Google is CONSTANTLY making changes to how they determine search results as they strive to deliver more relevant results for what people are actually looking for.
Google has had more than the usual number of changes recently (39, to be exact, just in May alone). You may already know about one of the biggest – at least in terms of impact to local businesses. They’ve replaced Google Places with Google+ Business profiles in search results, so if you haven’t already updated your Google+ profile to respond to this change, I’d suggest doing so quickly. If you need help with this, call us today at 404-669-6682.
Some of these other changes directly impact search results, some offer additional features, benefits and miscellaneous functionality to improve the overall user experience.
Here’s an overview of these changes on Google’s “Inside Search” official blog:
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-changes.html
Here’s a little more about the Knowledge Graph:
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html
Outside of Google, more change is happening – this time with Facebook and WordPress: Facebook now has an official plugin for WordPress. This just came out a couple of days ago:
https://developers.facebook.com
From that page, here’s an interesting bit of non-trivial info: “WordPress powers 16.6 percent of the web, from The New York Times to People Magazine, and attracts more than 600 million unique visitors each month.”
That’s pretty huge.