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Google Search Updates for April 2012

binny
6 May 2012
Reading Time: One Minute

 

Google search team did not rest this April; On top of the Penguin update, two Panda updates and several April fools inventions, Google announced 53 more updates, improvements and tweaks made on Google search algorithm last April.

The biggest news concern Google index expansion and reorganization:

Google main index, where all the web documents crawled by Google are stored and all search queries are matched against it, was increased by 15%.

This index is tiered, and different documents are indexed on different rates according to their potential relevancy to users. This month, Google has introduced “additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results”.

Google has also introduced several updates that seem related to the Panda and Penguin updates. For example, a domain diversity update that diversifies the number of domains that appears in search results to avoid search returns with too many results from the same domain. “Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. […] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.” Below Google mentioned a “Keyword stuffing classifier improvement” designed to detect sites that use this technique.

Google has also worked on the freshness factor and said that they will promote sites that meet this criterion and publish fresh content. At the same time, they have notified that low quality websites will not have this advantage and will not be promoted despite publishing the freshest and hottest news items.