Roundup of Search (November 2014)

Above: Plotted overall ranking change of showing recovery of one of our clients since they received a penalty back in October 2013

In September I reported it’d been almost over a year since the last iteration of Google Penguin. With many business having to wait patiently to see if their hard efforts to clean up backlink profiles and address other possible issues had paid off, Penguin was welcomed by many.

The update dubbed Penguin 3.0 was much smaller than we thought and only affected around 1% (or less) of English queries. Starting on October 17th it began its ‘slow’ roll out and we’re not completely sure it has finished,with some fluctuations still being felt across keywords. We know that there were no new signals added and it begs the question why Google didn’t push the algorithm out months ago?

The algorithm has helped websites recover that were hit by the penalty previously, but many were disappointed by the scale of the update. For those that didn’t recover there are a few things you should probably consider such as when your disavow files was submitted, how quickly the file was processed, and if you managed to miss any vital harmful links whilst disavowing.

Above: Image taken from TorrentFreak’s blog

Google also announced the second iteration of their Pirate algorithm on the 21st of October, after over two years since the original DMCA (Pirate) algorithm release. The algorithm filters sites similar to Penguin or Panda and targets websites that receive large amounts of DMCA removal requests (you may have seen these at the bottom of some search terms).

In a post on TorrentFreak they displayed the image above showing traffic drop significantly since the recent change. Pirate Bay said they weren’t that worried about the update as more traffic would be seen to entering directly rather than organically and people would still be able to find them.

There has also been some argument that the websites which have replaced the top spots provide users with a higher risk of malware. What do you think, do the changes hinder users at the cost of appeasing the entertainment industry?

There have been a number of changes to the way Google views websites that offer mobile friendly websites. Google are putting a lot of effort into making sure the sites they offer for mobile searches are friendly in recent changes.

In a recent post on Google’s Webmaster Blog about mobile friendliness there was a one line which read “We are also experimenting with using the mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal”, which seems pretty cool.

At the moment it’s rather elusive about what will be included in this possible ranking signal but they’ve made it relatively easy to check. Over the past month they’ve released a number of different tools to check for issues with things like Flash, configured viewports and the scale of your fonts. You can check these these tools out using the links two links below. Along with this possible inclusion of a ranking signal for mobile friendly sites Google also announced a new label for sites offering “Mobile Friendly” versions of their website. This is one example:

After a number of tests in the US, Google released the ‘In the News’ section to the rest of the world. The new box extends the original News element of web search and includes articles from around the web, including reddit. Many publishers have argued that this will hurt their rankings but we’re welcoming the changes and we’ve seen some pretty cool stuff happen recently with this. There were some pretty funny mishaps too with some profanity accidentally being pulled in from a Reddit thread

We’ll be keeping you posted on all of the updates to search over the next few months. Make sure you keep an eye on our blog.

If you want to chat more about search, don’t hesitate to get in touch.