Along with changes to its search algorithm, Google has announced a slew of updates to Panda along with tweaking of its various other tools. These changes have been made over a period of 2 months, namely August and September.
Google launched several projects that combine together to improve the quality of search results. A few changes are mentioned in this blog.
The company has improved their Page Quality feature to help users locate high quality content extracted from trusted sources. Google also included a freshness project that provided more relevance to latest or fresh content on webpages even if they were from a single domain.
In addition, Google improved the ranking process by including content relevant to search queries that contained locations while also fixing minor bugs related to links that were used in the page ranking process.
Another project focused on improving video indexing on a large scale. Google also improved SafeSearch to filter out adult content for queries that were not actually in search for mature content. SafeSearch Strict Setting was also improved to ensure that adult content does not creep into results for this setting. In addition, non-relevant results in Strict Settings that were earlier being displayed were also removed in this update.
Google also included the lists as well as collections feature in their Knowledge Graph tool. Several signals in Knowledge Graph were improved to determine relevant result titles and display summaries of the topics. Google also created a snippet that mentions that robots.txt could not crawl because of absence of descriptions. The automatic title generation feature for PDS and non html documents was also improved by Google.
Google has embarked on a long journey to improve its algorithm and tools in a bid to offer improved results that are far more relevant to search queries. These updates have refined their tools while providing Google a better insight into the needs of their users.