Search Algorithms
Search engines have complex search algorithms which are used to ensure they are able to display the most relevant and useful results to their users. While algorithm changes are common and won’t usually affect a site’s ranking, search engines such as Google will occasionally introduce a major update which may impact search results. Our Hangout Notes cover insights from Google around these algorithms with best practice advice.
Using Google Services Doesn’t Improve Site Relevancy or SERPs
Using Google Services such as Analytics, Search Console, AdWords or Adsense does not make your site more relevant in Google’s eyes and does not improve organic rankings.
Google Takes Rel Canonical To Be Mistake If Present With Noindex
If a canonical and noindex are both present on a page, Google’s algorithms judge the rel canonical to be a mistake and the noindex as being used as a way to force a canonical.
Quality Raters Improve Algorithms Rather Than Evaluate Individual Sites
Quality raters are, for the most part, looking for things to do with specific parts of algorithms not necessarily flagging sites with regards to reputation.
SERPS Carousels Have Their Own Rankings
Carousels have their own organic ranking algorithms so you may not appear even if you have relevant markup and are showing up in the search results.
Google Understands Synonyms Algorithmically Through Search Behaviour
Google tries to understand words that are synonyms of each other in an algorithmic way, such as those which use diacritic characters with accents, based on what people are searching for. Google doesn’t have a linguistic model to say determine how characters and words map to each other.
Google Algorithm Changes Are Applied Universally to All Languages
When Google makes algorithm changes, they try to make them across all sites regardless of differences like language. Exceptions with rich snippets, structured data, knowledge graph, business related information, streaming services can be trickier for legal reasons so they can’t roll updates out all at the same time.
User-generated Content May Cause SERP Fluctuations
Sites with user-generated content may see SERP fluctuations as the algorithms may change how it judges content quality.
Quality Algorithms are Used to Influence Crawling and Indexing Speed
Quality algorithms are used to influence other algorithms such as those which control crawling and indexing speed.
Remove Incorrect Canonical Tags Until They Can be Corrected
Google has algorithms to catch common mistakes made by webmasters with canonical tag implementation, but they may not work, so John recommends to remove incorrect canonical tags until they can be implemented correctly.
Noindex Can be Used on Low Quality Pages to Prevent Penalties
You can noindex pages to prevent low quality pages affecting the Panda algorithm