Here is the monthly recap for all Google webmaster related topics for the past month. January was a pretty wild month with a pretty big update happening on January 8th and 9th, which Google did not confirm. Google went after a French link network, began sending out new manual action notifications, updated their link guidelines, set a stern warning to German SEOs, and so much more.
Google is strongly experimenting with new UIs over the past few weeks, so the SERP tracking tools are all over the place. We had tons of interesting videos from Matt Cutts. We also seen Expedia penalized and Irwin Mitchell slapped plus other sites, which I did not cover here.
Here is our recap:
- Is Google Search Updating? January 8th & 9th
- Google's Matt Cutts: We're Taking Action Against Buzzea, The French Link Network
- Google Sends Manual Actions For Rich Snippet Spam & Spammy Structured Markup
- Google Updates Link Guidelines: Widget Links Are Allowed When...
- Google To Bring It On German Link Spammers
- Google's Matt Cutts: Guest Blogging For Links Or SEO Is Over & Dead
- Google To Affiliates: No Added Value, Then You Violate Our Webmaster Guidelines
- Google's Matt Cutts: Don't Use Article Directories For Link Building
- Was Expedia Penalized By Google? SearchMetrics Says So.
- irwinmitchell.co.uk Also Penalized By Google, Interesting...
- Why Does Irwin Mitchell's Redirect Rank, If Google Penalized Them?
- Google Answers Questions With Longer Responses Now
- Google's New Knowledge Graph Snippet Overlay
- Playable YouTube Videos Directly In Google's Search Results
- Google's Matt Cutts: We Don't Have Different Algorithms For Different Ranking Positions
- Google: No Special Indexing For Facebook Or Twitter Because They Can Block Us But...
- Google's Matt Cutts On When Old Sites No Longer Rank Well
- Google Apologizes For The Hotel Listing Hijack In Google Places
- Google Places Business Adds 1,000 Categories Internationally
- Google Search Queries Report Now Showing Exact Numbers
- Google Webmaster Tools Now Reports Crawl Errors On The Final Redirect URL
- Google Updated Googlebot-Mobile User-Agent Name
Check out the January 2014 recap if you missed it.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
