Google: Panda 4.1 Still Rolling Out

Over the weekend, there was a tremendous amount of chatter within the SEO community, including discussion forums, social media and other channels. There were rumors that Google was pushing out a new algorithm, maybe the eagerly anticipatedPenguin refresh which is expected really soon or maybe something else?

Google told us just now that the Panda 4.1 release is still rolling out and that may be what SEOs and Webmasters are noticing.

Google launched Panda 4.1 on September 25, 2014 and told us it would be a “slow rollout” that would go into the following week. No one really expected the rollout to continue into this week but it has and the fluctuations and ranking changes you are seeing are likely related to that.

If you saw a huge drop in Google traffic, it may or may not be related to Panda 4.1. Google is constantly making changes and although you may notice a drop on the Panda 4.1 release date, you may have been impacted by other algorithms, user interface changes or manual actions. In addition, you might not notice a change on September 25th but notice one over this past weekend, which could also be related to Panda 4.1.

Google has confirmed with us that Panda 4.1 is still rolling out.

SOURCE:http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-4-1-still-rolling-205201

Google Releases Penguin 3.0 — First Penguin Update In Over A Year

Google confirms that a new version of its Penguin filter aimed at fighting spam went live on Friday

Google has confirmed to Search Engine Land that it updated its Penguin filter on Friday. Penguin targets sites deemed to be spammy, especially those found in violation of Google’s guidelines about linking.

Some noticed major changes in Google search results beginning late Friday night US time and speculated that this was due to the long-awaited Penguin Update that Google had said to expect this month.

Google verified to us today that this has happened, when we asked about it. Google hasn’t yet given more details on the percentage of search results the latest version of Penguin has impacted or if there were any major changes made to it since the last release. We’ll update if we get these details.

Penguin Releases Over Time

This is the sixth release of Penguin. Google itself hasn’t given it a number, but we’re calling it Penguin 3.0 because it’s been so long since the last release of Penguin that it’s worth counting as a major release.

Here are dates of all Penguin releases:

• Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
• Penguin 1.1 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
• Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
• Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
• Penguin 2.1 on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
• Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impact not yet released

Note that Penguin 1.1 and Penguin 1.2 were previously reported by us as Penguin 2 and Penguin 3, because Google itself hadn’t given them numbers, so we did. But when the fourth release happened, Google declared that to be Penguin 2.0. We’ve renumbered to fit in with Google’s belated numbering sequence.

The latest Penguin release is one of the most anticipated algorithm updates in Google’s history. Some publishers have been desperately waiting for the refresh that arrives just over a year since the last.

Getting Caught & Freed By Penguin

The publishers have been anxious because of the way Penguin works. If you’re hit by it, even if you make changes, you have to wait until the next release to see if your changes have done what Google wanted.

Publishers hit by the last version of Penguin — back in October 2013 — have been waiting until now to see if actions they’re tried such as removing spammy links have worked. If so, they’re likely seeing some improvement in traffic this weekend. If not, they have to try making more changes and then waiting until however long it takes for Google to release Penguin again.

By the way, for those who tried disavowing bad links, if you did that within the last three weeks, that was too late for this Penguin update. Our article from a talk Google gave at our SMX conference earlier this month explains more.

Do keep in mind that some people may see ranking drops but not actually be hit by Penguin. That’s because if Penguin causes a wide range of links to be discounted, those links will no longer pass along the credit or act as “votes” as they once might have.

Sites that gained from these fake votes — as Google would consider them — lose that credit and thus potentially visibility, even though they weren’t penalized by Google directly.

Google has suggested that with the latest version of Penguin, it also would have a new system allowing for refreshes to happen more frequently. Time will tell on that — the count starts now.

SOURCE:http://searchengineland.com/google-releases-first-penguin-update-year-206169

Google Toolbar PageRank Finally & Officially Dead....!!!

Google's John Mueller said Google probably won't update Toolbar PageRank in the future.

In October 2013, Google head of search spam Matt Cutts implied we would likely not see another Google Toolbar PageRank update before the year end. Well, by accident, Google updated Toolbar PageRank in December 2013. Since then, we have had no Toolbar PageRank updates.
Google’s John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Hangout video that there will probably not be another Toolbar PageRank update ever. John said:

We will probably not going to be updating it [PageRank] going forward, at least in the Toolbar PageRank.

He said this at the 20:30 mark in the video. Here is an embed of the video if you want to hear it yourself:

So now, can we finally say Google Toolbar PageRank is finally dead? I think so.

SOURCE: http://searchengineland.com/google-toolbar-pagerank-finally-officially-dead-205277

Google Tests A New Local Knowledge Graph

Google Tests A New Local Knowledge Graph Interface

Google is testing a new interface for their local knowledge graph. Instead of the local carousel interface that launched a year ago in June 2013, Google is testing more of a ‘card’-like approach that is vertical as opposed to horizontal scroll.

The folks at Moz captured this in their testing and posted it on their Google+ page.

Here is a picture showing the new interface:

Clicking on the “more” link will likely dynamically load more local results below. You can also easily filter the restaurants by rating and cuisine at the top.

Here is the current interface that still has the carousel look:

The new interface looks similar to the mobile interface:

SOURCE:

http://searchengineland.com/google-tests-new-local-knowledge-graph-interface-201060

Google “Pigeon” Updates

Google has released a new algorithm to provide a more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. The changes will be visible within the Google Maps search results and Google Web search results.

Note: We’ve named this update the Pigeon update.

The core changes are behind the scenes, but it does impact local search results rankings and some local businesses may notice an increase or decrease in web site referrals, leads and business from the change.

Google told us that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more.

In addition, Google said that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

The new algorithm is currently rolling out for US English results and aims to provide a more useful and relevant experience for searchers seeking local results. Google didn’t share any details about if and when the update would roll out more widely in other countries and languages.

Google has not commented on the percent of queries impacted by this algorithm update, nor if certain web spam algorithms were deployed in this update.

If you have noticed any ranking changes and referral changes for your local business, please let us know in the comments.

SOURCE:

http://searchengineland.com/google-makes-significant-changes-local-search-ranking-algorithm-197778

Google Launches A New Google Alerts Interface

Google has completely revamped the user interface and design for Google Alerts. Google Alerts allows searchers to subscribe to be notified of new content Google discovers on a specific keyword via email or RSS feed. Google Alerts is useful and important for managing your online reputation, following companies and topics you are interested and the like.

The new interface makes it much easier for a normal searcher to understand and use. The previous interface was more designed for an advanced user but this new interface really makes it easier to process and use.

The new Google Alerts starts with a search box, followed by your current alerts and then suggested alerts:

To manage or an alert, you get a revised interface as well, with the same functionality but a preview option below:

Here is a screen shot of the old interface:

SOURCE:

http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-new-google-alerts-interface-197110

Google updates Quality rating guidelines version 5

Google Updates Quality Rating Guidelines - EAT

Jennifer Slegg reports that Google has completely revamped the Google Quality Rating Guidelines, which is used for Google contractors to manually review search results and send that feedback to Google's team to improve the overall algorithm.

The Quality Rating Guidelines have been leakedseveral times in the past.

Jennifer didn't post the document but claims that this is a "a brand new version, rewritten from the ground up, so it isn’t just a refresh of the old one." She said this new version was released a few months ago and is version number five of the guidelines.

She explained the major change is that in this document, "Google is now putting a high emphasis on sites that are considered to have a high level of expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness." This is known as EAT, expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness, within the document.

Jennifer summarizes the document on her blog. Again, I do not have a copy of this, so I cannot share it with you.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, one member tries to break down EAT:

EXPERTISE - Fame? (Everyone in his area knows who the person is?) - Accomplishments? (I did this, I did that. Braggadocio?) - Published works? (Piled Higher and Deeper?) - Large body of work? (Can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with BS?) - Uncontroversial? (Universally respected - never sticks their neck out?)

AUTHORITATIVENESS - IQ Test results? Mensa membership? - College? - Degree? - GPA? - Past job titles? - Current Employer? - Current job title?

TRUSTWORTHINESS - Web Rep? (No John Doe $ucks pages?) - Email address? (Is a graphic still OK to avoid harvesters?) - Contact page link on every page? (pound accessibility into them?) - Physical address required? (or just snail-mail address, PO Box) - Telephone number? (Is a graphic still OK to avoid harvesters?) - Privacy policy?

Anyone have a copy of this new document?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Here is a link to view the new guidelines on scribd.com.

Source:

 http://www.seroundtable.com/google-updates-quality-rating-guidelines-18830.html

Google Notifying Publishers For Right To Be Forgotten Removals

Now that Google has been removing results from the European versions of Google in response to the EU’s Right To Be Forgotten requirements,many webmasters are now receiving notifications of these removals.

Last night, around 10 p.m. EST, I received a notification for a site I have verified Webmaster Tools access from. The notice read:

Notice of removal from Google Search

We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google:

[example URL(s) go here]

For more information, see https://www.google.com/policies/faq/?hl=en

Here is a picture:

I am not the only one who received this notice. Other webmasters have shown examples of notices they received, as well, including Menachem Rosenbaum and Alex Graves.

The removal notice in the search results looks like this:

While it is unclear for searchers to know for sure if a removal request was made by a specific individual and which specific page was actually removed by looking at the search results, the webmasters are being notified of which pages are being removed from the European search results.

Source:

http://searchengineland.com/google-notifying-publishers-right-forgotten-removals-195634

Quick SEO Tips

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written, and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for a site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Text around your links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages.Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain.This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines,place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Source:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/

Redirecting A Penalized Site To Penalty Free Site Likely Won’t Negatively Impact The Site

The question was: What if a competitor takes a site that has a severe penalty and 301 redirects it to my penalty-free site — would it cause my penalty-free site to get a penalty?

John Mueller basically said he has never seen a case like this where it ended up hurting the site. He said that Google is usually catches these situations fairly easily. He did add, if you are worried that you can disavow all the links pointing to the penalized site that is redirecting to you. But he made it sound like you really should not have to worry about this.

Source:

http://searchengineland.com/google-redirecting-penalized-site-penalty-free-site-likely-wont-negatively-impact-site-195482

content marketing is the new SEO in 2014

SEO isn’t the same as what it used to be. You can’t just pop up an ugly website, throw up mediocre content, build a few links and expect to rank well. These days you actually have to build a good website, write high quality content that solves peoples’ problems, build thousands of links and get thousands of social shares.

But there is one big issue: it’s hard to scale all of this. Building thousands of high quality links manually is really expensive, and even if you have the money, it will take months, if not years, to build those links. And if you don’t have anything worth sharing on the social web, you won’t get social shares unless you buy them from spammy accounts.

So, how do you build thousands of links naturally and get thousands of social shares? Through content marketing.

Content marketing is the cheapest and most effective way to do SEO these days. Not only does writing high quality content produce links at a quicker pace than building them manually, but it’s also cheaper. Plus, your content will naturally get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.

My content marketing experience

I’ve always built my organic search traffic through content marketing. “Why?” you may ask. It’s cheaper, and it provides faster results.

We were able to launch KISSmetrics and get over 100,000 monthly organic visitors in less than a year just through blogging and creating infographics. We didn’t build one link manually… we just spent our time and money on content marketing.

I did the same with Quick Sprout. Google drives around 90,000 visitors a month to the blog, and I didn’t have to manually build one link. I just wrote a lot of high quality content… 311 blog posts to be exact.

If you don’t think content marketing is the new SEO, let’s take a look at the numbers:

Content marketing by numbers

At KISSmetrics, we’ve created a total of 47 infographics. An infographic on average costs us $600, which means we have spent $28,200 on infographics in the last two years.

Within the two-year period, we’ve generated 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains, all from those 47 infographics.

From a social perspective, in the last two years, the infographics have driven 41,359 tweets and 20,859 likes.

If you decided that you want to buy 2,512,596 visitors, it would cost you $125,629.80 if you paid 5 cents a visitor. If you bought 41,142 links from a service like Sponsored Reviews at a rate of $20 a link, you would have spent $822,840. And that wouldn’t even give you high quality links. We naturally got our links from sites like Huffington Post and Forbes.

If you want to buy 41,359 tweets, it would cost you $82,718, assuming you paid $2.00 a tweet. It would also cost you an additional $41,718 if you paid $2.00 a Like.

In total, if you were trying to game Google and get the same results as we did at KISSmetrics, you would have spent a total of $1,072,905.80. Now, that’s a lot of money… especially if you compare that number to the $28,200 we spent to create the infographics.

The big difference between content marketing and paid SEO

There is one huge difference between paying to do all of the things above and spending the money on content marketing. Can you guess what it is?

Nope, it isn’t the price difference of $1,047,705.80. Guess again…

Content marketing doesn’t get affected by algorithm updates, while paid SEO does. Search engines can tell when you provide value, and in the long run, that’s the kind of stuff they want to make sure stays high in the rankings.

So, instead of investing in short term solutions that may increase your overall rankings and traffic, invest in the long term solution of content marketing.

Conclusion

Now that you know content marketing is the new SEO, spending money on it doesn’t guarantee results. Over the last few years, I’ve tested a lot of different types of content and found that certain types produce better results than others.

• Detailed content – short blog posts tend to get fewer links than detailed, thorough content. Don’t try to replicate what Huffington post does by producing hundreds of new pieces of content each day… focus on quality.
• Digestible infographics – if you can make complex data easy to understand in a visual format, you can get millions of visitors to your website.
• Social profiles – a key requirement to a successful content marketing strategy is owning powerful social profiles. Make sure you build up your Twitter and Facebook profiles. You’ll need them to spread your content.
• Collect emails – make sure you have email opt-in forms in your sidebar and leverage pop-ups to collect even more emails. If you have a solid email list, you can always email it every time you publish a new blog post or content piece. This is an easy way to kick start the virality process.
• Be consistent – if you can’t publish content on a regular basis, no matter how good your content is, it will be tough to get a good ROI out of your content marketing. Make sure you publish content on a regular basis.
• Headlines matter – no matter how good your content is, if you can’t write attractive headlines, no one will read your content.

SOURCE:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/10/22/why-content-marketing-is-the-new-seo/

Screen Shot Of Google's New Rejection Notices For Reconsideration Requests

At SMX Advanced a week ago, Google's head of pursuit quality, Matt Cutts, affirmed that they will be updating their reevaluation demands dismissal notices with more point by point reactions in a few cases.

We've now placed an illustration of the new dismissal notices, as imparted by @johnedwarddoyle to me on Twitter.

The new recognize has another segment at the lowest part titled "A note from your commentator." Then the Google analyst could give particular exhortation that, at any rate for this situation, would be to a great degree accommodating to the webmaster with the manual activity.

Payday Loan Algorithm 3.0 Rolling Out Now

payday-pandaslast night we reported that Google is going to be propelling Payday Loan 3.0 and Google's Matt Cutts posted on Twitter minutes back that it is presently taking off. 

Cutts, Google's head of inquiry quality said, "its taking off now!" 

To get you up, Payday Loan 2.0 propelled a couple of weeks back around May seventeenth and eighteenth. That particularly focused on extremely spammy destinations in the porn, pills and money joint markets. 

Payday 3.0 particularly targets spammy inquiries, versus spammy locales. What precisely that methods is not 100% acceptable. Anyhow the sorts of questions this targets incorporates terms like [payday loans], [casinos], [viagra] and different manifestations of exceedingly spammy inquiries.

SOURCE: http://searchengineland.com/googles-payday-loan-algorithm-3-0-rolling-now-193954

Google Updates Documentation & Guidelines On Moving A Site

Google Webmaster Trends Analysts, Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahajji, posted on the Google Webmaster blog today that they’ve updated their official guidelines for moving your web site and having Google in mind when doing so.

They broke out the process based on two ways of moving your site:

(1) Move a site with no URL change

(2) Move a site with URL changes

With the first, i.e. no URL change, this is typically when you upgrade your site’s content management system to a new platform and you have the same domain name and URLs, but you may move the site to a new hosting company.

The second, i.e. with URL changes, is typically when the URL changes, such as the protocol URL, i.e. http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com, the domain name changes, i.e. example.com to example.net and/or the URL paths change, i.e. http://example.com/page.php?id=1 to http://example.com/widget.

Google said they’ve “seen cases where webmasters implemented site moves incorrectly, or missed out steps that would have greatly increased the chances of the site move completing successfully.” Because of this, they’ve upgraded their content in the moving your web siteguidelines to help webmasters along the process.

SOURCE: http://searchengineland.com/google-updates-documentation-guidelines-moving-site-193480