Internet marketer Erik Baemlisberger spotted in a change (via Search Engine Land) in what little wording there is, however, and it’s actually somewhat noteworthy.

As you can see, the wording use to be: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Now, it says, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”

Google has removed he word “link,” presumably to play down the importance of links in its algorithm. This doesn’t mean that links are less important. High quality links are likely still a major signal, but by de-emphasizing the word link (or removing it altogether), Google probably hopes to cut down on people engaging in link schemes and paid links – things Google has been cracking down on more than ever over the past year or so.

Give it a go—type or say “mexican restaurants,” or try any similar search for restaurants, bars or hotels. Click on one of the places in the carousel to get more details on it, including its overall review-based score, address and photos. If you want to see more places, click the arrow at the right of the carousel. And you can zoom in on the map that appears below the carousel to restrict your search to only places in a specific area.

While some iPad and Nexus tablet users have seen this new look since December, we’re excited to expand to desktop. The interactive “carousel” is rolling out in English in the U.S.—we’ll add more features and languages over time.

The feature could be good for local businesses that don’t necessarily rank at the top of local results, as it features more on the page, and encourages users to scroll through them.

Does using stock photos on your pages have a negative effect on rankings? Do original photos help you in this regard?

“‘Does using stock photos on your pages have a negative effect on rankings?’ To the best of my knowledge, the answer is no,” says Cutts. “‘Do original photos help you?’ To the best of my knowledge, it doesn’t really make a difference whether it’s a stock photo versus an original photo.”

But he doesn’t leave it at that.

“But you know what?” he adds. “That’s a great suggestion for a future signal we could look at in terms of search quality. Who knows? Maybe original sites – original image sites might be higher quality, where sites that just repeat the same stock photos over and over again might not be nearly as high quality.”

Interesting.

“But to the best of my knowledge,” he reiterates, “we don’t use that directly in our algorithmic web ranking right now.”

Well, even if Google is not using this as a signal currently, it’s hard to imagine why Cutts would make comments like these if he’s not serious about this actually being something Google could add in the future. They are, as you know, making changes to the algorithm every day. Here, he’s pretty much saying that original images are a signal of quality, so that’s worth paying attention to.

Which of the latest announcements do you believe will have the biggest impact on webmasters? On your SEO strategy? Let us know what you think.

On Monday, Apple had its big Worldwide Developer’s Conference keynote, where it unveiled the latest versions of its Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. Within these unveilings were a few pieces of noteworthy search news. For one, its adding more search options to Safari, which is significant given that it has made moves in recent memory to distance itself further from Google. The big piece of news here, however, was the addition of Bing (Google’s biggest search competitor) to Siri as the web search provider. We discussed the implications of this in more depth here, but suffice it to say, this could lead to a lot more people accessing your content from Bing if you’re ranking there. In other words, you now have more of a reason to optimize for Bing.

Also on Monday, Google released a video discussing mistakes webmasters are commonly making when using the Disavow Links tool.

The most common mistake is that people are uploading the wrong kinds of files.

Yelp, a frequent critic of Google’s (which generates its own share of criticism) is making moves to become a better local search tool. See its newly revamped “Nearby” mobile feature. Local businesses now have even more incentive to be found in Yelp. Speaking of Yelp, Greg Sterling at Screenwerk shares an anecdote in which a plumber claimed that 95% of his leads come from the service. This caught the attention of CEO Jeremy Stoppelman:

Clearly some are finding Yelp well worth it, despite those decrying the service.

Google made a major announcement in that it is readying ranking changes for mobile content. Basically, if you’re not providing smartphone users with the relevant content you’re providing them on the desktop, you’re going to be in trouble.

“Some websites use separate URLs to serve desktop and smartphone users,” explain Google’s Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far. “A faulty redirect is when a desktop page redirects smartphone users to an irrelevant page on the smartphone-optimized website. A typical example is when all pages on the desktop site redirect smartphone users to the homepage of the smartphone-optimized site.”

“This kind of redirect disrupts a user’s workflow and may lead them to stop using the site and go elsewhere,” they add. “Even if the user doesn’t abandon the site, irrelevant redirects add more work for them to handle, which is particularly troublesome when they’re on slow mobile networks. These faulty redirects frustrate users whether they’re looking for a webpage, video, or something else, and our ranking changes will affect many types of searches.”

More on all of this here.

In addition to that, Google’s Matt Cutts hinted at SMX Advanced that mobile site speed could soon become a ranking factor. Google made site speed a signal several years ago, and it looks like they’ll be taking that a step further with mobile in mind.

Cutts revealed quite a few things at SMX Advanced, actually. Here’s the whole discussion he had with interviewer Danny Sullivan:

One thing he mentioned at the conference was that Google started rolling out a new ranking update to clean up more spammy queries. It’s been unofficially referred to as the “payday loans” update. Google had previously warned about forthcoming efforts in this area, and these efforts are now taking effect.

In other algorithm update news, Cutts also indicated that Google hasn’t rolled out a Panda data refresh for a month and a half. Panda is apparently being run about once a month, and rolling out slowly over the course of roughly ten days.

He mentioned a new structured data tool Google is beta testing, which allows webmasters to report structured data errors. Giving webmasters as much control over structured data is going to be increasingly important, as Google is turning to this kind of data more and more for its search results. Optimizing structured data could be considered a vital part of your SEO strategy these days, for better or worse. At least Google providing more and more tools in this area.

Finally, Cutts announced that Google is now including example links in its messages to webmasters regarding manual penalties. Those who have to deal with these penalties find the addition very welcome. Cutts put out a video discussing this:

Facebook, as I’m sure you’ve heard, has launched hashtags, which pretty much turn the giant social network into a real-time search engine, for all intents and purposes. That has some pretty big marketing implications. The hashtags, by the way, can be searched via Facebook’s Graph Search. On a separate note, Facebook is killing its sponsored search results.

So those are some of the biggest stories in a very busy week for search. The mere fact that all of this stuff just happened over the past week really illustrates how rapidly the search game is evolving, and this doesn’t even take into account that Google makes changes to its algorithm every day.

Out of all that was announced this week, which item are you most concerned about? Which are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments.

“I’m very happy to say that just recently, we’ve rolled out the ability to, when we send a message, to include more examples,” he says. “We’re not going to be able to show you every single thing that we think is wrong, for a couple reasons. Number one, it might help the spammers, and number two, if there’s a lot of bad pages, we’d be sending out emails that are, you know, like fifty megabytes long. But we do think it’s helpful if we can include a small number of example URLs that will help you, as a webmaster, know where to look whenever you’re trying to fix things and clean the site back up.”

He adds, “It’s much better than it was than even just a few months ago, and we’ll keep looking for ways to provide even more guidance and a little more transparency so that webmasters get [an] even better idea of where to look, but we’re just really happy that now we have the ability, when we send messages, to give you a few concrete examples.”

Cutts notes that it’s going to take some time to roll out, test, ramp up, etc. There might still be some cases where people aren’t getting examples.

But that’s not all.

Google’s Matt Cutts spoke at SMX Advanced on Tuesday evening, and implied that Google might roll out a version of its site speed ranking factor for mobile sites. Google officially revealed that site speed was a ranking factor for search over three years ago after placing a great deal of emphasis on speed for quite some time before that.

Fast forward to 2013, and mobile has grown a lot. Google is making it so you have no excuse to treat your mobile content with less regard than your desktop content. Frankly, sites should be optimizing for mobile anyway, simply for the benefit of their users, but if ignoring the mobile experience is going to cost sites search rankings, perhaps this will light a fire under their butts to do something about poor mobile site performance.

Here’s the relevant section of Search Engine Land’s liveblogged account of what Cutts said about mobile page speed:

At Google I/O, there was a session on instant mobile websites – there were page speed recommendations. We’ve said that before about desktop sites, we might start doing the same thing about mobile websites.

By the way, Cutts said at the event that the smartphone-related changes discussed in the blog post have been approved, but that he’s not sure when they’ll roll out.

Google actually announced the launch of the Structured Data Dashboard in Webmaster Tools last July. Our coverage of that is here.

Search Engine Land provides a link the an application for those who want to test the new tool. It appears that the test is just for “structured data error reporting”.

Presumably, this is part of the dashboard announced last year.

A couple weeks ago, Google launched some new tools for webmasters to provide it with structured data from their sites. They added support for new types of data with the Data Highlighter and launched the Structured Data Markup Helper.

“Rather than having some huge change that happens on a given day. You are more likely in the future to see Panda deployed gradually as we rebuild the index. So you are less likely to see these large scale sorts of changes,” Google’s Matt Cutts was quoted as saying.

Matt Cutts appeared in a discussion at SMX Advanced Tuesday evening in which he spoke a bit about Panda, among many other things.

Interviewer Danny Sullivan asked Cutts how many Panda updates there have been since Google stopped confirming them. His response was that they had one about a month and a half ago, but hadn’t updated it since then because they’re looking at pulling in a new signal that might help some people out of the gray zone.

This brings to mind recent words from Cutts in an industry-famous video in which he discussed numerous upcoming changes.

In that, Cutts talked about Google changing its update strategy for Panda. “We’ve also been looking at Panda, and seeing if we can find some additional signals (and we think we’ve got some) to help refine things for the sites that are kind of in the border zone – in the gray area a little bit. And so if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality, then that will help sites that have previously been affected (to some degree) by Panda.”

Panda will apparently be updated about once a month, and roll out slowly throughout the month.

“What happens is Google will run the update on a particular day, let’s say on the 4th of the month,” explains Barry Schwartz from SMX sister site, Search Engine Land. “Then Google will slowly push out that impact over 10 days or so through the month. Google will typically repeat this cycle over monthly.”

Hat tip to Matt McGee for liveblogging the discussion.

Cutts discusses a variety of things during the session, but he also announced that Google is now rolling out a new algorithm update focusing on spammy queries like “payday loans”. More on that here.

In the video, Cutts talked about working harder on types of queries that tend to draw a lot of spam.

“We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google, so, for example, there were some people complaining about searches like ‘payday loans’ on Google.co.uk,” he said. “So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more clean to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact on those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”

Cutts discussed the update a little at SMX Advanced. Barry Schwartz from the conference’s sister site, Search Engine Land, reports:

Matt Cutts explained this goes after unique link schemes, many of which are illegal. He also added this is a world-wide update and is not just being rolled out in the U.S. but being rolled out globally.

This update impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries were web spam is typically higher.

They’re calling it the “payday loan algorithm,” by the way (not sure if that’s official).

In another tweet, Cutts said that the update will be rolling out over the course of the next one to two months.

Image: Hersheys.com