Google announces over fifty updates to ranking algorithm

Today Google announced over fifty changes to its search algorithm. Most of these are highly technical, beyond the comprehension of most SEO consultants.  Matt from search engine land says.

Google’s latest round of search quality updates is now available, and — at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old SEO — this month’s seems even more difficult to grasp than normal. There are a lot of words in this month’s list of 50 changes, but it appears to me that there’s not really a lot of explanation

However reading between the lines of the different blog posts and Google announcements three clear trends emerge from the technical jargon. These are 1.Flight to quality sites, this is a continuing theme, which builds on the PANDA updates. Quality sites with lots of unique and valuable content continue to do well in rankings. The difficult question is what is quality?  This is moving more towards the values of journalistic measures, is it interesting to read, retain visitor interest, and answer the key questions who, what, why, when and how.

1. Increasing reliance on personal reputation, both for the author and those who recommend the site. You can see this in the increasing focus on personal profiles, and the linkages to Google plus one recommendation. In the future it looks like who writes content and who recommends it will be important in ranking.
2. Freshness seems to be increasingly important, several of the updates seem to relate to presenting the most up to date relevant articles

So what will the latest Google updates mean for site owner? The key areas for site owners to focus on are, ensuring that the content on the site is of the highest quality, unique and well presented. We have blogged before about quality content. We would continue to build personal profiles in the main social networking sites and linking these to your main site, maintain a fresh site with lots of user generated content discussion and debate. However the needs to be better quality than the normal forum stuff. If you have a different view then your comments are welcome below.