Google's May Updates: Inorganic Backlinks, Page Titles, Fresh Results & More
Google’s latest batch of search quality updates is online, and offers some insight into a variety of search- and SEO-related topics.
Though some of Google’s monthly updates have included more than 50 items, this one comes in at 39. But it looks like there’s still plenty to digest.
Here’s a look at what stands out for me after a first read of Google’s blog post.
Inorganic Backlinks & Penguin
There are two items that would appear to be closely related to one another:
Better application of inorganic backlinks signals. [launch codename "improv-fix", project codename "Page Quality"] We have algorithms in place designed to detect a variety of link schemes, a common spam technique. This change ensures we’re using those signals appropriately in the rest of our ranking.The fact that they’re listed separately suggests that the item about “inorganic backlinks” is not actually part of the Penguin algorithm. So what does the first item mean? I think Google might be saying that the signals it uses to detect link-related spam/schemes have been “appropriately” applied to other parts of the ranking algorithm, perhaps to help detect other types of spam/schemes. The wording isn’t clear, which is pretty much par for the course with these monthly updates. (I envision the search quality and webspam teams reading my recaps and your comments and chuckling at our attempts to figure this stuff out.)Google's May Updates: Inorganic Backlinks, Page Titles, Fresh Results & MoreImprovements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm.
