In light of several updates, for example, the Panda & Penguin updates and also the effect that they have had on many websites placement in Google’s search engine, a lot of people have often wondered why their sites are underperforming in searches or in some cases, seem to have disappeared from view.
While it is understood that there are many factors to take into consideration, such as on page/off page optimization, relevant content, spam sites, Google’s attempts to improve the quality of user experience, etc., many people have asked why their sites were affected and it still remains a mystery to some.
Matt Cutts sheds some light on this topic in this video, where he was asked by a user: “What are some of the metrics that Google uses to evaluate whether one iteration of the ranking algorithm is delivering better quality results to users than another?”
He covers points such as quality raters, relevancy, how Google evaluates sets of search results side by side, spam results and many other metrics. He also explains how Google will launch a “live experiment” before rolling out changes to live users.
The video provides useful insights into how the Google algorithm changes are evaluated and implemented.
Original Source: How does Google evaluate algorithmic changes? presented by Matt Cutts on the official Google Webmasters YouTube Channel
