The popularity of search engines has spawned huge growth in search engine marketing as more and more businesses crank up efforts to make sure links to their websites appear prominently in search results page. Google, by far the most popular search engine, is an important source of leads and sales to businesses and any changes it makes to its search index can have far-reaching consequences. Small Business Computing reports on the impact of a recent change to how Google indexes search queries.
TORONTO — At the beginning of the Web era, many search queries were only a few keywords in length. Times change, and Web users are now searching by using longer queries of more than three words.
As Web searching habits are changing, so is search engine giant Google — with serious implications for how businesses’ sites are ranked as well.
At a keynote presentation at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto conference, Maile Ohye, senior developer programs engineer at Google, explained how Google’s “May Day” update — which actually began impacting search results on April 28 — changed the way Google indexes so-called ‘long-tail” queries, in which a user enters multiple keywords for a search.
The impact of the May Day update has caused the displacement of countless numbers of websites from Google’s search index as the relevancy algorithms changed. But Ohye explained to the capacity crowd that Google does hundreds of updates to its search algorithms every year, and that the May Day update was a necessary one to better tackle the long tail of search.
