Here is a summary of the major Google updates starting from 2011 until the current time, this page will be updated with all future major updates to the Google search algorithm.

Google Updates 2013

May 23 2013 – Google Penguin 2.0 – A major Google update, the first algo change to Penguin sinces it’s inception. Over 3% of sites affected. Now takes in excessive and unnatural linking tactics to internal pages.

May 21 2013 – Domain crowding update – to reduce the domain crowding problem that occurred on certain search terms after page 1 results.

May 9 2013 – A ‘phantom’ update that caused a number of site owners to lose ranking – Google denied any significant update.

March 16 2013 – Google Panda 25 – Possibly the final manual update to Panda as it becomes integrated into the search algorithm (Panda everflux if you like)

January 22 2013 – Google Panda 24

Google Updates 2012

December 21 2012 – Google Panda 23

November 21 2012 – Google Panda 22

November 5 2012 – Google Panda 21

October 9 2012 – Page Layout 2

October 5 2012 – Google Penguin 3

September 27 2012 – EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update

September 27 2012 – Google Panda 20

September 18 2012 – Google Panda 19 (or 3.9.2 under the old nomenclature!)

Augusut 20 2012 – Google Panda 18 (or 3.9.1)

August 14 2012 – 7 Results Update – For certain terms Google began display of only 7 organic results on page 1

August 10 2012 – DMCA penatly – Google announced it would demote sites that had repeated successful DMCA actions against them

July 24 2012 – Google Panda 17 (or 3.9)

June 25 2012 – Google Panda 16 (or 3.8)

June 8 2012 – Google Panda 15 (or 3.7)

May 25 2012 – Google Penguin 2 (or 1.1)

April 27 2012 – Google Panda 14 (or 3.6)

April 24 2012 – Google Penguin 1

April 19 2012 – Google Panda 13 (or 3.5)

March 23 2012 – Google Panda 12 (or 3.4)

February 27 2012 – Google Panda 11 (or 3.3)

February 26 2012 – Venice Update – increased emphasis on local organic results

January 19 2012 – Above the fold – Update that could demote sites with excessive ads or lack of copy above the fold

January 18 2012 – Google Panda 10 (or 3.2)

January 10 2012 – Search + Your World – More personalised search results including Google + data – Further reading on this here

Google Updates 2011

November 18 2011 – Google Panda 9 (or 3.1)

November 21st 2011. That is the date Yahoo Site Explorer closed down forever, no longer would we be able to pull up a freely accessible web page… type ‘site:someurl’ and get a list of just about every backlink to that address. It was a sad day, particularly in light of the fact that by then it was about the only remaining way to quickly and easily access such data. Of course Yahoo Site explorer always had its limitations, it never allowed you to sort the data and draw intelligence from it. You could not, for example, sort the backlinks by date order, by anchor text order or by PageRank strength.

Ahrefs.com - a fast, simple well thought out backlinks tool

Fortunately, there was an online knight in shining armour available, a company that begin a backlinks service earlier in 2011 and was rapidly developing it into a really useful too. I trialed ahrefs.com in late 2011 and instantly took a liking to its speed and simplicity. I soon signed up a subscription to get the full data it offers.

So what does ahrefs.com do and why do I like it so much?

Firsly, let me begin by explaining what I don’t like about another essential SEO tool in my life; my ranking software. It has to run on my pc (so is not accessible when out of the office), it has to be constantly updated, it crashes occasionally and loses data. Ahrefs.com’s service runs on its own server, you access the full subscription service through their website without any software required locally. Its FAST and any updates it makes are welcomingly none of your business, it just works and improves. Apparently, their index of backlinks now exceeds 100,000,000,000, for sure, I have never found a reason to doubt its comprehensiveness.

The most important features it offers which are of immense value to an SEO expert or consultant are as follows:

1. It allows one to identify ‘new’ and ‘lost’ backlinks BY DATE. So imagine, you are picking up from another SEO company or you kept bad records of directory listings acquired last year, you see a ranking decline and wonder what good backlinks may have expired… with the date organised detection of lost links you can identify these links. In contrast, being able to identify ‘new’ backlinks affords a number of benefits not least of which might be the ability to punch in a client competitor url and see what they are up to in their current link building activities.

2. Anchor text intelligence – this is more relevant than ever before. Google understandably dislikes overt and artificial link building practices and so will look for unnatural anchor text patterns in a websites backlink profile. Being able to see the anchor text distribution for a given URL is extremely valuable in assessing ranking problems a new client may have or working out why ranking for a given term is so poor. By default, ahrefs.com now lists the anchor texts for a domain in order of the most domains containing any particular anchor text.

Finally, if you have one of Googles webmaster tool messages notifying you of unnatural links detected then you may find another feature useful which will help you identify any potentially paid for sitewide backlinks as the list of backlinks to a domain is sorted by number of links from each referring domain!

Now I just wish ahrefs.com would develop a ranking reports module (their current SERPS analysis feature is not especially helpful) that works ‘on the cloud’ rather than on local machine software and I can ditch my current ranking software tool.

I am a fan of ahrefs.com and recommend it. Keep up the good work guys.

Google DMCA – Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Occasionally you will find that your quality, original content is stolen by other website owners and used on their own site and passed off as their own copy, especially if you check for this using Copyscape or an equivalent. This has happened (and is happening) with Misterweb.co.uk and it has happened to some of my clients. Google attempts to identify the original author of duplicated content and then give them the credit for the work and potentially demote the copyright offender. However, they do get this wrong and sites with the original content have been demoted by the Google panda update, i.e. there are innocent casualties of Google’s attempt to improve search results. The webmaster forums, seo forums and business owner forums are full of complaints, frustration and anger at the fact their sites which may have ranked well for years are now flailing in obscurity. You cannot stop copyright infringement so you have to act upon it. You can use a service like Copyscape to check for copies of your websites content across the entire web. With a premium account you can check your entire site and get a listing of all the infringements for each page. Hopefully, you will have nothing listed or just a short list. You can read more about DMCA and the services we provide here

I say hopefully as the next step is time consuming. If you have copy which has been plagiarised you can start by contacting the website owners and explaining what they have done, demanding they remove the content or else you will file a DMCA takedown action with their hosting provider which could forcibly remove their website from the web. I have had very little success with this route when contacting Indian and Chinese SEO websites about the pages they have stolen from my site to use on their own, only replacing the word Misterweb with ‘lazy Chinese SEO firm’.

So, you can deal with copyright infringement in these more direct two ways, you can file a DMCA notice against them. You can go to their hosting company who will look into the details and if they agree with your complaint they will remove the website or offending pages from the web.

The alternative is to go to Google and file a DMCA complaint through them. If successful they will remove the offending content from their index and you will have secured your status as original author! Googles form for this is here: DMCA complaint form. I have used Googles DMCA tool with great success, in my experience they have taken 3 to 4 days to deal with the notice. They then send a personal reply to you confirming their action. The Google DMCA form allows you to submit multiple infringements in one go, it’s really very helpful and I recommend it.

I expect DMCA services to be a rapidly growing industry given the importance of originality for ranking.

Google is continually updating its algorithm; they have previously stated they made several hundred tweaks and changes in a 1 year period. Most of these changes are not explained or announced as they aim to give the best results to a user without telling the world how they arrive at the rankings they do, hence the SEO industry!

However, occasionally they roll out a major update to the algorithm that determines where sites are placed in their results. The panda update is one such major update and this rolled out in the US or on ‘google.com’ in late February 2011. Panda was later rolled out in the UK on April 12th 2011. The update is essentially a change which aims to demote lower quality pages and sites and thereby give more credit to high quality sites. The main feature of this update was to demote sites or pages that had low content, copied content or ‘thin content’. I have seen in some cases that if a site had substantial levels of copied or thin content it could demote the whole site in the rankings.

The update has been highly controversial, major websites and blue chips have been affected. There have been innocent casualties and Google is still tweaking ‘along the spectrum’. There is almost no reporting of progress from a site that has been ‘pandalized’. Sites that were hit have thus far stayed hit.

We have to take this seriously and go in the direction Google is pushing us, that is, high quality content that is ORIGINAL and NOT elsewhere on the web. It has long been said that content is king but now we need to be saying ‘Quality, original, non-copied content is king’. You can read more on the difficulties with this in my post – ‘Copyright Infringement’.

So the Panda update is a ‘quality’ update or at least it’s based on the signals Google are using to determine quality. They will be looking at site usability, user engagement, bounce rate, site speed, w3c validation and a great deal more. Google can capture a great deal of data about how users interact with sites due to the other google products, adsense, analytics, google user reviews and the google toolbar.

In conclusion, if your site was pandalized by Google Panda and your rankings and traffic fell on the 12th April then you need to focus on removing copied content and improving or removing low quality or ‘thin’ pages. A reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools in an option you may wish to take when your site is in order. If you were not affected then you should take heed of the advice here to avoid being adversely affected by future iterations and rollouts of Panda, it’s not over.

Further reading: More Guidance on Building High Quality Content.

Google has ‘just’ launched its Google +1 button. This is a bit of a facebook ‘like’ copy. The idea is you can place the google +1 button on your website, you then hope a visitor who likes what you have to offer clicks it as a vote of their approval, a symbolic ‘I approve’! I am unconvinced this will take off very quickly as it only works if the clicker has a Google profile and is logged into it. Furthermore, some of the most active and keen Google users who use Google Apps (like me) are unable to have a google profile or click Google +1 buttons, apparently, it’s coming… Assuming it does work then you may see connected +1 recommendations when you search on Google. If you are signed up in Google services to be involved in +1 then you will see google+1 buttons at the end of every search result. You can Google +1 any page.

Google +1 has moved out into Google adwords and there is even tracking and metrics on Google +1 in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

In the spirit of testing everything that can affect SEO I have added this to my site www.misterweb.co.uk please feel free to try the +1 button you can see at the top right of all my pages.

Further reading: http://www.google.com/+1/button/.

Google is using more signals than ever before to determine relevant results for their users. Given the rapid rise in social networks it is not surprising that they would use these as signals in their algorithm. Why? Well, googles initial success was based on the fact that they deemed a link to a website as being a vote for that website. In the same way they can assume a facebook ‘like’ is a signal of popularity for that site, a sign that the site is useful (and should therefore rank). Of course not every business will suit having a facebook page but if it fits and you can do it, do it. Don’t forget with facebook you can set a catchy username for your page, think of keywords!

Twitter is similar. If your business has a thousand followers why wouldn’t google be taking that as a positive signal, you must have something to say of interest! Similarly, if somebody ‘retweets’ your tweets then that is a stamp of approval that you are saying something useful.

If your website is built on wordpress there are many easy to use plugins that can integrate the social networks into your site and help you engage a wider audience. I recently added a facebook like feature to a blog site I operate and found the next day that I and ‘6 others’ had ‘liked’ my most recent article. The power here is the potential for viral promotion and gaining some traffic as well as sending signals to google for your organic SERPs.

I have a twitter account and if you want to be seeing my rare but timely SEO tweets you can follow me at http://twitter.com/stevenapier.

In conclusion: You can’t deny the social networks, if its feasible and sensible to do it, then do it.

Google rules the world so we find ourselves mostly talking about Google when we talk about SEO and organic search results. As you know in the UK a web user is normally redirected to the local Google i.e. www.google.co.uk. The very latest stats tabulated below show a breakdown of search engine use. Google has a very dominant position so it makes sense to focus our efforts there.

Top Search Engines

In March 2011 we completed building a brand new website for the Office Furniture company Cubewing. This is a CMS site (content management system, i.e. Cubewing can edit, add and delete content without having to refer to us) with rotating featured scrollers, feature galleries and a beautifully simple ‘save favourite products’ feature that does not even require a customer to register or login.

Cubewing wanted to update the design of their website to make it more visually appealing and to showcase their stylish range of furniture. At the same time they wanted to improve the quality of the copy so that their messages were clearer and more succinct.

We created a scroller for their home page so they could showcase particular products. This fantastic feature also allows Cubewing to highlight seasonal offers or particular aspects of their service. They can update their featured items as well as replace them with new items without reference to a web designer. This reduces their costs and means they can make instant changes to their web presence.

Every product now has a full page of content and an image gallery and can more easily be found with the product navigation we created. Navigations are essential to good website performance – if your customers can not easily find their way around your website you risk losing them to a competitor. We created a navigation that lets users reach each product in one of three ways; type, price range or specific furniture piece. In addition the website has a fully functioning search which analyses products as well as other webpage content.

As with all our website projects the web site has been designed in clean, valid code that can be read easily and quickly served by the search engines.

Smile Studio had a very stylish website which incorporated movement via flash. However the website was created from image files which meant it was very difficult to edit or add to and could not be easily read by all of the major Search Engines. To Google, Bing etc the website was largely empty – there was no text for them to read.  In addition Dr Gill, the owner, wanted to be able to use Twitter and create a blog.  So he asked Misterweb to take style elements from his original site but to build a new one in html and php to create a compliant website that could be read by search engines and actively managed by him and his team.

We built him a website on the WordPress platform, a platform originally developed for blogs but not more competent at running CMS business websites than just about any other platform.  The platform is very versatile due to years of development which means it is great for blogs as well as having all the necessary features and versatility for a general business website too.  The new website is much bigger than the original version which means patients can access lots more information on dental treatments and the pain free dentistry which Dr Gill practices.  All this extra content can be read by the search engines meaning that the website now appears for a huge set of long tail search terms in addition to the main keyphrases this dental practice was targeting.

Dr Gill creates regular posts on his website covering advances and new treatments as well as keeping people informed about basic dental care.  He also actively posts on Twitter and his website displays his latest posts and encourages users to follow him on Twitter.  This is a really good idea for his business at it is a way of associating passing traffic with him – when  they need dental care in 6 months or more they already have his details.

Real Estate or Estate Agent websites are very complicated – they have a detailed database of properties that the website must draw from and display in a clear and attractive way. They must be able to manage lots of large images and have a complicated search function. Taurus Real Estate wanted a website that gave the impression of being simple as most of their clients are older and not too computer orientated but they needed complicated functionality which included the following;

• XML feed for transferring properties to other websites
• Fully changeable home page
• Feature property on home page
• Shopping list
• Easily printable property pages
• Map showing villages and information on area page
• Purchase guide page
• Last 20 properties page (updated automatically)
• Property Reductions
• Favourite properties
• Saved search criterion so customers can be emailed automatically when a new property that matches their criterion is listed
• Ability to monitor the activity on the site
• Advanced search

We were able to provide a website that incorporated all these features and looked great. We even designed then a new logo which they use on their shop front, in adverts and on their letter head. In addition we were able to give them a simple interface to manage their properties and change the page content so they operate this complicated website easily and without needing a web designer to constantly work on it.