The coming months will witness a lot of activity from Google directed at updating and tweaking their existing search algorithms. These changes will have an impact on webmasters in particular and the search engine optimization business in general.
Google’s web spam team has been working on the next version of the Penguin update and the Panda update. The search algorithm changes are also intended at tackling link spam, advertorials, and more.
There are a number of possibilities emerging from Google’s Matt Cutts’ seven-minute Webmaster Help video. Here’s an overview of what the SEO community should expect:
Penguin Update
According to Cutts, Google is “relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin.” This algorithm update is predicted to be more comprehensive than its previous version, and is aimed at tackling black hat web spam. Needless to say, it will have an impact that’s stronger than the previous update.
Rolling Panda Updates
The Panda update will, in probability, no longer be an anticipated and speculated ‘announcement’ from Google. It will instead be a ‘rolling update’ which means that there will be a series of continuous updates.
It might come as somewhat of a respite to webmasters when Cutts says, “We’ve also been looking at Panda, and seeing if we can find some additional signals (and we think we’ve got some) to help refine things for the sites that are kind of in the border zone – in the gray area a little bit. And so if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality, then that will help sites that have previously been affected (to some degree) by Panda.”
Benefits to Regular Webmasters
Cutts makes it clear that authoritative content on any topic will earn more value. To this end, Cutts is quoted as saying, “We have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters. We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is more of an authority on a specific space. You know, it could be medical. It could be travel. Whatever. And try to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site, according to the algorithms, we think might be a little more appropriate for users.”
Advertorials
Another area Google is keeping a close watch on is advertorials. Their logic is: “There’s nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising, but they should not flow PageRank, and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure, so that users realize that something is paid – not organic or editorial,” according to Cutts.
He was also quoted as saying that advertorials violating Google’s quality guidelines will come under the scanner. “We’ve also been looking at advertorials … We’ve seen a few sites in the U.S. and around the world that take money and do link to websites, and pass PageRank, so we’ll be looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as advertorials that violate our quality guidelines.”
Minimizing Link Spam
While Cutts confirms that Google is working towards link spam of different kinds, he refuses to reveal the strategy behind it. Says Cutts, “We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers … We’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis”
Domain Clustering in Focus
Google has taken cognizance of complaints pertaining to ‘domain clustering’, meaning that a search for some keywords might throw up results from the same domain on the result pages.
Google is acting on the feedback, says Cutts. “We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from people about – if I go down three pages deep, I’ll see a cluster of several results all from one domain, and we’ve actually made things better in terms of – you would be less likely to see that on the first page, but more likely to see that on the following pages. And we’re looking a change, which might deploy, which would basically say that once you’ve seen a cluster of results from one site, then you’d be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google search results.”
In the backdrop of these updates, it would be premature to conclude if these changes are for the better or for the worse. A clear picture will emerge with more concrete announcements from Google in the future.