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Here is our monthly recap of the changes made to Google that impact webmasters and SEO. Before we give the recap, I wanted to pull out of the WebmasterWorld thread the three things webmasters are talking about right now in terms of Google's search results changes. They include:
- Long Tail Sites Seeing Huge Fluctuations In Google Traffic
- E-Commerce Sites Not Ranking As Well
- Google's Localization Changed (Google Venice)
In the past thirty days, the most important topics include the Panda 3.4 update, Matt Cutts announcing an overly SEO penalty and big blog network penalty.
Here are the stories that I pulled out over the past month which are important and related to Google SEO topics:
- Google Panda 3.4 Rollout
- Cutts: Google To Target Overly SEO'ed Sites Within Weeks
- Google Penalizes Blog Networks, Did SEOs Use It To Hurt Competitors?
- Updated: New Panda Refresh? Google Update Happening...
- Google Webmaster Tools Notifying Of Traffic Drops
- Panda Notifications Being Sent Via Google Webmasters Tools? Not Yet
- New Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors Confuses
- Google Rolling Out SSL Default Worldwide
- Google Offers Free Hosts Advice On Being Penalty Free
- Using The API To Get More Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Error Data
- Search, Images, Maps & Now Google Play
- Google Retired Geo Sitemap Support
- Google: New Top Level Domains (TLD) Will Not Help Rankings
- Not Provided To Spike When Firefox Adds Google SSL As Default
- Google: Want More Organic Traffic? Buy Search Ads
- Google's Amit Singhal: Freebase Entities Grows From 12M To 200M
- Google: When Search Results Suck, It's Because We're Stupid
- Google On Pace To Hit Over 4 Million Messages To Webmasters This Year
- Video: SEO Pagination By Google
- 450 Videos & 7 Million Views On Google Webmaster YouTube Channel
- Video Of Inside A Search Quality Meeting
Last month's recap can be found here.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Paul Matheson
04/02/2012 01:00 pm
Wow you guys have some top quality information here! This is the first time I've found your site but I'm definitely sticking around to soak up some of your knowledge, keep it coming!
Sd
04/02/2012 01:34 pm
I think this has hurt an awful lot of people really. I understand what Google is trying to do but when the over-optimisation penalty hits ecommerce websites that have thousands of products and have to use some form of automation to get there I think they are just going a bit too far!
Allenbrayan
04/02/2012 01:43 pm
When i wake up at morning and my friend said did u read new post about Google algorithm..I think this things stop now because every day Google doing changes.Its not fair with users.Something I'm frustrated from all these changes.
SelfStorage.com
04/02/2012 06:09 pm
I wish they'd finalize what "over-optimization" penalty actually entails.
Fiestas
04/04/2012 08:09 am
These changes will generate movement in SEO work. Thanks for information.
SEO Company
04/08/2012 08:25 pm
you are right Fiestas.. all SEO Companies must take care of all these while doing web promotion of their site.
Madison R.
04/27/2012 04:03 pm
I totally agree with Sd - they've gone just a bit too far in their attempt to weed out all spam. From what I understand, the duplicate penalty - which used to be a non-issue for legit marketers -is now hitting people who just have very similar-looking product pages - that's nuts! Hopefully we see some revisions in the near future. It's good that they're focusing on content, but it's not like they're really making SEO any easier for the little guys. If anything, it just got harder.