Evolution of the Google's Algorithm in 2010

Chronic of changes to the algorithm and result pages

Evolutions rated or announced of the algorithm of Google and the content of results pages, the SERPs. Google perfoms 400 changes in the algorithm during the year, some are more visible and lead to big changes in traffic for some sites.

Definitions at top

Many surfers use the search engine for the definition of a term. Google has so created a special section that appears at the top of the result page and provides definitions from online dictionaries Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Answers.com, The Free Dictionary.
The snippets include pronunciation and grammatical information.
For now only on the English engine.
Example: Search for "persistent".
Announcement.
July 25, 2010.

Google image modernized

The results pages of the image section enlarge images in a box when you move the mouse over the images and display them in a window with the page that contains them in a grayed background, on the principle of the lightbox.
July 21, 2010.

Caffeine builds a fresher index

Google announced June 8 that the new indexing engine, Caffeine is finalized. It offers a new index with 50% fresher results.
Its operation differs from the previous system which was updating as a whole, by waves. Caffeine updates the index incrementally. New pages can be added and made available for search as soon as they are discovered.
The new architecture allows also to associate a page to several countries.
Caffeine vs. previous system.
June 8, 2010.

MayDay: The long tail evolves

This was confirmed by Matt Cutts at the Google I/O in May, the radical evolution in the month of April comes from the change in the algorithm, to promote quality content on the long trail.

This is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.

Remind that the long tail is the set of queries with multiple keywords, each being rare, but which together form the bulk of traffic to a site.

Webmasters gave the evolution the name of MayDay. I have previously called Black Tuesday. This has been disastrous for some sites well established but having not enough content in deep pages. This happened in late April and early May depending on the sites, even though other sites have experienced a loss of traffic for other reasons.
This has boosted traffic on scriptol.com.
Google confirms Mayday impact. By Vanessa Fox that says also Caffeine is not live yet.
Matt Cutts explains Mayday in a video. It is not related to Caffeine and is definitive. Webmasters must add content to their page to retrieve the traffic lost.
May 27, 2010.

Short answers

From the Squared engine as the previous technology, short answer is trying to directly answer a query that looks like a question.
For example if one asks the "date of birth x", the engine will give a direct answer, date of birth of the person, then follows a list of pages containing information related to the birth date of x.
May 12, 2010.

Something different

In certain queries may appear in the sidebar to search by category, a new section: "Something different" and a list of query below.
In the case of a search on an actress, it will be a list of other actresses.
This has been developed for the Google's alternative engine , Squared and integrated to the standard search engine.
May 12, 2010.

Black Tuesday: Ranking changes on the long tail

The long tail is the set of pages on a site that make few visit each but all together have a large traffic.
Queries on multiple keywords, make the long tail.
Many sites have seen a change in traffic of these pages since April 27. Some have lost up to 90% of their traffic. They attributed this change to Caffeine, the new infrastructure of Google indexes more pages and creates more competition, but it has been confirmed later by Google it is a change in the algorithm (see May 27).
April 27, 2010.

Similar Sites

For a while the search engine has a feature sites offering similar content. The "similar" link to a similar page near a result in addition to "cached" to the cached version.
This function becomes more important. We can now possibly find a block of sites similar to results at the bottom of results page.
April 28, 2010.

Rich snippets go international

Including rich snippets for recipes.
April 26, 2010.

Real time improved

MySpace, Facebook, Buzz, Twitter are integrated in search results. When, after viewing the results page you ask to show more options and you clicks on "Update", you can see activities on social networks about the query, for a given period.
Replay accross Twitter.
April 14, 2010.

Snippets for recipes

The recipes are displayed differently in results, provided that their page has an internal format that is suitable.
Google supports 5 formats including RDF and microdata.
Introducing rich recipe snippets.
April 13, 2010.

Site speed

is officially a ranking factor

This was announced a few months ago, it became reality: a site that is too slow is now downgraded in SERPs or at least has a chance to be in conjunction with other factors.

"Today we're Including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed."

It is possible to know if your site is too slow from Google Webmaster Tools (Labs -> Site performance).
Using site speed in web search ranking.
April 9, 2010.

Microdata

Microdata as specified in HTML 5 are now included in the description of the results if they are defined in the page.
They adds social data about the site.

Microdata in snippets.
March 12, 2010.

Public data in search results

The search engine now provides access to public statistics and displays graphs directly instead of links, like Wolfram Alpha.
To do this, you type in the search bar keywords like "unemployment rate " with the name of a country or region and the image of a graph is displayed under a link to click.
You can check with "unemployement rate usa" that things are not going very well in USA.
This service works only for USA in March 2010.

More information and video.
March 9, 2010.

Assigning stars to results

Google abandons the SearchWiki service which imitated the principles of Wikia and allowed users to annotate, vote for or delete pages in results. (Wikia dropped this service for a while).
But it retains a feature that is extended to the general search engine: the user can assign a star to a link in results. When he returned on the search engine, links that received a star appear at top of the page ion a special list.
This rating is personal, it does not change the results for other users.

More details.
February 4, 2010.

Local Search option

A new option "Nearby" appears in the panel of specialized search. It restricts searches to regions.
The advantage is that the search will no longer depend precisely on keywords but on a region, without the need to found all the different terms used to designate towns and various places...

Refine your search by location.
February 26, 2010.

Search engine and answers

To add the feature of the Wolfram Alpha engine, Google now wants to offer real answers to questions from webmasters. For this it offers a richer snippet (description under the link in results) and includes the response in bold.
Clearly, if we ask how many people are living in China, the snippet should contain the answer. What we can easily check ...

The difference with Wolfram is that the user can click on the link for more details. In addition, the snippet has a limited size, while Wolfram can provide an answer on a full page ... that the Web site linked by Google can also do. Webmasters may have to change their writing habits to adapt to that.
For example, to use Ajax to give to his visitors an unique information. If the information is not unique, they will find it in snippets of other sites and it is not recommended.

Explanation: Answer highlighting.
January 2010.

The speed of a site will be a ranking factor in 2010

This is what Matt Cutts has just said in an interview.

"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast.
It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much.
I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast, how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?"

This should favor static website with no SQL. See our article, How to build a CMS without database.