Yesterday Google posted a blog post outlining 53 search quality changes rolled out in April, the month of the dreadful Penguin algorithm update.
You can view
Google's original post here.
Some Key Highlights from the Blog Post | Anchors bug fix. [launch codename "Organochloride", project codename "Anchors"] This change fixed a bug related to our handling of anchors.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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A lot of talk about on-site variables being analyzed in this post, including keyword stuffing, low-quality content analysis, freshness indicators, etc.
Also, another interesting topic is the fact that they regularly are discussing anchor text, in this regard fixing a bug that they had.
What are some of your takeaways from Google's search quality highlights for April? 