Gear up for Google Panda 3.3 update and many more

Search Marketers better pay heed. Google has rolled out Panda 3.3 update to its search algorithm, along with 39 additional search updates. 

According to a post on Google’s official blogspot page, introduction of Panda 3.3 update will ‘refresh data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web’.

Panda algorithm, ever since it first came about, has been force to reckon with. And with every update to this algorithm, the search engine has been able to shore up its efforts towards creating a more accurate and authentic search environment. This update, like the previous one, is directed at data refresh and not so much at creating new or changing ranking signals. Nevertheless, with every tweak in Panda algorithm, search and thereby search marketing will only get smarter and wiser. 

Of the 39 other search related updates, some significant changes that one ought to lookout for are:

1. Improved local results and improvements to rankings in local search results: Google has launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. This will help detect, more accurately, queries and documents that are local to a user. With respect to rankings in local search, an improvement in the triggering of ‘Local Universal’ results has been introduced by relying more on the ranking on Google’s main search results as a signal.

2. Improvements to freshness: ‘Freshness’ has been an important subject matter for Google for a long time. To be able to surface results that are ‘fresh’ and thereby more relevant to the time has been an aspiration for the search engine and with respect to the same, it has applied new signals which will help surface fresher content in the results more quickly than before.

3. Link evaluation: Google has decided to do away with its link evaluation/analysis signal. Google has for long relied on characteristics of a link to help figure out the topic of a linked page. But having turned off a method of link analysis that was being used for several years, one can expect Google to come up with (or in Google’s terms -‘re-architect’) an upgraded link evaluation tool or something which will carry out the function with more scrutinized eye in the near future. 

An inference which can be best drawn from these suggested tweaks and upgrades is that Google is going all out in its efforts to spruce up the local and accurate-ize the more generic way of search. For SEOs, these upgrades are only but a call to tighten their reins of search marketing initiatives and make them more concentrated, if anything.