Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison has published a number of tweets on new updates to search algorithms. Quite a number of website owners and SEOs have come across the rise and fall in search traffic over the last couple of weeks. This has caused speculation regarding what is exactly happening on Google’s search algorithms. Given below is a short summary of what Sullivan tweeted.
Since July 2015, Stone Temple has followed more than 1.4 M questions, keeping a track of the exact number which have results based on Knowledge Graph, featured snippets and improved snippets regularly in search results. Stone Temple used the same questions for all their studies.
All these questions were chosen since it seemed that they could be answered either through a featured snippet or a Knowledge Graph result. All the questions looked for a plain answer based on facts. There are a number of terms which you will have to understand before you go through the data. Some of them are mentioned below-
Google has created numerous third-party apps and services to enhance the online experience of users.
However, the success of these apps and services depends on the awareness of users that their data is safe and developers following established norms. Over the last few years, Google has consistently strengthened policies and controls to respond to day to day internal reviews, feedback from users and changing presumptions related to data privacy and security.
Google has altered the length of posts which are published by Google My Business to 1500 characters. Earlier, length of Google My Business posts was based on words rather than characters. Google needed at least 100 words per post and a maximum of 300 words. But now there is probably no minimum length for Google My Business posts.
Google seems to have extended title lengths in search result snippets as per a new report.
RankRanger’s tracking tools demonstrate that the average length of page titles in search results has increased on an average from 55 to 83 characters. Here is RankRanger’s tweet from last week-
Google’s Danny Sullivan affirmed that an algorithm update had taken this place last week. He stated-
“Our core algorithm is updated all the time. For major updates, we’ll continue to share about those on @searchliaison, as we have been. We haven’t had a major update of that nature, but we did have a smaller one this week.”
In a Google Webmaster Central Hangout last week, Google’s John Mueller suggested that website owners who have been affected by August core algorithm update should focus on content relevance. For dealing with such core algorithm updates, Mueller stated that it was not just about resolving specific issues. Instead, Google is more focused on the relevance of content to the queries of searchers.
On Tuesday Google announced that auctions conducted on search partner sites can utilize Smart Bidding rather than smart pricing once an advertiser has a conversion tracking set up.
Why is it important to you?
Google states that Smart Bidding can provide better performance since it includes contextual signals for optimizing bids for all auctions. Smart pricing, which has been utilized for manual bids for search partners, focuses on signals like keyboard lists or concepts which initiated the ad and the page type on which the ad was displayed.