Two days ago Google released some exciting new search add-ons and changes in their algorithm. The search add-ons are explained nicely in the below video, so you can watch the video in your own time to find out more information. Today though, I want to focus on the algorithm update as I feel it’s much more important from a SEO stand point.

Google is incorporating user reviews and ratings into google.com’s search results, it cannot be seen in google.co.za just yet but I have no doubt it’s on its way. There are two sides to the coin here.

1) If analysing it as a single algorithm, it is not the brightest idea the Google engineers have come up with because it can be easily manipulated by companies. There are rumours going around the SEO circles that companies are even paying people to write good reviews about their products and give them good ratings as well. So the reviews may not always be trusted.

2) On the flip side it is Google embracing Web2.0 technology and not relying anymore on their incoming link algorithm. This move by Google also strengthens my belief that Google’s, Eric Schmidt must be taken seriously when he hints they are looking at introducing branding in their algorithm. One must look at this new algorithm as one small piece of Google’s massive puzzle.

So lets try and make these two side of the coins gel and become one, helping us understand why Google released such an algorithm…

There is no doubt that Google will still use their incoming link and on-site optimisation algorithms (together with their analytical analysis of traffic within a website plus the amount of rss subscribers a website has). With this new addition to their algorithms they now have a more refined algorithm. I’m convinced (I have no proof yet) that they will only insert reviews and ratings in their search results with websites that already have a good ranking score with their other algorithms. I very much doubt that they will insert every rating and review from every e-commerce/blog website indexed in the world wide web…

The next two questions we must be asking regarding Web2.0 algorithms are:

1) How soon will Google be able to tap into Twitter profiles and start indexing tweets, and placing an authorative ranking on Twitter profiles?

As you can see in the below image Google have begun a primitive index on Twitter updates. Will this evolve into something more spectacular?

2) Will Google be able to index Facebook pages and use the size of their fan base as part of their algorithm?

I question this theory in my previous post.

Google is adding two improvements to their search algorithm as of 24 March 2009. The first helping understand associations and concepts relating to your search and the second is longer search result descriptions (snippets).

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Refined searches

Google has now a better understanding of what we are searching for, it can refine a long tail (long keyphrase) search and understand word association. SO as you can see in the image below (click to make image larger), if I search for “scientific law of gravity” Google is able to know that “Newton”, “Einstein” and “quantum mechanics” are words related to this search.

They are now able to make more suggestions to our searches and target different languages (37 languages at this point in time), basically they are refining our longer queries, which has always been a difficult task in the past.

Longer snippets

When you do a search on Google, each result begins with a larger dark blue text followed by a short (usually 160 charachters) of description (otherwise known as a “snippet”), this usually gives an idea of what the page is all about. To give more context, the snippet hightlights your searched words so you can identify what you are searching for.

Google has now increased the amount of characters in the snippet for when we search for long tail keyphrases i.e. searches longer than three words. This addition to their algorithm allows them to highlight more keywords which you are searching for, thus giving you a better understanding of what the web page is about.

As you can see in the above image (click to make larger), I searched for “online marketing social media company cape town”. The two highlighted results are examples of Google’s new algorithm change in action.

I have done a few searches already and cannot see a remarkable change so far but I’m sure as Google begins to index the web these type of results will become more visible.

So what do these changes mean for SEO?

It is speculation but the second mentioned change could become very important for SEO, it could mean that webmasters and SEO‘ers need to start inserting one or two more keywords into their content. We as SEO‘ers need a holistic approach to marketing websites online and take every aspect of SEO into account. Inserting additional keywords may not be the secret ingredient but it is always good to know what Google’s likes and dislikes are.

If you are wanting to find out what keywords search engines are favouring in your content I recommend using SEOmoz’s “term extractor“. It helps you find exactly what long tail keywords you should be focusing on, it could also help you when editing your title tag.