Legal Internet Marketing Blog
Have you ever wondered what Google does to improve search results and keep users happy with such a reliable and trustworthy search engine? So have we, and so does everybody else; and with good reason: the Internet is always evolving.
To stay ahead of the competition and effectively promote your law firm or business online, you need to know how the Internet is changing, especially when it comes to search.
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It may seem like top secret information, but a recent SearchEngineLand article discusses the most recent Google search results improvements made in December. Some of the highlights, with their respective Google codenames, are as follows:
- “Megasitelinks” – Sitelinks in search results are invaluable and help with SEO in that they provide additional links to your website by showing specific web pages. Google recently improved their algorithm (guidelines/processes that apply to search engines for ranking a site’s listing within its index) for selecting sitelinks so that results are more relevant. One example of how this improves search results is that sitelinks may be displayed based on precise geographic locations.
- “Foby” – Byline dates, the date connected with an online document/publication, helps search engine users skim the results to assess whether a site will be helpful to them based on when a site was last updated or when the content on a page was published. Google isn’t giving away much, but has stated that improvements have been made to establish what date goes with a document. As such, users should expect to see more precise dates being added to search results. So, even if a blog post is a few years old, a 2011 or 2012 byline date may show up in search results displaying the most recent updated dates.
- “Simple” and “Leaf” – To ensure that search results are displaying the most relevant images with regard to the inquiry and that images are being linked to the highest quality source pages, Google has improved quality sources with the “simple” image search update. In other words, the quality of a landing page now serves as an algorithmic flag for image search. The “leaf” image search upgrade expands algorithms used for main search results to spam detection. With better spam identification in Image Search, users shouldn’t have to do as much sifting as before when trying to find the right photo(s) or image(s).
Other Google search updates from December range from song lyric search results to live NFL and college football results, and from a +1 button visual display update to enhanced Vietnamese spell check.
Client Development Starts with Search
Want to net more clients? The place to start is with search results. For a free growth assessment of your law firm, contact Susan L. Sipe at SLS Consulting by calling (323) 254-1510 today. For over a decade, SLS has helped attorneys throughout the U.S. obtain high search engine rankings that last.