Early this month Google released another string of algorithm updates. About 50 of them to be exact, luckily we have narrowed the field down to only a few that you really should be paying attention to. You may need to adjust your small business SEO strategy so pay attention.
Anchor Text Changes
Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.
Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename “PC”] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.
These two new rules seem to suggest that highly targeted anchor text will be devalued in search. This probably won’t be quite as bad as you might think it is. Google is all about going after web spam and bad SEO tactics these days more than likely this devaluation of targeted anchor text will apply to key words that don’t have any relevance to the content they are a part of. In short if you have an article about an awesome new tech toy that includes a link back to your parts and service page with anchor text like “best prices on parts and service” you might have a problem.
Google Plus Updates
Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename “Prof-2”] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.
Improvements to name detection. [launch codename “edge”, project codename “NameDetector”] We’ve improved a system for detecting names, particularly for celebrity names.
This is pretty self explanatory Google is just continuing to push their social platform and if you haven’t made a business page for Google Plus yet then you really need to make one now. Google is determined to make their social platform more and more relevant by integrating it into search results and other such tactics. It may work in the long run, it may not, but for now having a Google Plus profile is a must for any business if you want a well rounded social presence.
Need help keeping up with Google’s algorithm updates? Having trouble understanding how to adjust your SEO strategies as a result of these updates? Contact Wikimotive for a free evaluation of your tactics and SEO advice.