Google to publish monthly updates in blog

Due to prominent demand, Google will now publish a month-to-month blog series devoted to smaller algorithm enhancements.

Scott Huffman, Engineering Director of Google Search, clarifies: "We know people care about how search works, so we always want to push the envelope when it comes to transparency ... The good news is that we make roughly 500 improvements in a given year, so there's always more to share.With this blog series, we 'll be highlighting many of the subtler algorithmic and visible feature changes we make. These are changes that aren't necessarily big enough to warrant entire blog posts on their own".

Google is expected to rely less on backlinks as a means to figure out the value of sites. This seems to be the theme of most of the changes we are seeing with Google's algorithm with respect to SEO.

What really grabs the eye was the update centered on "more comprehensive indexing". This implies long-tail documents are even more likely to rank for appropriate queries and experts always recommended new clients add long-tail keywords to their strategy.

Remember they may be less preferred than short tail keywords, but they are much easier and faster to rank for ( is great for those who aren't ranking highly for short-tail keywords or those that have recently turned to online marketing). Long-tail keywords are also very specific, and tend to draw more high quality traffic, which leads in more conversions than short-tail keywords. So this new update is great news for webmasters adopting this technique.

Google + integration is the agenda Google is promoting since they have no alliance with Facebook and have ceased Twitter integration. Building relationships by linking out to other sites has proven to make a difference.

Panda iterations will become closer and nearer collectively rather than a Panda update every month or two as it has occured in the past.

The "final-destination" update, which handles how Google blends news results into the mix is worth noting as well. The fact that this is based around "realtime trends" seems to be an additional area where Google attempting to fill the void of realtime search.