A roundup of some of the most interesting Google updates and industry news for December 2011.

1. Industry Updates
Industry Update
December 2011

2. Industry Updates
GA Site Speed Reports No Longer Require Custom Tracking
• All Google Analytics accounts will automatically
have the „Site Speed‟ report available with no extra
work.
• Previously webmasters had to add a custom line to
their analytics tracking code.
– _trackPageLoadTime()
• http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/11/site-speed-
now-even-easier-to-access.html

3. Industry Updates
Google Evolve Their Design Even Further
• The new Google bar that will enable users to
navigate quickly between Google services, as
well as sharing content easily on Google+.
• Instead of the horizontal black bar at the top of
the page, links to Google services will be in a
new drop-down Google menu nested under the
Google logo. It will show a list of links as well as
allowing access to additional services by
hovering over the “More” link.
• This provides even tighter integration between
services and offers a seamless experience for
Google users.

4. Industry Updates
New Markup For Multilingual Content
• Google have launched a new meta tag which helps with multilingual websites -
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html
• This is pretty complicated post, but essentially it‟s saying you can specify one URL as the de-
facto page (so all link equity is consolidated to there) but then reference different language
translations and get those pages ranking in their local language Google (google.fr, google.dk
etc)
• And updated it to new tags Dec 11
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-
content.html?spref=tw
• Example usage
– http://www.example.com/ - contains the general homepage of a website, in Spanish
– http://es-es.example.com/ - is the version for users in Spain, in Spanish
– http://es-mx.example.com/ - is the version for users in Mexico, in Spanish
– http://en.example.com/ - is the generic English language version

5. Industry Updates
New Parked Domain Identifier
• Google have improved their parked domain detection so that these domains, which are often
used by spammers and stuffed with ads, should appear less in search results.
• “New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked
domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with
ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not
to show them.”
– http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/12/search-quality-highlights-new-monthly.html
• “Ironically, Google’s own AdSense For Domains program has fueled much of the parked
domain industry that its web search team is now penalizing against.”
– Danny Sullivan
– http://searchengineland.com/google-parked-domains-scraper-sites-targeted-
amongsearch-changes-103302

6. Industry Updates
Rewarding Original Content
• Google also announced that they would be making some further changes to help identify
original content.
• “We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web
pages is the original one.”
– http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/12/search-quality-highlights-new-monthly.html
• Although Google doesn‟t specifically state the change is aimed at scraper sites, it should
help prevent the problem of publishers having their content stolen by scraper sites, an issue
that Google‟s has been trying to tackle since launching its Panda Update earlier this year.

7. Industry Updates
Less Host Crowding
• Another interesting update was Google saying that it is now preventing a single site from
occupying too much of the top search results.
• “This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we
don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it
easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.”
– http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/12/search-quality-highlights-new-monthly.html
• This is a bit of a „U turn‟ as Google was previously giving brands more prominence in it‟s
search results (see the previous announcements below)
– http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/petits-fours-in-your-search-
results.html
– http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/showing-more-results-from-
domain.html
• The change means that that brand owners will now occupy less of the search results page
for searches on their name. Competitors or critics are now more likely turn up more meaning
that this represents more of a challenge for brands with reputation management issues.

8. Industry Updates
Further Announcements
• Google announced several other tweaks to it‟s algorithm this month which included;
• Related query results refinements: Google is now more likely to return results for queries
that feature rare words that might have previously been dropped. For example, if you are
searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions
“red widgets.”
• More comprehensive indexing: Making long-tail documents more likely to rank for relevant
queries.
• Fresher and more complete blog search results: We made a change to our blog search
index to get coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.
• Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for
news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.

9. Industry Updates
Rich Snippets Now Showing Everywhere
• Google seems to have taken out the „whitelisting‟ process for several types rich
snippets.including review and review-aggregate types which are some of the more common
rich snippet types.
• This appears to be the case with both microformat hreview markup and schema.org markup
and both methods are displaying rich snippets, even when hidden.
• Interestingly, Google had always stated that you shouldn‟t hide your code for rich snippets
and this appears to be a „u turn‟.
• It does mean however that SERPs could be flooded with star ratings so much so that it will
now have less of an effect in terms of CTR.