Google is Changing Its Search Results

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 8. May 2011 - 17:00

In February 2011, Google got shamed by JC Penny who cheated to be ranked in the top 5 websites for common words like dress, jeans…. I wrote about in SEO: How To Cheat JC Penney Style

Fast forward May 2011, and last week, I was talking with a Google engineer. She gave me some “top secret” (actually not so top secret, since Google had already made the decision and is in the process of publicizing it.) I was asked, no non-disclosure agreement, to wait for at least a week before blabbing about it.

Google is undergoing its biggest change in the SEO since the introduction of using links instead of keywords for ranking websites, by “refining” its Panda algorithm. What's the Panda algorithm, you ask? It's how Google improves the rankings of high-quality websites and downgrade the others aka the not so high-quality websites.

The changes will be rolled out during the whole 2011 year. The changes will be incremental.

This leads to the question: “What's a high quality web page?”

  1. A web page that has “in-depth information”
  2. A web page that is unique and not just a variation of everybody else
  3. A web page without spelling or factual errors
  4. A web page that provides substantial value when compared to the other web pages in the search results
  5. A website that is an “authority” on the topic
  6. A web page type that people send link to others
  7. A web page that has “enough” details

How can Google measure these things? Very simple, Google has 10+ billion web pages in its index. Any web page can always be compared to another one. Any website can always be compared to another website. Plus, Google has the Google Bookmarks, Chrome users, and Gmail to know what people do with their web browsers. And that's on top of being tracked by Google Analytics.

If you do not fit the Google criteria, your website will drop down to the bottom of the index, so low that Google will not consider your website as relevant, therefore not to be shown in the results.

BTW, lately, I've noticed that Google now returns a maximum of only around 800 results per search.

  • Do the search for Sex and the City
  • About 337,000,000 results (0.15 seconds) (8-May-2011 5:55pm)
  • Go to the bottom of the page, click on the #10, this should means results from 901 to 1000 (100 results per page) and what do I get? Page 9 with only 833 results!
  • All the other 337 millions never to be seen!