The Google Penguin update was rolled out in April 24, 2012. Many sites are complaining that they were severely hit by the update and Google is actually favoring sites with no SEO or very less SEO. And the worst thing is most of the companies do not know whether they were hit by this update or not.

There is an easiest way to find this by checking your Google analytics and analyzing the search related traffic for past weeks and this week. If you had paid links or spam links in your site you are probably hit by the update.

While most of the webmaster whines that they are severely hit by the update there were few websites who had benefitted from the update as well.  It’s very early to take them as a sample so how penguin evaluates a website of spam link is yet to be determined.

There are few points to be noted. This is completely an automated update. And Google has openly said that there will be no reconsideration for manual exceptions. Google has given a form to report if you think you have been wrongly hit by this update.

How do you recover?

Try and remove the spam as soon as possible from the links from which you’ve been getting traffic.  This is critical because the update is targeted on spam.  Most probably Google could have sent you a message of what are all the spam links you have your website. If you didn’t get any such messages from Google and still if you think you have it by the update remove anything that looks like spam from your site.

As said earlier, manual reconsiderations will not be accepted because the algorithmic change is automatic. That is there was no human touch involved in verifying spam or not. When the algorithm thinks that you are linked with spam, you are hit. If the algorithm thinks you are clean, you are good for the moment.

Will Over-Optimization exist?

Google first said that its going to crack down its whip with the Over optimized websites too. But as far as the complaints we see on the Google Forum only the website with purchases spam links were hit hard. And for Google also it will be tough to target some overly optimized blogs or websites.

To make the life easy for the searchers and the audience Google is constantly trying to make changes and updates which means we have to catch up with it or we will be losing the race with the planet’s biggest search engine. Though there are alternatives Google is the primary search engine in most of the countries and you won’t regret changing few things to be in first page of Google Search results.

SEO is the industry that always is changes and keeps evolving. Keeping abreast of the changes happening is mandatory for every SEO Professional to be on track or else he is for sure to be left out from the stream. This change has been very constant throughout the year of 2011 and has left us some predictable information on the drift.

The site quality and page quality in the Panda Updates of 2011 have ascertained the need for high quality content in any form like relevant articles, blog post, UGC’s or even newsletters. Google ranking of websites having Google places listings have been a trend setter in 2011.Further this year also saw the dramatic rise of social media marketing like Facebook, twitter,digg and so on .The WebPages that are active on social media have been given good appreciation by Google. All these and the recent patents by Google on Behaviour pattern of web users pave way for a unique direction in Search Optimization.

Personalization, localization and socialization are the captcha of today and are for sure to intensify tomorrow. More and more of user generated quality content will rule. Google places will have more weightage. Results displayed will be based on the IP’s thereby giving different ranking for same website on different geographies. Example the results on www.google.com will be different from www.google.com.au for the same keyword. Multi-channel marketing by natural listings, paid listings, social media, map listings, ad listings may become mandatory for higher rankings. With 3G updates mobile apps are going for an iconic rise. So it is essential to optimize a website for mobile applications. Spamming will continue to be the biggest problem as ever leading to greater scrutiny of web content, images and data.

Keeping the future in mind it is a must that a SEO Company must re-strategise their SEO Services based on the weightage given by Google on various factors. So be mindful of the upcoming trends and stay ahead of your competition!!!!

So Personalize, Localize and Socialize!!!

Google changes its search algorithm at least a good 500 to 600 times in one calendar year, out of which most changes are minor while some major changes which affect the search algorithm to a great extent are released every few months. A good recent update is that Google has patented Behaviour signals of the users to modify its search algorithm.

The recent patent has been a major shift in the search giants strategy from results based on quality link building, on-page factors, content relevancy to user behaviours. What google tries to get from this patent is that it sees the user patterns or the time spent on a ranked site .For example if google displays results for a search term from 1 to 10 and the user opens site 1 and moves on to site 2 without spending much time on site 1 and if he spends more time on site 2 than site 1 then Google arrives at a conclusion that site 1 did meet the requirements of the user. This strategy to rank a site was adopted a long time before by Bing with Google just pausing on these metrics.
When questioned Google nodded by stating that human factors were better tested by a panel of human testers who verified the quality of search results. As of now this human testing of search quality has been patented to automate the process. The patent watches the metrics like how many users prefer Site 1 to site 2, which are clearly the user behaviour and the quality of the site signals. As the result these tend to indicate or contraindicate the correctness of the SERP rankings and may ultimately lead to re-ranking. So it is much of a wait and watch game for SEO Company like ours to see what impact this patent brings to us to further optimize our SEO services for better ranking of sites.
May be a good tip is to drive enough search volume around keywords to show Google that users expect to see certain brands higher on Search Engine to favour your valuable client. Well all these are for SEO companies like us to worry about, for the user it is just that the search quality is getting closer to his expectations.

We think this is a year of Google changes and we have seen a lot of changes small to big in the past few months.

Now, Google has introduced a new feature in which they will display your shop interiors or your business place interior through a panaromic view of the business. Google had been testing this for sometime now and has released this last week. This is rolled over across the world against Google’s usual roll out’s which will happen in a specific geography and then they will be rolled over to other places.

Google panda update 2.5

GOOGLE is marvelous with its updations then and there.

And now GOOGLE panda update 2.5 is live from last few days. To make this version update it nearly took 7 weeks gap from the update of PANDA 2.4.  Google follows its own strategies and algorithms which nobody can study on the whole. The thought behind this algorithm is to index and rank sites with best quality in the “SERP”.

Panda update schedule so far,

• Panda Update 1.0 – Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0 – April 11, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.1 – May 10, 2011 (about 4 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.2 – June 16, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.3 – July 23, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.4 – August 12, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
• Panda Update 2.5 – September 28, 2011 (about 7 week gap)