Welcome to this month’s edition of the Juicy SEO online marketing report where we condense all the changes and important news into a 2 minute read, as per normal we have a Glossary at the bottom to remind you which algorithm does what.
This month our report is mainly to do with a major update that has recently happened, Penguin 4.0 is now live and in the wild!
So, lets get to it…
Penguin 4.0 out in the wild, or just a sweet painting
Penguin
As this algorithm update is major news we will focus a little more than normal on this subject and explain what has changed and how it will affect you.
Real Time
This is the 4th version (4.0) of this algorithm and it will also be the last, this is because they moved the ‘code’ of Penguin into their main core ranking engine which ‘scores’ website pages continuously. Therefore, Penguin will be real time and any penalties given due to bad links will happen instantly. The good news though is that once you clean up your bad links your site should recover instantly too.
New Links
As Google will be checking your links all the time this also includes new links to your site, it means keeping a close eye on your links in case they affect your ranking positions.
Per-Page Not Per-Site
The new version of the Penguin algorithm does not assess links to your website but more to your web pages. Therefore, if Google penalises your site for a bad link it should just affect the page it is linked to and not the whole site. This is great news as you should be able to manage your link building strategy and see if certain links penalise your website.
Recovery
Once you have cleaned up your bad links you might expect to bounce back up to where your website once ranked, sadly that is unlikely. Google will instead of penalising your site and devalue the links they will simply just ignore them.
Therefore, if you once ranked no:1 for ‘Keyword Research’ and got hit with a Penguin penalty, the recovery will just ignore the link juice of those bad links so you won’t get any help at all from them. Your site should still move up the rankings as you are no longer penalised, just not as high as you once were.
One final thing about Penguin, well for this month anyway. Google have said that the roll out of Penguin 4.0 was their best roll out to date. Which isn’t surprising really is it as it took them 2 years to do it!
Local SEO
This month Google’s local algorithm received an update too, this time, the update was to target spam results.
API’s
If you provide an API for developers to access data from your site then this might be of interest. Google have said if your API requires a DOfollow link to access the API it is the same as a paid link and therefore against Google’s guidelines.
Widgets
If you are a provider of Widgets for webmasters to add to their site, Google this month have stressed that all the links back to you must be NOfollow, not a surprise here but good to be reminded of.
Links
Google this month said an interesting thing about links, “To get more traffic to your site you don’t necessarily need more links”. Is this a smoke screen to try and stop people link building or are they devaluing links?
AdWords
If you are a user of Google Adwords (PPC) you would have most likely been informed that the length the text can be for the adverts is to increase therefore allowing more “Words for your Buck”. We believe it is going live early 2017.
AMP
AMP sites have been seeing a considerable amount of traffic increase over the last couple of weeks, AMP is not for everyone but it is worth looking at to see if it will help your business.
Mobile SEO
Over the last couple of months in our SEO reports we have mentioned Google might penalise mobile websites that have pop-ups which fully cover or cover a large percentage of the screen when the page loads. This month they have added more information on this, sites can also be penalised if the pop-up appears after scrolling half way down the page. This is interesting as there are many social media sharing widgets that work like this.
Algorithms
Google this month highlighted that now Penguin 4.0 (oops sorry I mentioned it again) is live you should expect to see more algorithm updates coming in the near future and that this will never stop. Great! 🙁
Rankings
We are expecting to see a lot of fluctuations in ranking figures over the next week or so as Penguin calms down, so don’t panic if your rankings are not looking too good. If you need some help just drop us a line.
Glossary
Panda: The Google Panda update concentrates on the quality of the web page content, if the algorithm thinks the page is of low quality it might penalise it in Google’s search results.
Penguin: Google has an algorithm called Penguin which analyses links to web pages and identifies which ones are valuable or spam links. An example of a spam link would be a paid link to your site. Since 23rd Sept 2016 this has joined the core search updates and is now real time.
Pigeon: Google’s Pigeon algorithm concentrates on Local SEO, if you have a bricks and mortar business this is something you should take note of.
Phantom (Quality Update): This algorithm rewards website pages for good content.
TDL: A TLD means Top Level Domain like .com or .net or .co.uk.
AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. A way to increase the speed your mobile version of your website loads.