It has been an interesting several weeks for the SEO world. Whether the hat you wear is white, gray, or black, chances are you have been affected by the recent Google algo changes. To complicate matters, Google has sent thousands of messages via webmaster tools warning of unnatural links and phishing for information. These are of course timed to coincide with the devaluing of links so most people are only too happy to comply by providing  G with every scrap of information they can in the futile hope that all will be forgiven.

All of this reminds me of some strange 12 step program that I imagine framed and hanging behind Matt Cutts’ desk at the Googleplex. See if you can spot the changes I made to the original 12 steps.

1. We admitted we were powerless over rankings—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Google as we understood It.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our back link profile.
5. Admitted to Google, to ourselves, and to another human beings the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have Google remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Google to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through reading the Google Webmaster Guidelines to improve our conscious contact with Google as we understood It, asking only for knowledge of Google’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to webmasters, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This week Google announced over 40 updates and improvements to search, the largest update since they have been releasing updates monthly. Of course the two big take-aways include the latest iteration of Panda and the vague announcement that one of the link signals that Google has been using for several years has been dropped. There is a lot of speculation on that one but it is doubtful that the link signal that was dropped was a very strong one to begin with. Also, as with any update, new changes in spam protection.

While most SEO’s are focusing on the big changes, I think there are quite a few hidden gems in this announcement, especially if you are concerned with local SEO, keyword diversification, or freshness.

More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.

These are both significant for anyone doing keyword research. The big question for the coverage change; what data source is being brought into play? Maybe something dealing with Google + and related searches? Who knows. Since we no longer get keyword data from logged in users, any additional indicators for trending keywords is welcome. Hopefully, related searches will be more accurate and refreshed more frequently.

“Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

I use the “Site:” query daily so any improvements are welcome. I hope that this removes duplicate pages that are common to blog queries that include “tag” and “category” pages.

Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.

Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.

The freshness algo seems to be getting a lot of updates this time around. It would be interesting to know what freshness signals are now outdated. Pretty good bet that social signals may make older methods obsolete.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

National brands dealing with skewed local results will welcome the first change. Not sure how the localized docs improvement will work. Will have to keep a look out for those results. Have you started localizing your YouTube videos? No time like the present. Be sure to utilize the map function when uploading your videos if you want Google to recognize them as localized.

Which of these improvements will have the most effect on your day to day SEO or marketing activities?

Last week Google announced that SSL search would be turned on by default for users that were signed in to Google. This means that keyword data from these searches will no longer be available to site administrators. Those searches will just show as Google organic traffic. Those of us in the SEO game should have seen the writing on the wall back in 2010 when Google introduced encrypted search. But alas, multiple Panda updates and leaked quality guidelines have distracted us from the real big changes coming down the pike. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a big deal and just one more step on the way to having true search personalization and forcing advertisers to rely on paid search rather than the unpredictable organic results.

How the Change Impacts Analytics

First, no more keyword data from signed in users. Instead, these search queries will be tagged as (not provided). You will still be able to see an aggregate list of the top 1,000 queries via Webmaster tools but no individual keyword data. Users can also navigate to https://www.google.com and have their searches encrypted without logging in.

Conversion information will still track at the Source/Medium level so they will show as google/organic but you will no longer know what keyword query resulted in a conversion. This is a big deal, especially if you are not an Adwords advertiser since CPC information will still track on the keyword level. Is this a ploy by Google to force more advertisers into Adwords? Maybe, but I think it is just the beginning of a new spam reduction strategy.

Bait and Switch?

So Google announces that they are protecting users privacy by restricting the information passed to other websites, how altruistic of them. I think that they are just encouraging more users to stay logged into Google services like Plus or Gmail where advertising can be easily targeted. Google continues to move toward a more intent or interest based search model where search results are determined by user behavior rather than signals that can be easily manipulated like backlinks. This is not necessarily a bad thing but I wish they would be upfront about it instead of trying sell it as privacy protection when it is anything but.

So What Should You Do?

When in doubt, scream and shout. After that, be sure you make use of the annotate function in Google Analytics and note that October 18th was the date your keyword data started to disappear. Remember that you still have Bing data to work with although in my experience getting accurate data from Bing has been more than a little problematic. If you can’t or won’t advertise on certain terms but still need an idea of the volume, the Adwords keyword tool is OK although remember that it only shows Adwords information. Other than that, I guess we just hope that people start using meta search engines again. Dogpile anyone?