Google: ‘We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year’

Marketers hoping to find the “silver bullets” to Google SEO success, look no further. According to the search giant, you’ll never find them – they don’t exist, and the company makes “hundreds of changes” to its search algorithms in a given year to ensure this. While Google won’t give any insights that will help publishers “game the system,” it recently offered explanations around recent search changes that SEO marketers might use to understand how they can provide sites that foster great user experiences and (subsequent) search visibility.

In an Inside Search blog post released this morning, Google outlined 10 algorithm changes it has issued in the past few weeks. These range from its freshness factor update (which Brafton reported impacts 35 percent of searches, favoring recent content) to a tweak that focuses on prioritizing “official” pages in rankings to promote authoritative results.

Some other updates detailed include the company’s move toward search snippets with page content instead of menu content. Google says, “This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets,” thereby giving searchers a clearer picture of the information contained in a result. Another algorithm tweak described is Google’s effort toward better page titles in search results, as the company strives to reduce the rankings of duplicate anchor text. Both of these changes point SEO marketers toward the bigger picture of focusing on their brands’ content marketing efforts to achieve search visibility.

Meanwhile, the company also explains that it has been working on multi-language algorithm updates, including cross-language result retrieval and autocomplete predictions in Russian. But before marketers become obsessed “thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users,” Google reminds readers that this is a sampling of countless algorithm updates. The company’s main goal is to provide relevant results to searchers.

Brafton has reported in the past that Google’s Matt Cutts says the main reason the search giant gives SEO advice is to “make the web a better experience.” The company has long suggested compelling content is the best way to improve users’ experiences – and industry specific, high-quality information may be marketers’ best bet to prepare their sites for the hundreds of algorithm updates yet to come.