On February 27th, 2012, Google has announced update 3.3 of Panda tweaks to its search algorithms. The changes concern 40 updates to improve the quality of Google search results. The list of changes include:
* More coverage for related searches, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries.
* improvement of expanded sitelinks and sitelinks duplication.
* More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries.
* More accurate detection of official pages.
* Refreshed per-URL country information.
* Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
* Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms.
* "Site:" query update to improve the ranking for queries using the "site:" operator by increasing the diversity of results.
* Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search.
* Interval based history tracking for indexing. This improvement changes the signals used in document tracking algorithms.
* Improvements to foreign language synonyms.
* Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
* More organized search results for Google Korea.
* Fresher images. get more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
* Update to the Google bar. The biggest change is that they replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
* Improvements to travel-related searches. These changes improve the user experience for Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
* Data refresh for related searches signal. This update refreshes the model used to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
* International launch of shopping rich snippets. Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany.
* Improvements to freshness which helps surface fresh content in results even more quickly than before.
* Web History in 20 new countries.
* Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich "decorated" snippets.
* Improvements to ranking for local search results. This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of the main search results as a signal.
* Improvements to English spell correction. This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries.
* Improvements to coverage of News Universal.
* Consolidation of signals for spiking topics.
* Visual refresh to account settings page. they completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of the constantly evolving design.
* Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
* Link evaluation. they often use characteristics of links to help figure out the topic of a linked page. they have changed the way in which links are evaluated. they turned off scoring parts in order to keep the system maintainable, clean and understandable.
* SafeSearch update. they have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
* Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, they fixed some weaknesses in spam protections.
* Improved local results. they launched a new system to find results from a user's city more reliably.
Pruning your website content should be part of your monthly task to improve SEO. This is as important to get greater attention from Google, as Panda tweaks are expected to continue in the future.