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From the post: "More precise detection of old pages. [launch codename "oldn23", project codename “Freshness"] This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users." This might make it even more important to get new links, from fresh content. As opposed to contacting site owners and asking for link inclusion on an old page.
Seems like something changed for exact match domains: "Improvements to results for navigational queries. [launch codename "IceMan5"] A “navigational query” is a search where it looks like the user is looking to navigate to a particular website, such as [New York Times] or [wikipedia.org]. While these searches may seem straightforward, there are still challenges to serving the best results. For example, what if the user doesn’t actually know the right URL? What if the URL they’re searching for seems to be a parked domain (with no content)? This change improves results for this kind of search"
Interesting - changed anchor text handling too: "Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust."
"Anchor text is being devalued" is something we've all speculated on for quite some time. It only made sense since it was was such an effective form of rankings manipulation. It will be interesting to see if this algo change is big enough to actually make an impact on rankings that rely on too much exact KW match anchor text.
Doesn't necessarily suggest to me that links are worth any less or that anchor text is devalued, but rather than some methodology they were applying to measuring anchor text or sorting/filtering has changed. Honestly, though, when Google's "transparent" in this way, it makes me feel like they're merely paying lip service to get the press/perception benefit. Real transparency is about explaining so that others can understand. This opaque sharing has a different purpose.
Yes. Like pleasing our friends in the EU monopoly abuse case :)
Cosmos Newsy and it's casual ending sentence mention of "author information being added."