Google: April's Search Quality Highlights
Each month now Matt Cutts posts some information about the changes to Google's search algorithm. You can visit the blog here. This is a great resource and helps us in the SEO world determine if we need to make any changes to our SEO strategy. However, for those of you that are not experts, here is the important stuff and what it means to you:
1. "Improvements to local navigational searches." - This is an attempt to get better results for searches that include location information(city, zip, etc). This will affect business that rely on 'local' traffic from web searches to get local leads. Key factors to help determine if a site will be effected are: site navigation, 'location' pages, maps/address data.
2. "No freshness boost for low-quality content. " - Freshness of content has long been a factor in Google ranking algorithm. This update takes the quality of the content into account when evaluating new content. To comply with this, make sure all new content you add to any of your web properties is not only unique, make sure it is accurate and valuable as well.
3. "Keyword stuffing classifier improvement." - Keyword stuffing is using a key term many time within a document to try and manipulate the results. Say, including the term 'Chicago movers' on a page 50+ times in many different areas on the page; title tags, alt tags, main navigation, body, anchors, footer, etc. This has been a SEO topic for a long time, but Google is basically tightening the belt here. Actively looking for more keyword stuffing while diminishing the value of those key words in certain places. make sure your not using any one key word to often. If you us standard grammar, write quality content, and have a company like Spectrum to handle the website code, you'll be in good shape.
The 49 other updates in the article, while important, don't have a large impact on SEO as a broad topic, most will only effect a small set of results. Have any questions? Ask me on Twitter @SEOesq .