September 2012 Industry Update

NetBooster UK

Google Improves Diversity in Results

Matt Cutts tweeted back on the of September that they

have released an algorithm change that had effectively

improved the diversity of domains shown in it’s results.

This correction was widely anticipated by many

webmasters as the domain diversity bug has been well

documented for the past few months.

NetBooster Verdict

Unfortunately, as yet we haven’t seen any real impact of

this update reflected in the Google UK results so it may be

that this is taking a little time to become fully visible. The

bug still seems to be prevalent in Google’s top 10 and

typically gets worse the deeper you drill into their results.

2 | Copyright NetBooster Group

Panda Refresh

Google announced on Twitter on 18th September that they

pushed out a Panda refresh that impacted "fewer than 0.7%

of queries." This is simply a refresh rather than an algorithm

change however. The previous Panda refresh was on

August 20, 2012 and labeled 3.9.1.

NetBooster Verdict

Google continues to invest in it’s higher quality sites

algorithm and many of the search updates in August &

September were related to page quality signals. The impact

of many of these data refreshes and tweaks seem to be

minimal however as Google fine tunes this part of their

algorithm.

3 | Copyright NetBooster Group

Google dials down the effectiveness of exact

match domains

Matt Cutts also announced that Google would be reducing the

effectiveness of low quality exact match domains in it’s results.

This was something that webmaster’s had been expecting for

some time as Google had stated 2 years ago that they would

be looking into it.

NetBooster Verdict

Currently this looks like it has only been rolled out in US

results however expect a wider roll out soon. This is yet

another algorithm change that aims to target low quality

domains although we are already seeing some fallout for

legitimate client domains so I would expect Google to try and

fine tune this over the next few months.

However in the meantime this tweak may help UK brands

compete for more targeted search queries where exact match

domains had previously punched above their weight.

Over 65 Search Updates Made in August &

September

Google released details regarding the 65 updates that they rolled out in August and September via the

Inside Search blog.

An example of some of the page quality updates that were announced.

#84010. [project “Page Quality”] We refreshed data for the "Panda" high-quality sites algorithm.

#84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted

sources.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/search-quality-highlights-65-changes.html

NetBooster Verdict

Whilst they only refer to Panda once in the post, there are numerous references to page quality

updates indicating that they are focusing on Panda related signals. There were also plenty of updated

focused around their knowledge graph and safesearch.

Over 65 Search Updates Made in August &

September Cont…

Most notably however was the omission of anything relating to the exact match domain tweak. Google

released the response explaining why this was the case.

“These changes rolled out very recently, and their launch language was approved after the cutoff date

where we were finalizing the blog post. We tweeted these changes and were also planning to include

those launches in future updates.”

“…in general we only intend to show entries when a new change went through the launch process for

approval, and so you might not see every data refresh in our list. As we said last December, we're

going to keep pushing the envelope when it comes to sharing how our search engine works.”

Google