Google has released a new list of algorithm changes it made during the months of August and September. We’ve been looking at different groups of changes individually. So far, we’ve looked at domains, freshness, page quality, autocomplete, and answers-related changes.
Some of the changes on Google’s list come under the “Other Ranking Components” project label. This appears to be something of a catch all label for things that aren’t categorized by other projects. Interestingly, Google acknowledges here that it is showing fewer results on more pages. Google says this is to show the most relevant results more quickly. Here’s that list entry:
#82279. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We changed to fewer results for some queries to show the most relevant results as quickly as possible.
Google has also adjusted the way links are used in ranking through what it is calling a “minor bug fix,” and has changed how it ranks documents for location-based queries. Here are three more entries to Google’s big list:
LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.
#83709. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change was a minor bug fix related to the way links are used in ranking.
#84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.