Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
Google’s Matt Cutts shared 50 changes to Google search yesterday. Many of the changes are small but there are a few major categories and takeaways. This follows on the promise two weeks ago that Google would roll out some changes to better penalize “over optimized” sites. This penalization seems to come through favoring a few aspects of pages more.
Freshness of content continues to be more and more critical. Localization is equally a winner in this round of changes. Better predictions of content based on synonyms and words that do not appear on a page are also addressed. As has been the case for some time, fresh content and good site functionality and visibility continue to be the key to success.
Matt also highlighted an unedited video of the leaders of Google’s search algorithm group debating just one of the changes. This is what a lot of smart people in one room looks like:
