Some of the main changes this month that will have an effect on SEO are focussed around improving search of fresh content, discounting link schemes and improving their scoring infrastructure of websites. A few of the changes in summary:
Ignoring Inbound Links (backlinks)
This is quite an important one as Google further strives to reduce the value of links pointing in to a website. Google have better signals to determine if links pointing into a site are part of any 'link schemes'. They've made a few mistakes on this in the past, hopefully this one is a little smoother and error free.
Further Penguin Updates
Minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm.
Autocomplete predictions used as refinements.
- Improvements to the search predicitons coming up when a user types their search query in.
- Autocomplete has also had improvements in mobile devices
For Sports Fanatics
- Improvements and features for the NBA, Soccer, and golf to help find scores and information about players more easily.
News Results
- Improvements to help find news content faster
New Events
Better detection of new events being placed up, to show in Google Realtime Search.
Freshness
A few updates to the 'Freshness' update, all fopcussed on better finding fresh results, and also ironing out some of the bugs in the previous Google Freshness updates. Find out more about the Search quality highlights for May
