Google’s 40 New Challenges/Opportunities for SEO Consultants

Well no posts for 6 months but finally here I am writing a post and this is purely motivated by Google rolling out 40 changes in the month of February. It is definitely not possible to talk about all the 40 changes here but let’s just look at few changes that are definitely going to grab the attention for all SEO consultants and professionals.

a)More accurate detection of official pages – Google announces that they have made adjustments which would help them identify official pages more accurately and many pages which were earlier mis-identified as official will no-longer be. – It would be fun to see if some of the actual official pages gets victimized by these adjustments and lose their official status in Google’s eye.

b)“Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] : This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

c)“International launch of shopping rich snippets.” – This would be critical for SEO consultants working on e-commerce websites. This will help the users to easily identify which sites have the products they need, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This was earlier available in US , Japan and Germany – but now available globally.

d)Improved snippets for video channels – This could mean higher CTR on video listings in organic results, if the snippets are well optimized for users.

e)Improvements to ranking for local search results. – This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

The biggest of them all..

f)Link evaluation – Google mentions that they have changed the way the evaluate links and specifically they have “turned off” a method of link analysis that they used for several years. Typical to Google, they do not go any further into the explanation and leaves SEO professionals like us guess what could be that factor. Are they going to turn off the Page Rank factor, which has been the root of link based algorithm ( and one of the oldest link evaluation factors) and has been gamed in in-numerous ways by SEOs ? Keep guessing!!