Did the latest Google update actually improve search results?

Google performs updates to its algorithm on a daily basis, but it is not very often that Google actually lets up know what they are doing!

Last week, a tweet from Google’s Matt Cutts informed us about a new update to Google’s algorithm. The tweet said: “Just fyi, we rolled out a small algo change this week that improves the diversity of search results in terms of different domains returned.”

Most of us would probably agree that an algorithm update such as this would be very helpful, for both webmasters and users (unless you are the one dominating the search results). A comment posted to WebProNews read: “I think this is a great idea. I have no idea how many times I have seen a certain domain show up 3-4 different times in the top 5 pages. The first page is really the only one that matters anyways. But this will enable more people to rank for harder keywords. Well hopefully at least.”

As of yet, we have not seen this change actually make an improvement to search engine results and cannot find any examples to back up an improvement by Google. In fact, we have examples where a website’s search engine results have been improved. The search term “watch series” for example, brings up one domain within the first page results!

Saying that, just because the examples haven’t been easy to spot, does not mean Google’s update did not perform as intended. It is very easy to spot places where an update didn’t work. The question is, how often are you organically appearing onto search results pages where you see a load of other results for the same domain on the same page? In my experience, not very. So maybe Google is succeeding in their improvements. As Google will often say, no algorithm is perfect.

Google did inform that this was a very minor update. It would be interesting to know how been sites have been effected by this update, both positively and negatively. There don’t seem to be nearly the amount of complaints that would be seen with a Panda or a Penguin update.

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