced a new search feature to help
you find Formula 1 leaderboards and results. Try searching [formula 1] or [mark webber].
- Tweaks to NHL search feature. We’ve improved the NHL search feature so it’s more likely to appear when relevant. Try searching for [nhl scores] or [capitals score].
- Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.
- More authoritative results. We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.
- Better HTML5 resource caching for mobile. We’ve improved caching of different components of the search results page, dramatically reducing latency in a number of cases.
About Author :
Towab Muhammad Yusuf
Marketing Executive
Outsoutce Expert Ltd