After November’s initial 10-pack of updates, Google rolled out another 10-pack in the same month which was announced in December and followed it up with 30 algorithm changes that were confirmed in January. Back in the first packed updates, the team had already confirmed that they would be announcing the highlights in their blog to inform webmasters about the tweaks they implemented.
The developers launched the second 10-pack of updates in a push to make search more transparent for users. A few factors they improved on were for rare search terms in related queries, autocomplete predictions, live results for football leagues, image result freshness, and tablet device usability.
The more significant changes involved:
Meanwhile, the 30-pack of updates announced in January 2012 improved on the accuracy of country-restricted searches which gave users the choice to view results from their particular country only. Another change was the refining of how the search engine detects soft 404s which some sites use to return other status codes when users can’t access their domains. Recurring changes were for snippets, autocomplete, live results, and related queries.
Notable improvements were for:
While Google did confirm that they’ll do a blog series for the changes they made to the search engine’s algorithm, evaluation, and rankings, the team also noted that the packed updates were lumped together because they are merely slight changes that don’t necessarily warrant entire blog posts.
Scraper sites suffered a significant loss with the 10-pack of updates’ improvement on detecting original pages. Most of them outranked the sources where they scraped their material from. Plus, the displaying of sitelinks continued to expand, and the incorporation of new signals for Image Search has led to its comprehensiveness today.
If you’re using your original photos for your blog posts, maximize it for SEO by using alt tags for each picture. Alt tags are text descriptions of the image or its general theme. It was initially intended for visually impaired users, but you can leverage this feature for your website’s SEO since search bots use words to crawl and index your site.
Here are some image elements you can optimize to improve your search rankings: