Thank you Matt Cutts/Google for providing some of the transparency that our search engine marketing agency seeks to help us improve our client’s web page/ website visibility from search engine query results. Below are 10 of the important google algorithm changes from the last quarter of 2011.

10 Google Algorithm Changes 2011 Q4

1) Cross-Language Information Retrieval

This now means translated English pages are provided by Google where limited web content is available in that native language search query.

Specifically for these languages:

Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.

2) Snippets with MORE Page Content & LESS Header/Menu Content

This change helps Google choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As they improve their understanding of web page structure, Google is now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.

3) Better Page Titles in Search Results by De-duplicating Boilerplate Anchors

Google looks at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. They found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so they are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.

4) Length-based Autocomplete Predictions in Russian

This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. They will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already Google’s practice in English.

5) Extending Application Rich Snippets

The “Big G” recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.

6) Retiring a Signal in Image Search

As the web evolves, Google often revisits signals that were launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, they decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.

7) Fresher, More Recent Results

As they announced several weeks ago, Google made a significant improvement to how they rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query. This reinforces the importance for website owners to maintain the freshness of their site with new, updated content.

Refining Official Page Detection

They try hard to give users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, they adjusted how Google attempts to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in the rankings.

9) Improvements to Date-Restricted Queries

New change on how they handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.

10) Prediction Fix for IME Queries

This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

If you’re a site owner, before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes made to the search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine.

Google published these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming.

For those of us at CarbonFoot Interactive that work in digital marketing / search engine marketing every day, this stuff is incredibly exciting. If you’d like to see more posts like this, please comment and let us know.

To improve overall PPC campaign efficiency, a match type analysis is extremely important and one which has helped us drive further reductions in Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and improved conversion rates. It reveals whether CPC charges are higher than they need to be.

Exact, Phrase & Broad Match

A keyword using exact match for example, will generally have a lower CPC than that same keyword using broad or phrase match – assuming the same bid across all match types. As part of the determining factors for Quality Score, what is important is the relationship between the landing page ad copy, the ad copy associated with that term and the exact match form of the keyword. To optimize the paid search advertising account structure, we strive to generate the majority of clicks from exact match. The logic being that a click for the same keyword using exact match will be less expensive than broad or phrase match.

This strategy must be balanced however with the fact that broad and phrase match types have the special attributes of matching relevant queries with keywords being bid on so there is no denying that the majority of impressions in an optimized account structure will come from phrase and broad match types while the majority of clicks should come from exact match. The expectation therefore, is that click-through rates will be higher for exact match. However, in an Adwords search query report, it is broad and phrase match that provide the keyword expansion opportunities.

CarbonFoot Interactive srategy for client accounts is to comb through the campaigns on a regular basis to ensure all keywords that live in broad or phrase match types are live or at least test in exact match. In addition, we try keeping broad and phrase match live on select terms that drive effective clicks and conversions.

Our ultimate goal with optimization of match types is to minimize cost of running your campaigns WITHOUT reducing click volume. The additional benefits are a reduction in CPC and improvements to CTR. Often times this is accompanied by an improvement in Quality score for the terms, adgroups and campaigns that have had exact match activations.