WebProNews

Tag: algorithm changes

  • Google Will Announce The Long-Anticipated Penguin Update

    Google Will Announce The Long-Anticipated Penguin Update

    Well, here we are halfway through April, and still no sign of that long-anticipated Penguin update. Google has been hinting at rolling this thing out for many months. At one point it was supposed to happen before the end of last year, but it kept getting pushed back. Google just hasn’t been ready to launch it yet.

    Early last month, Google’s Gary Illyes, who had been hinting at date possibilities for quite some time, said he would no longer give any timeframes as he kept being wrong.

    We still don’t have a timeframe, but at least we’ll know when the time finally does come. Google’s John Mueller said in a Google+ hangout (via Search Engine Roundtable):

    I am pretty sure when we start rolling out [Penguin] we will have a message to kind of post but at the moment I don’t have anything specific to kind of announce.

    Waiting on Google to push the new Penguin has grown increasingly frustrating for businesses impacted by the update in the past, who have lost search visibility and traffic and have no way to recover until the next one comes. Once the next one does come, it will supposedly be continuous, meaning that sites will no longer have to wait so long to recover in the future if they make the necessary adjustments.

    Read this interview Illyes did with Stone Temple a while back for more comments on the the pending update.

  • No Telling When Google Penguin Will Return

    No Telling When Google Penguin Will Return

    What once seemed so close now seems so far. In other words, for some SEOs and webmasters who have been patiently (or impatiently in some cases) waiting, that glimpse of a light at the end of the tunnel has just faded from view. It’s possible that its visibility is just being clouded and that the light is still close, but things just got a lot darker.

    We’re talking of course about Penguin. Perhaps this is a little dramatic, but it’s clear from reactions around the web that people are growing more and more frustrated the longer Google takes to push out the update it has been promising for so long.

    Are you anxiously awaiting Google’s next Penguin, or have you simply moved on with your life? Discuss.

    Penguin will turn 4 years old this April. The update has been the bane of many SEOs’ and webmasters’ existence for all this time, and things really haven’t gotten a whole lot better for some of them, despite promises from Google.

    The reason the update exists – to fight webspam – is important, and it’s certainly a problem that needed to be addressed in Google’s search results, but there’s hardly been a consensus on how well it’s been executed, and a great deal of frustration has lingered, largely due to how hard it can be to recover from getting hit by the update, even when the necessary changes have been made to a site.

    The reason it is so hard to recover is that Google refreshes Penguin so infrequently. Affected sites must wait until Google releases Penguin again before they can recover, and that could take months. If you’re trying to run a business and rely on Google for traffic, it can feel like an eternity, and that’s exactly how it’s currently feeling for some.

    Google said back in June that it was working on a new version of Penguin that will run continuously (meaning webmasters and SEOs won’t have to wait for long periods of time for a chance to recover). At the time, they indicated this would be months off. The last Penguin update had been launched the previous Q4.

    In July, they said it was still months away. In September, it was expected to hit before the end of the year. This was still the case in late October.

    In November, Google confirmed the update will be a “huge” change, but in December, they said “With the holidays upon us, it looks like the penguins won’t march until next year.”

    It was interesting that they cited the holidays as having something to do with it because after that it was expected to come in January (following the holidays), but that didn’t happen either. Google did, however, say last month that the updated timeframe on Penguin was now “this quarter”.

    Now, even that’s questionable. We’re not halfway through February, and Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a tweet from Google’s Gary Illyes indicating that he has no idea if the Penguin update is still likely to come this quarter.

    It’s worth noting that Illyes isn’t actually on the team that works on Penguin even if he generally serves as one of the main messengers to webmasters.

    If this uncertainty wasn’t enough, Schwartz points to another tweet from Google’s Zineb Ait, who now says they’re aiming the roll-out at “as soon as it is ready,” and who knows when that will be?

    Will it make this quarter? Will it make Penguin’s 4th birthday in April? Will it make it this year?

    How do webmasters feel about this continued delay? Well, suffice it to say, we’re seeing expletives thrown around pretty loosely.

    When do you think Google will finally push out this update? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Facebook News Feed Gets More Ranking Adjustments

    Facebook News Feed Gets More Ranking Adjustments

    Facebook is messing with the News Feed again. This is an ongoing thing that will never change, but Pages will always face the possibility of increased or decreased reach and referral traffic based on the social network’s whims.

    How has your Page adjusted to Facebook News Feed changes over the past year? Let us know in the comments.

    In its first “News Feed FYI” post of the year, Facebook announced some new changes to how it ranks content in users’ News Feeds. After some surveys and research, Facebook has decided that it will now aim to rank more highly stories users are both likely to rate highly if asked and likely to engage with.

    In other words, the News Feed ranking update will rank stories higher if Facebook thinks the users might take action on it and want to see near the top.

    “The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you,” says Facebook in a blog post. “The actions people take on Facebook—liking, clicking, commenting or sharing a post—are historically some of the main factors considered to determine what to show at the top of your News Feed. But these factors don’t always tell us the whole story of what is most meaningful to you.”

    “As part of our ongoing effort to improve News Feed, we ask over a thousand people to rate their experience every day and tell us how we can improve the content they see when they check Facebook — we call this our Feed Quality Panel,” it adds. “We also survey tens of thousands of people around the world each day to learn more about how well we’re ranking each person’s feed. We ask people to rate each story from one to five stars in response to the question “how much did you want to see this story in your News Feed?” From this research using a representative sample of people, we are able to better understand which stories people would be interested in seeing near the top of their News Feed even if they choose not to click, like or comment on them — and use this information to make ranking changes.”

    The company says it saw through its research that people tend to have a better News Feed experience when the stories they see at the top are stories that BOTH likely to rate highly if asked and likely to engage with. As a result, News Feed will no look at BOTH the probability you that users would want to see the story at the top of their feed and the probability that they will like, comment on, click, or share a story. It will rank things higher when they meet both criteria.

    As with any algorithm update, Pages face the possibility of seeing increased or decreased referral traffic. In this case, Facebook says most pages won’t notice much of a difference, but you might see a decline if the rate at which your stories are clicked doesn’t match how much people report wanting to see your story near the top.

    Facebook says the impact of the changes will vary depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity.

    Facebook also says Pages should avoid encouraging people to take action because it will only cause temporary spikes that will be “rebalanced” over time. It says the “majority of Pages” won’t see an impact on reach or referral traffic in any “meaningful” way.

    The company says that as the change takes effect, it will learn about possible factors or posting strategies that may lead to increases or decreases in referral traffic, and that it will communicate with partners about these findings.

    So what if you’re not a partner (which you most likely aren’t)? Well, you can keep an eye out for updates on the News Feed best practices page in in the News, Media and Publishing Facebook group.

    Facebook released its financials and held a conference call to discuss its business last week. They company didn’t have a lot to say about News Feed other than its ad efforts and touting of video performance.

    They are expanding live video streaming to the News Feed for all users, so there’s that. According to recent research from Locowise, videos are already getting the best reach in News Feed as well as the second best engagement rate (behind images).

    This is certainly something to think about as you plan your strategy for the weeks and months ahead, considering Facebook’s latest News Feed update.

    What do you think about the new update? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Facebook

  • Google Core Update Winners And Losers Analyzed

    Google Core Update Winners And Losers Analyzed

    About a week ago, Google launched a big update to its core algorithm, catching the attention of many webmasters and SEOs. It was also revealed that Panda is now part of Google’s core algorithm, but consensus is that this particular update wasn’t Panda related.

    Searchmetrics, which often compiles lists of “winners” and “losers” from significant Google updates based on their search visibility, has released some findings on this one.

    The biggest loser, according to the report was TheAtlantic.com, which it says has primarily lost with old URLs that ranked for brand keywords and entities.

    Screen Shot 2016-01-15 at 10.13.44 AM

    Searchmetrics founder and CTO Marcus Tober said in a blog post, “It is apparent that many loser domains are classic print publishers and their losses in rankings mainly stem from older content pieces. Additional publishers who lost rankings are newyorker.com, vanityfair.com, arstechnica.com, fastcompany.com and economist.com.”

    The firm found gains for sites with “current” or “holistic”content, referring to those covering a topic comprehensively.

    “One of the top winners from this update according to Searchmetrics’ analysis is gq.com,” a spokesperson for Searchmetrics tells us. “On gq.com the biggest winning URL is a comprehensive article about NFL star Tom Brady. The article contains photos and a video and a lot of text (more than 3000 words including an interview).”

    Other winners included time.com, qz.com, howstuffworks.com, politico.com, and inquisitr.com. Educational game sites like brainpop.com and mathplayground.com also gained.

    “According to Searchmetrics, whether a publisher or brands won or lost for a specific keyword is dependent on the individual QDF (query deserves freshness) score that Google calculates – this is linked to whether the topic/search relates to current news and events and user behavior, particularly search volume,” the spokesperson says. “For topics that are current, publishers with current content witnessed visibility gains.”

    Searchmetrics notes that the trend is not noticeable in international markets yet, suggesting the update hasn’t rolled out on a global level so far.

    Find the full analysis here.

    Images via Thinkstock, Searchmetrics

  • An Important Change To Google’s Panda

    An Important Change To Google’s Panda

    The Google Panda Update has been around for five years and has dominated more headlines than probably any other Google algorithm change over that time. It was so big that it transcended industry press, making headlines from more mainstream media outlets. An important change has been made with Panda, and it affects how Google utilizes it from here on out.

    Has Panda improved Google’s search results over the past five years in your opinion? Let us know what you think.

    Webmasters and SEOs saw some big changes in Google rankings late last week. Some speculated that it was Google finally unleashing the “huge” Penguin update it has been promising (but delaying) for months. It was not. Google confirmed to inquiring minds on Twitter that it was a core update and not Penguin-related.

    As of this writing, we’re still waiting on Penguin. For a significant part of 2015, we heard it would likely happen before the end of the year, but it never came. Last month, Google admitted it wasn’t going to happen, hinting that it would likely come in January, but even that was not set in stone.

    Last week, Google Google’s Gary Illyes, who often responds to webmaster questions, including those about Penguin (even though he’s not on the actual team that works on it), said he hadn’t seen any experiment results from the upcoming update yet:

    As you probably know by now, this Penguin update is supposed to go real-time, so it will continuously update without webmasters having to wait forever for a refresh if they happen to be impacted by it and need to make changes to their site to recover visibility in search results.

    So this most recent update wasn’t Penguin. It was a core update. On a related note, it has come out (and been confirmed by Google) that Panda is actually now part of the core update. This means that there will no longer be specifically Panda updates.

    This week, Jennifer Slegg at The SEM Post released “Understanding Google Panda: Definitive Algo Guide for SEOs“. This features a notable quote from Google:

    “Panda is an algorithm that’s applied to sites overall and has become one of our core ranking signals. It measures the quality of a site, which you can read more about in our guidelines. Panda allows Google to take quality into account and adjust ranking accordingly.”

    Also noteworthy is that Slegg’s guide was endorsed by Illyes, practically (for all intents and purposes) equating it to the official go-to document on the subject. No, Google didn’t quite say that, but with this kind of endorsement, it seems just about as good:

    “When Panda first launched (and initially known as Farmer, for those who want to go digging through the archives) was a separate spam filter,” writes Slegg. “This meant that it was a filter that was applied to the search results after the core ranking algo as a completely separate piece. But now, Panda is rolled into the core ranking algo.”

    “This also means that core ranking algo changes, such as the one we have been seeing over the last few days that Google confirmed is NOT Penguin, could technically be Panda, although we have no confirmation of whether it is or isn’t,” she adds. “But now there is a possibility of any core ranking changes could be connected to Panda.”

    It’s interesting that Panda has made it to this stage after roughly five years of existence. From the early days, it’s been a controversial update. It’s affected many businesses for better or for worse (and let’s be honest, we mostly just hear about the worse), but now Google feels confident enough in Panda’s effectiveness to “bake” it right into the secret sauce.

    Panda has always been about rewarding high quality content. Don’t forget, you always have this guidance Google provided after the initial Panda roll-out to help you assess your site and how Google might view it in terms of quality.

    Do you think Google baking Panda into the core algorithm is a smart move? Has Panda done its job better as time has progressed? Share your thoughts.

  • Google Penguin Update Still On For This Year

    Google Penguin Update Still On For This Year

    The SEO and webmaster communities have been waiting for Google to launch a new Penguin refresh for a long time. Google has been promising a new version that will update in real time, so those impacted by it won’t have to wait for Google to push another one to have any hope of recovery. It will instead be constantly updating.

    About a month ago, Google’s John Mueller said he expected Penguin to be here before the end of the year. Google’s Gary Illyes said it was in the “foreseeable future” and that he “hoped” it would be here before the end of the year.

    Illyes has since been talking about it a little on Twitter with curious parties. Last week, he tweeted (via Search Engine Roundtable) that it’s still not ready for primetime.

    It does look like the update is still on track for this year, however. Illeys tweeted that he still expects as much.

    Illyes also indicated on Twitter this week that it’s not too late for Penguin to acknowledge disavow files.

    As Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points out, however, if everything goes according to plan, it should never again be too late because the update will continue in real time once it finally comes.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Don’t Do This If You’ve Been Hit By Google’s Panda Update

    Don’t Do This If You’ve Been Hit By Google’s Panda Update

    Google’s Panda update has been around since February 2011 and continues to wreak havoc on websites when it finds content issues. Sometimes it’s not clear that the site suffering Panda’s wrath actually deserved to be algorithmically penalized. Either way, some sites have been hit really hard by it over the years, and one tactic that has sometimes been employed has been to delete content. Don’t do that.

    Do you think deleting content is a good idea when you’re trying to recover from Panda? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Perhaps the most famous victim of Panda over the years has been Demand Media – particularly its eHow property. The site was largely considered to be a content farm, which is precisely the type of site expected to be targeted by the algorithm update. Even though eHow escaped Panda when it first launched, the algorithm eventually caught up to it in a big way. In an effort to recover its Google traffic, Demand Media redesigned the site and deleted a ton of content of questionable quality. In 2012, it looked like things were looking good again for the site, but that didn’t last. The company has since had to become less reliant on Google as such a big chunk of its traffic.

    These days, you can Google “how to fix a toilet,” which would be a prime example of the type of query you might legitimately expect eHow to rank for, and eHow is nowhere in the top results.

    Google is now flat out saying that you might not want to delete content in response to Panda. Google’s Gary Illyes said on Twitter, “We don’t recommend removing content in general for Panda, rather add more highQ stuff.”

    SEO Barry Schwartz, who first reported on Illyes’ comments, says, “Now Gary is saying generally it does not make sense to remove content. Generally you should improve your site. But the sites that are hit badly by Panda, often have serious structural issues with the site where they can consolidate content and remove a lot of the pages. I’d say generally, removing or consolidating content is the approach most SEOs take to tackle Panda issues. But Gary is saying otherwise.”

    Illyes went on in a series of tweets to say, “We see way too many people cut the good [content]. Careful what you trim…use search analytics: look for pages that don’t satisfy users’ information need for the queries they rank for…Thin content: make it better, make it…thick and ADD more highQ stuff….Don’t remove content someone might find useful…What you really need is content created with care for the users, that’s it.”

    In other words, just avoid getting rid of stuff and focus on improving the stuff you already have. Depending on how big your site is, that could be easier said than done, but that is the guidance you’re getting right from Google itself.

    Illyes did have additional advice at PubCon. Jennifer Slegg reports (via Search Engine Roundtable):

    While responding, Illyes did make an interesting recommendation for those who are removing thin content for Panda reasons. Rather than simply use a 404 or a 410, he strongly recommends that webmasters should use noindex on those pages, ensure those pages are listed in the sitemap or add them to the sitemap and then submit the sitemap to Google.

    Of course Google has a list of 23 questions to ask yourself about your site and content when it comes to high quality versus thin:

    1. Would you trust the information presented in this article?

    2. Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

    3. Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

    4. Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

    5. Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

    6. Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

    7. Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

    8. Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

    9. How much quality control is done on content?

    10. Does the article describe both sides of a story?

    11. Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

    12. Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?

    13. Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?

    14. For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

    15. Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

    16. Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

    17. Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

    18. Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

    19. Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

    20. Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

    21. Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

    22. Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

    23. Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

    These have been around for years, but it never hurts to take a look again to remind yourself just what Google is looking for when it evaluates quality.

    The latest Panda refresh is still rolling out. Illyes appeared at SMX East last week and said this is the case. Google always said it would be a slow roll-out, and it wasn’t kidding. It began in mid-July. If you were waiting to recover after being hit by a previous Panda update/refresh, you may still have a shot (assuming that you’ve taken steps to fix the problems that got you hit by the update in the first place).

    Penguin is expected to return before the end of the year.

    After seeing these comments from Google, do you still think there’s a case for removing content to recover from Panda? Share your thoughts in the comments.

  • Google Tweaks Algorithm To Better Handle Hacked Spam

    Google Tweaks Algorithm To Better Handle Hacked Spam

    Google announced that it has begun rolling out a series of algorithmic changes aimed at better handling hacked spam in search results. The company says it is “aggressively” targeting hacked spam to protect users and webmasters alike.

    “A huge amount of legitimate sites are hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behavior, such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs, etc.,” says Google software engineer Ning Song. “Website owners that don’t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked. This can include government sites, universities, small business, company websites, restaurants, hobby organizations, conferences, etc. Spammers and cyber-criminals purposely seek out those sites and inject pages with malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines.”

    Google says as it rolls out the new algorithms, users will notice that for some queries, only the “most relevant” results are shown, reducing the amount of results shown altogether.

    “This is due to the large amount of hacked spam being removed, and should improve in the near future,” says Song. “We are continuing tuning our systems to weed out the bad content while retaining the organic, legitimate results.”

    The updates will eventually impact about 5% of queries (depending on language), Google says.

    Images via Google

  • Google Reportedly Adds Another App Indexing-Related Ranking Signal

    Google Reportedly Adds Another App Indexing-Related Ranking Signal

    Back in February, Google announced two major mobile ranking signals back in February. The one that got the most attention and the nickname “Mobilegeddon” was a site’s “mobile-friendliness”. The other one was app indexing. Google would show content from apps to users when they had the apps installed.

    READ: How To Set Up App Indexing For Ranking In Google

    In April, Google announced that it had indexed 30 billion links within apps and that it would start showing Android users apps in search results even if the user doesn’t already have the app installed.

    In July, we learned that Etsy sellers were seeing significant benefits from the signal, and they’re surely not alone.

    Now, Google reportedly adding a new ranking factor for apps that use the App Indexing API. This was announced at the SMX East conference. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reports:

    On the panel, Mariya Moeva from Google announced several things around App Indexing, but got everyone’s attention pretty quickly when she announced there is an additional ranking boost, on top of the original app ranking boost, for using the App Indexing API.

    Why is there a new boost? Mariya explained that with the new API, Google is able to know start and end times of use of the app and pages within the app, amongst other important data points.

    At first, Google only made app indexing available on Android, but in May, they started indexing some iOS app content.

    This week, the company posted new documentation for that, which you can find here.

    Image via Google

  • Google Penguin Update Expected Before End Of Year

    Google Penguin Update Expected Before End Of Year

    As of mid-July, Google was sending the message that a new launch of its Penguin update was still months away. Now, over two months later, it’s getting closer. Just how close we don’t know exactly, but from he sound of it, it is likely to drop by the end of the year.

    The topic came up in the latest Google Webmaster Central office hours hangout with Google Webmaster Trends analyst.

    Mueller says if he had to guess, he’d say Penguin would launch before the end of the year, but obviously that’s not set in stone. Barry Schwartz transcribes:

    I don’t feel comfortable making that far of a future decision. So I would guess but… it is really hard to say.
     
    Sometimes we see things where we have all the internal information all lined up, we’re going to launch this in two or three days and everything is going to be awesome. And then something pops up and then we say we have to fix this problem first or there’s something with this data, and it gets delayed for a couple of days or maybe a couple of weeks. And these things always come up. And it’s something that I think it’s something that we need to make sure we respond to, and we don’t just roll out something that isn’t completely ready. So from that point of view, if it’s more than a month out, then, we can’t really say anything.

    Meanwhile, webmasters who were penalized by the update (either legitimately or otherwise) have to wait to see if they can recover.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Is Google’s Latest Panda Refresh Too Slow?

    Is Google’s Latest Panda Refresh Too Slow?

    Last Friday, Google confirmed that it had finally begun rolling out a refresh to its infamous Panda algorithm the prior weekend. It’s still rolling out as the company said it would take “a few months” to complete.

    Are Google’s Panda refreshes too slow and far between? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    The update, Google’s Gary Illyes said, affects 2 – 3% of queries.

    The refresh is particularly noteworthy because it took Google so long to actually launch it despite telling webmasters it’s trying to do these things more quickly. And that’s important because websites that are impacted have to wait for a refresh for a chance to recover any lost visibility in the search engines.

    The previous Panda refresh came as long ago as October. At that point, Google indicated Panda would pretty much continue indefinitely. It would seem that this wasn’t quite the case, even if that is still Google’s ultimate goal.

    While you may have no sympathy for sites that are negatively impacted by Panda if they’re producing the type of content that the update was designed to target (thin, low-quality content), there are cases when the update also negatively impacts higher quality stuff. In those cases, the long wait for a chance to recover is a little more disturbing.

    A few years ago, for example, IT discussion community DaniWeb was hit by the algorithm despite being a forum with a solid user base and being the kind of site that provides helpful answers for real problems that people have.

    Not even a popular site like Metafilter is immune to Google’s wrath.

    A more recent and maybe even a better example would be Search Engine Roundtable. This is one of the go-to industry blogs for SEO with content exclusively from a long-term veteran of the industry, often with direct quotes from Google itself. It’s not the type of site you would expect Panda to go after, yet last October, that’s exactly what happened. Under the new refresh, the site is indeed recovering even if gradually.

    Ironically, it is the author of this very site, Barry Schwartz, that broke (and confirmed) the news that Google finally launched its refresh.

    Schwartz is seeing continued improvement since the latest refresh, he’s still waiting to get back to where he was before the Panda hit in October.

    “There is plenty of room to grow but hopefully as the new Panda scores hit all my pages, recovery will come back in line with what it was before Panda 4.1 hit this site,” he writes.

    Despite Schwartz’s reports, some questioned the authenticity of the news of a Panda refresh actually occurring, but Illyes confirmed it directly on Twitter:

    It’s also a global roll-out, by the way:

    With this one being such a slow rollout, it’s hard (and unnecessary) to say who the real winners and losers are at this point. It’s going to be a while before we really have an idea. In fact, Searchmetrics, which regularly publishes lists of apparent winners and losers for major Google updates, says there’s no pattern yet.

    “It is not yet possible to detect a clear pattern regarding the winners and losers in the rankings, nor is it possible to correlate these results with specific aspects of the Panda update,” said Searchmetrics founder Marcus Tober. “In this regard, we expect to see changes in the SERPs over the coming weeks. We will continue to observe the data and keep you updated on this page about the effects of the Panda update.”

    In the meantime, it might not be a bad idea to review Google’s 23 questions you should ask yourself about the quality of the content on your site.

    Google has said in the past that Panda should help small businesses, but it’s unclear to what extent this has actually happened. We tend to hear more about the businesses that get hurt by it (which are sometimes forced to reduce their staff).

    Have you been waiting for this latest Panda refresh to come? Have you been impacted by it one way or another so far? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Google Says Penguin Refresh Is Still Months Away

    Google Says Penguin Refresh Is Still Months Away

    Early last month, Google provided webmasters and SEOs with an update on what was going on with Panda and Penguin. The former was said to be coming in two to four weeks from that time, but that never happened. It’s still expected soon, but appears to have been delayed for technical reasons.

    Penguin, on the other hand, is still quite a ways off. This is of course contradictory to the message Google has given people in the past in that Penguin would run more quickly.

    Google’s Gary Illyes indicated on Twitter that a Penguin refresh is still months away (via Search Engine Roundtable):

    He also indicated that it’s still Google’s goal to make these things come more quickly:

    The last Penguin update came in October, so we’re approaching a year.

    Penguin had its three-year anniversary in April. As we noted at the time, the algorithm continues to frustrate webmasters, and incredible amount of time it takes Google to do refreshes is a major source of that frustration. It no doubt sucks having to wait a year to try to recover your search visibility.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Facebook News Feed Ranking Now Takes These Video Actions Into Account

    Facebook announced a new change to how it shows content in News Feed on Monday. It will now start taking into account the actions users take on videos when determining when to show a video to people.

    Specifically, it will look at when users choose to turn on sound, make a video full screen, or enable high definition. The thinking is that even if a user doesn’t like, share, or comment on a video, actions such as these are a good indication that the video is of interest to them.

    “We have previously made updates to News Feed that take into account whether someone has watched a video and for how long they watched it, so people who tend to watch videos in News Feed will see more videos higher up in their News Feed, and people who watch fewer videos will see videos further down,” Facebook engineers Meihong Wang and Yue Zhuo say in a joint blog post. “With this update, we want to show people more of the types of videos they want to see, and fewer of the videos they don’t.”

    “Many people have told us that they enjoy watching videos in News Feed but don’t always feel inclined to like, comment or share them,” they add. “For example, you may have found a video from a nonprofit you follow on Facebook to be really informative and you’re glad you saw it but it’s not something you felt inclined to like, comment on or share more broadly.”

    Long stor short, if you take any of the actions on a video as described above, Facebook is more likely to show you similar types of videos higher up in your News Feed going forward.

    The change has begun rolling out, and will continue to do so over the coming weeks. The company says it doesn’t expect Pages to see significant changes in distribution because of the update.

    Last week, Facebook announced the addition of a new Videos tab to Page Insights, enabling Page admins to see views and 30-second views at the Page level, top videos within a certain date range, and metrics for videos shared from other Pages.

    Two weeks ago, Facebook announced a News Feed change that takes into account how long users look at a story.

  • Google Algorithm Update (‘Colossus’ or ‘News-Wave’) Google Trends-Related?

    Google Algorithm Update (‘Colossus’ or ‘News-Wave’) Google Trends-Related?

    On June 17, Google’s algorithm seemed to get a mysterious jolt with a mysterious update that Google deemed a routine, non-major change. Google specifically said the update was not related to Panda, Penguin, or HTTPS. They wouldn’t comment further.

    They just said, “We’re always making improvements to our search algorithms and the web is constantly evolving. We’re going to continue to work on improvements across the board.”

    According to MozCast, which measures the “temperature” of patterns of the Google algorithm, the update came in at 101.8°F. For comparison, the first Penguin update only registered at 93.1°.

    Since initial reports on the update, Searchmetrics has analyzed it a bit, and found that news sites are benefiting most, and that it appears to be related to trending keywords and real time hot topics. Top winners, according to the company, were WSJ.com, USAToday.com, Dailymail.co.uk, BusinessInsider.com, Time.com, NBCNews.com, LATimes.com, NYPost.com, TechCrunch.com,FoxNews.com, Steampowered.com, BizJournals.com, TheVerge.com, Fortune.com, Gizmodo.com, Dict.cc, HollywoodLife.com, TechTarget.com, and WindowsPhone.com.

    Most of these sites publish “fresh and newsworthy” content on a regular basis, as Searchmetrics notes.

    The update coincides with a major refresh of Google Trends, which now provides data in real time, and takes into account trends on YouTube and Google News. Google hasn’t confirmed the connection here, but it seems like the most likely explanation at this point.

    As Searchmetrics notes, Google also has the Twitter fire hose now, so that’s more real time data it can use. It’s unclear whether or not that’s connected. The only use of this data that has actually been announced comes in the form of tweets appearing in Google’s mobile results, but it’s probably safe to say that Google can tap into this for other reasons, that have bigger implications than that specific feature.

    When the update was spotted by Moz, they dubbed it the Colossus update. Searchmetrics is calling it the seemingly more fitting “News-wave” update. I don’t know if either name will stick, but it does appear that freshness is once again a major priority of the Google algorithm. This has been taken too far by Google in the past, in my opinion, so we’ll see how it goes this time.

    Interestingly, Searchmetrics reports that Wikipedia has seen a bit of drop in SEO visibility as a result of the update. There was some speculation initially that the shakeup in tools like Mozcast was related to Wikipedia switching to HTTPS. Since Wikipedia is usually the top result for many pages, it any changes with the site could significantly change SERPs in general. According to Searchmetrics, however, Wikipedia’s placement has dropped a little due to news sites ranking for some terms.

  • Google Algorithm Gets Mysterious Jolt

    Google Algorithm Gets Mysterious Jolt

    Google changes its algorithm constantly, so an update is hardly newsworthy unless it causes major changes. Something pretty big apparently happened with the algorithm on June 17 – so big that Moz is calling it the “Colossus” update.

    I don’t know if that name’s going to catch on or not, but according to its MozCast product, which measures the “temperature” of patterns of the Google algorithm, the update came in at 101.8°F. For comparison, the first Penguin update only registered at 93.1°.

    temp

    Google has confirmed an update, and said that it’s not Panda, Penguin, or HTTPS-related. Other than that, they’re really not giving out much in the way of details.

    Search Engine Land shares this statement from the company: “This is not a Panda update. As you know, we’re always making improvements to our search algorithms and the web is constantly evolving. We’re going to continue to work on improvements across the board.

    SEL’s Barry Schwartz has an interesting theory in that the major change in temperature could have come from Wikipedia going HTTPS which the Wikimedia Foundation recently announced. The thinking is that this could have a substantial impact given that Wikipedia ranks at the top of search results for so many queries.

    Either way, Google gets updated constantly, and it’s possible that they didn’t really do anything all that significant this time.

    Images via Moz, Thinkstock

  • Google Update Bumped Down Half Of Pages It Threatened To

    Google Update Bumped Down Half Of Pages It Threatened To

    Google released an algorithm update on April 21 that began taking the mobile-friendliness of a site into account when ranking that site in search results. It’s still just one of many signals Google uses, and it’s not as significant as relevance or quality, but it is clearly a factor Google is taking very seriously as more searches are performed from mobile devices than on desktop now.

    The update was largely known as “Mobilegeddon” before it actually launched, but that name has been heavily questioned since then as the severity of its effects have been debated.

    Was your site affected by Mobilegeddon? Have you seen any impact as time has gone on? Do you think the whole thing was overblown? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    As Google’s John Mueller put it, “While it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes.”

    Last week, we looked at a report from Koozai, which polled 2000 SMEs and found that 45% saw ranking changes, and 41% of those were concerned that they had seen a drop in rankings by at least three places and had noticed a drop in traffic as a result. Some of these saw as much as a 50% decline. 27% said they had seen a drop in rankings even though they had optimized for mobile. 37% were said to be concerned that the update might have an impact on sales, while 44% were not worried as they said most of their sales came from desktops.

    12% were apparently completely oblivious to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool as they said they didn’t even know whether their websites were optimized for mobile or not. 49% said they didn’t know if sales on their desktops sites had initially come from visitors viewing their products or services on mobile.

    Since then, we looked at a poll from Search Engine Roundtable based on a thousand responses. In that, only 11% said the update resulted in changes in their traffic or rankings, while on overwhelming 65% provided an absolute “no” response. 13% said “unsure,” and 11% said, “sometimes”.

    The poll began on April 28, which was one week after the update launched.

    “I don’t think the poll would change much today, in fact, I think that 65% number would be closer to 75% or 80%,” writes Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz.

    Now Eric Enge’s Stone Temple Consulting has some research out looking at the effects of the update. According to that, nearly half (46%) of non-mobile-friendly URLs that help top 10 spots on April 17 lost ranking, while fewer than 20% gained. Other findings as relayed by Stone Temple include:

    – For URLs that dropped in ranking, the drop for non-friendly URLs was more pronounced – an average of 2 spots – than for mobile-friendly URLs – average of .25 spots.

    – Another significant effect was that URLs being favored for mobile-friendly sites are often different from the ones that ranked earlier.

    – Overall, the study found a 1.3% increase in mobile-friendly URLs in search results. While this does not approach the impact of Panda or Penguin algorithm updates, this is the first such change by Google, and we expect more changes and an increased impact over time favoring mobile-friendly sites.

    Enge had this to say in summary:

    In summary, I’d suggest that the impact of this release was indeed significantly bigger than originally met the eye. The trade press did not see it as large because of the slow roll out, and the intervening Search Quality Update.

    In addition, this is likely just the start of what Google plans to do with this algorithm. It is typical for Google to test some things and see how they work. Once they have tuned it, and gain confidence on how the algo works on the entire web as a data set, they can turn up the volume and make the impact significantly higher.

    It’s my expectation that they will do that. In the long run, don’t be surprised if the impact of this algorithm becomes even greater, and that people will stop debating whether or not it was greater than Panda or Penguin.

    Read the whole report here.

    In other Google algorithm update news, the company says a Panda update will likely come within the next four weeks, and they’re still working on making Penguin run continuously.

    Check out our recent discussion with Enge regarding Google’s partnership with Twitter here.

    Now that it’s been well over a month and counting, what do you think of the mobile-friendly update’s impact on search results? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Image via Google

  • Google Updates Webmasters On Panda and Penguin

    Google Updates Webmasters On Panda and Penguin

    At the SMX Advanced conference on Tuesday, Google’s Gary Illyes made some comments about what webmasters will be able to expect from Google with regards to its Panda and Penguin updates in the near future.

    April saw Google’s transparency being called into question again in light of mixed messages it had been sending about both updates – both of which can have devastating impacts on businesses who meet their negative sides. Google had suggested that having to wait months between the updates would not happen any longer, but later indicated the opposite. This matters because businesses and websites impacted by them have to wait until Google runs them again before they have any hope of getting their search rankings back after making changes to try to get back in Google’s good graces.

    So what’s the latest?

    SMX-affiliated industry blog Search Engine Land recaps Illyes’ comments on both algorithms. He reportedly said that the next Panda update will happen in the next two to four weeks. SEL’s Barry Schwartz reports:

    Illyes referred to it multiple times as a data refresh, not an algorithmic change. So sites that have been suffering from this algorithm may see a recovery in the near future. However, not all sites will see a recovery: Some may not recover, and new sites may also be hit by this data refresh.

    Illyes also reportedly reiterated that Panda still requires manual updates, so it won’t run by itself over time. It sounds like webmaters and businesses will just have to continue to wait on Google for a chance to recover, and it also sounds like this may never change.

    Regarding Penguin, Illyes apparently didn’t indicate that an update or refresh is immediately on the horizon, but said they are trying to make that one run continuously, which would be great news for those impacted by it. Unfortunately, it will probably be “months” before that happens.

    The last Penguin update was launched in Q4, and Google indicated that it would pretty much continue indefinitely. It would seem that this wasn’t quite the case, even if that is still Google’s ultimate goal.

    Image via @mattcutts

  • Poll: Only 11% Noticed Traffic Changes From Google Update

    Poll: Only 11% Noticed Traffic Changes From Google Update

    Another survey has been conducted regarding Google’s recent mobile-friendly update, which prior to release, had often been billed as “Mobilegeddon”. After its release it quickly became clear that it was anything but.

    Search Engine Roundtable released results from a poll it ran after getting a thousand responses. The source of the poll is worth taking into consideration as we’re talking about a widely read industry blog with readers comprised of those very much in the know about SEO and search-related happenings.

    The poll found that only 11% said the update resulted in changes in their traffic or rankings, while on overwhelming 65% provided an absolute “no” response. 13% said “unsure,” and 11% said, “sometimes”.

    The poll began on April 28, which was one week after the update launched.

    “I don’t think the poll would change much today, in fact, I think that 65% number would be closer to 75% or 80%,” writes Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz.

    Last week, we looked at some recent findings from a Koozai of 2000 small-to-medium-sized enterprises across the United States, which indicated that most agreed the “Mobilegeddon” label was overhyped and unhelpful.

    Still, 45% of businesses surveyed claimed they had experienced changes to their rankings or traffic as a result of the update, and 41% of those were concerned that they had seen a drop in rankings by at least three places and had noticed a drop in traffic as a result. Some of these saw as much as a 50% decline. 27% said they had seen a drop in rankings even though they had optimized for mobile. 37% were said to be concerned that the update might have an impact on sales, while 44% were not worried as they said most of their sales came from desktops.

    12% were apparently completely oblivious to Google’s mobile-friendly test tool as they said they didn’t even know whether their websites were optimized for mobile or not. 49% said they didn’t know if sales on their desktops sites had initially come from visitors viewing their products or services on mobile.

    “While it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes,” Google’s John Mueller said a while back. “So that is something that affects a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results completely if they are not mobile friendly.”

    While mobile-friendliness is certainly a signal you’ll want to take advantage of, Google also launched another mobile ranking factor even before that. It now uses App Indexing as a signal, and last week, announced the expansion of App Indexing to iOS after previously only offering it for Android.

    Here’s a Google I/O talk about that you’ll probably want to watch.

    Here’s how to make your site mobile-friendly, according to Google.

    Image via Google

  • Mobile-Friendly Update Bing Announced In November Still Hasn’t Rolled Out

    Mobile-Friendly Update Bing Announced In November Still Hasn’t Rolled Out

    In November, Bing principal program manager Mir Rosenberg wrote in a blog post, “We started probing web pages for ‘mobile friendliness’ and ranking web pages accordingly on our users’ mobile phones.”

    Bing had begun using mobile friendliness as a ranking signal for a “small but steadily growing percentage” of mobile queries. Apparently that growth was pretty slow, as a full roll-out is still only on the horizon.

    In a new blog post, Bing’s Shyam Jayasankar announced that Bing “will be rolling out mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking.” Apparently the older announcement was just about future plans, thought it didn’t make it sound that way. Either way, like Google, Bing also cares if your site is mobile-friendly.

    Last month, Bing began labeling results as “mobile-friendly” just like Google started doing last year as it prepared to get sites ready for the algorithmic adjustment.

    Here’s an example of how results might change as a result of the mobile-friendly signal:

    Bing isn’t saying exactly when the update will fully roll out, but you probably won’t need to worry about it too much if you’ve already made your site mobile-friendly for Google users or are in the process of doing so.

    As an added bonus, Bing is working on a tool to help webmasters analyze webpages using its mobile-friendliness classifier. This will become available in a few week. Or you could probably just use Google’s.

    More about Bing’s mobile-friendly efforts here and here.

    Google’s mobile-friendly update didn’t have quite the major impact on search results that many expected. Will Bing’s?

  • Was Google’s Update Really Mobilegeddon?

    Was Google’s Update Really Mobilegeddon?

    It turns out Google’s mobile-friendly update didn’t quite have the doomsday impact that some thought it might. I can’t say I’m shocked. While it’s clearly a significant update, these cries of “mobilegeddon” always felt a little sensational to me. While the importance of having a mobile-friendly site can’t be overstated, the fact is that many sites were already mobile-friendly, and it’s still just one of many signals Google uses in its algorithm.

    Did you notice any significant impact from the update? Let us know in the comments.

    The roll-out of the update completed about a week ago. At the time, Google’s Gary Illyes implied that the amount of sites impacted was relatively low.

    This came with the caveat that while the update had completed its roll-out, Google still hadn’t indexed everything yet.

    This week, 3Q Digital put out a report looking at the effects of the update using the Searchmetrics Mobile SEO Visibility Metric and comparing it with Sessions recorded in Google Analytics. These were the main takeaways:

    – The sites that showed an increase in their Mobile SEO Visibility were leveraging site builds for dedicated mobile sites and responsive designed sites

    – The one dynamically served site hasn’t seen clear benefit nor any detriment to its Mobile SEO Visibility levels

    – Traffic levels for all sites do not yet show clear increased levels

    – We’re only a little over a week since the update was announced; there’s a good chance we’ll begin to see latent traffic increases towards the beginning to middle of May – and beyond

    Google’s John Mueller weighed in on the lack of a major impact from the update in Webmaster Central hangout (via Search Engine Roundtable).

    Here’s what he had to say on the subject:

    I think one of the difficulties here is that it is a very broad change. So while it’s had a fairly big impact across all the search results, it doesn’t mean that in every search result you will see very big changes. So that is something that affects a lot of different sites, a lot of different queries, but it is not such that the sites disappear from the search results completely if they are not mobile friendly.

    On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense for the sites that aren’t able to go mobile friendly yet, maybe like small businesses who don’t have the time or the money to set their sites for that. These are results that are still fairly relevant in the search results, so we need to keep them in there some how.

    The other aspect that we noticed is that a lot of sites really moved forward on going mobile. So where we expected essentially a little bit of a bigger change, because of maybe bigger sites that weren’t mobile friendly, did take the time to go mobile friendly and with that, they didn’t see that much of a change.

    While the immediate impact may not have been felt far and wide in a “mobilegeddon” sense, that doesn’t mean sites won’t continue to see effects from this as other sites continue to make their sites mobile-friendly. Even early winners from the update could find their content knocked back down when competing pages go mobile-friendly in the future.

    As Vivid Seats SEO director Bryson Meunier makes the case, “Mobilegeddon is beginning, not ending.”

    A survey from gShift last month, ahead of the update’s roll-out, found that 52% of businesses polled expected their sites to be impacted by the update. 65% indicated they were factoring mobile SEO into their content strategies, which means that another 35% were not.

    This week, Google announced the launch of the new Search Analytics report in Google Webmaster Tools. While it can be used on a much broader basis, one thing Google suggested using it for is for looking at how your site has been affected by the mobile-friendly update.

    Were you affected by the update in any noticeable way? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Google

  • Google Mobile-Friendly Update Completes Roll-Out

    Google Mobile-Friendly Update Completes Roll-Out

    It appears that Google’s mobile-friendly update has fully rolled out, but as of Friday morning, not all pages had been indexed yet, so it’s possible that you’ll still see effects from it that haven’t taken place just yet. That said, it sounds like the impact of the update is far less significant than the “Mobilegeddon” headlines would have had you believe.

    Google webmaster trends analyst Gary Illyes tweeted that the algorithm is rolled out, but that not all pages were reindexed yet, so they don’t have the new scores yet (via Barry Schwartz):

    And on the impact:

    As we’ve said over and over again leading up to the update, while mobile-friendliness is obviously important ranking signal to consider, it’s still just one of over 200 that Google uses.

    If you haven’t had the chance to go mobile-friendly yet, you can do it anytime, and will send Google the right signal. Learn all about how to do so here.

    Image via Google