Google Panda Update Latest Results, What’s It Mean For SERP’s, Have You Lost Google Results Overnight?

Many website owners and web masters are freaking out over the latest Google Panda updates, with their long term Google results disappearing almost overnight. Why is this happening? Google have applied 40 algorithm updates and the chance are you site has been affected by one or more of these changes.  Can this be fixed? Yes Google will change their algorithm to affect your search engine results for many reasons. These reasons might include delivery of better search results for Google users or maybe they want to filter your results so that they can push you towards a PPC campaign. It is no mystery that Google is under a massive attack from many website owners and web masters about these latest updates.

LOST YOUR GOOGLE RESULTS? CONTACT US NOW ON 1300 663 664 or int +617 5554 8444

or read on below and deal with the 40 latest Google updates on your own, don’t suffer poor Google search results any longer, Take action now.

• More coverage for related searches. [launched as codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launched as codename “Snippy”, project codename “Mega site links”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. Google were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded site links, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant site links.

• Less duplication in expanded site links. [launched as codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Mega site links”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded site links.Now Google generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.

• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. Google have adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.

• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [Project codename, “Suggest”] Google have improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant results based queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in] performed on the US version of YouTube, Google might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Australian version of YouTube, Google might predict [lady gaga in Australia].

• More accurate detection of official pages. [launched as codename “WRE”] Google have made an adjustment to how they detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer appear.

• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launched as codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.

• Expand the size of Google’s images index in Universal Search. [launched as codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] Google have launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which they show images in a Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.

• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] Google have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms they use to implement these policies.

• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This Google change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launched as codename “Michandro”, project codename “SafeSearch”] This Google change improves the signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.

• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This Google improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.

• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launched as codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This Google change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.

• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launched as codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launched as codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.

• Fresher images. [launched as codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now Google can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.

• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] Google continue to iterate in their efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month they have made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesignwith a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.

• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launched as codename “PNI”, project codename “Soft404”] Google 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 contain 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 Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.

• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launched as codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for the Google Flight Search Feature with users getting more accurate flight results.

• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launched as codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals Google look at is to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model Google use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.

• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets that help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).

• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch has improved spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.

• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] Google have applied new signals which help them surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to your search, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, Google have launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History. The overview of this can be split as it may interfere with getting newer fresher results. Consider the web history search option before applying it.

• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. Google have also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.

• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launched as codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

• Improvements to English spell correction. [launched as codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.

• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launched as codename “final destination”] Google fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when their testing indicates they’d be very useful.

• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] Google use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so they can rely on signals we can compute in real time, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in Google’s systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.

• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launched as codename “hava”] Google have tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that Google are able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.

• Visual refresh to account settings page. Google have completed a visual refresh of the account settings page making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.

• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web. Whilst many website owners and web masters are still in damage control over the latest Panda Update the fact is it is now embedded as part of Google search results although Google is under an attack by many saying that the latest Panda update serves best for big business and is killing the smaller website operator or affiliate owners.

The fact of the matter is Google is well and truly functioning and they are not going to loosen up their latest algorithm changes for me, you or anyone else. So what can you do? Contact the SEO, Internet Marketing team at Website Promotion on 1300 663 664 or int +61 7 5554 8444 to discuss Panda updates for your website. We have already worked out what is happening and how to counter this to get you back to the front page of Google fast.

• Link evaluation. Google often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. Google have changed the way in which Google evaluate links; in particular, Google are turning off a method of link analysis that they have used for several years. Google often rearchitect or turn off parts of their scoring in order to keep their system maintainable, clean and understandable.

• SafeSearch update. Google have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries. This is another attack of affiliate related websites. One might ask why do Google allow PPC for adult content but do not allow adsense for adult content?

• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, Google found and fixed some weaknesses in their spam protections.

•  Improved local results. Google have launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now Google are better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

“DON’T DELAY, FAILING TO ACT ON GOOGLE UPDATES WILL COST YOU MONEY”   

“LOST YOUR GOOGLE RESULTS? CONTACT US NOW ON 1300 663 664 or int +617 5554 8444”