I was just reading Google Webmaster Central Blog for 19 Jan. It announces a change in the way Google will look at page layouts and is probably a topic in itself. But right at the end of it Matt Cutts says “This change is just one of the over 500 improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.”.
That’s an average of about 10 a week, but I don’t have the experience to know whether this is more than in previous years. Will a part-time SEO’er be able to keep up with this level of changes?
Google have been running at a similar level of upgrades for a long time. Most of them won’t be game-changers, they will just be minor tweaks to adjust the relative value of different parameters. Others might be more significant, but the main purpose will be to tighten up on the guidelines they’ve already got in place. If you’re already doing what they say you should be doing, you’ll be fine.
Thanks very much for that!! The way it was worded did kind of suggest to me that they were doing something different, and I’m pleased to learn that really its just business as usual.
However, as much of what they say we should be doing isn’t so much “don’t do this” more “don’t do this too much” I guess it depends on what they tighten up and by how much, and will we know anyway? I somehow can’t seem them making a blog for every one explaining what it means.
Afaik, Google use between 200 and 300 algorithms and have been doing monthly changes for some time. From what I understand, they are changing some major things that can have a big impact on sites. One of the things that I have not heard much of before, is lay-out impact and and ad/banner quantity vs useful information. In a nutshell, the less info is visible on the opening view of the page, the worse you will rank. Relativity also seems to become more important e.g. a website about breadmaking will not benefit from content about the manufacturing of cookers.