As usual, google’s trying to be as transparent as possible and listing what they’ve been doing to their search engine algorithm this past month.  At the same time, they’re still not giving you the secret sauce, but just pointing to what the secret sauce is doing to our results when we search on google.com   Among the highlights this past month in terms of ranking changes specifically are:

• Penalizing keyword stuffing in websites
• Using more “authoritative websites” to rank higher
• Higher Domain diversity in the results

They also are evaluating how your search terms are appearing on your page.  While they don’t clarify exactly in their list of updates on how to place the phrases in the proper order on your page, we can only guess and apply the same traditional locations that we’ve argued were in important like h1, h2 tags or higher up on the page.  And as mentioned in the bullet points, they don’t want keywords to be stuffed in the page.

So, what does this mean for your website?

• Continue building links, BUT try to get higher authority links to point to your website or build relationships with other websites that are more “authoritative” than yours with the hope they will be willing to link to you at some point
• Stop the keyword stuffing if you were doing it in the past or even now.  You don’t need the phrase to show up more than 1 or 2 times as we mentioned to many before.

There were also a number of other changes affecting local, sitelinks, more on fresh seo results,  and using an index that’s supposedly 15% larger now.   If you want to read them all, check them out here.