about their online presence. Google has tried to connect with its audience thanks to it’s new official blog but if you ask me, it is still far too technical for most internet-savvy closet technophobes. Hence the chasm between what Google is doing and what people think Google is doing.

So here’s what Google is out to do… of course their main objective is for you to find more relevant results more quickly so..

1. Th algorithm now favours high-quality sites. This sounds obvious but what matters (and what changes) here is the definition of high-quality content. Here’s the definition Google gives on the official blog “high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

So basically it seems advantageous to concentrate on creating valuable online content that people are looking for, so nothing new there.

2. The algorithm penalises websites with too many adverts above the fold (in the main window upon loading). It is not clear how this will affect sites as it also has an impact on the number of images. Anything beyond 3 adverts is overkill according to Google however it is not yet clear whether this includes all the images as Google still has difficulty recognising which images are ads and which aren’t.

In the official blog Google says that “Sites using pop-ups, pop-unders or overlay ads are not impacted by this. It only applies to static ads in fixed positions on pages themselves.” This is strange because websites with pop-ups are, in most cases, more annoying to Google users than websites with static ads.

3. The new changes are however also affecting advertising spend. If you have a website and need to sell more online, then Google is encouraging you to shift all or most of your spending online. The new algorithm favours companies and websites that have a strong social presence. This has diminished the importance of direct traffic generation through radio and TV advertising which used to boost your ranking over time. The emphasis has now moved to companies with strong social presence, of course Google+ will play a big role in this in the future because it means that Google decides which social platforms give you more weight/relevance. It is however also a fact that in order to keep people happy Facebook has to feature quite heavily.

However it’s going to be interesting to watch how the changes evolve in the next few months and ultimately how these results will effect what we find and how we find it.

One thing we know for sure is that content is King (and Quality Queen!) more than ever before, of course somewhere along the line Google also checks how relevant your content is to your domain and overall website so make sure all content is good quality and relevant.

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