Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great and productive week. What can I say, this weeks buzz is nearly all Google. I know that there may be a lot of other noteworthy news out there, but the Penguin 2.0, Google new search by voice feature and AdSense related stuff, are those that caught my attention a lot more.
Penguin 2.0 as you may all have probably heard about has struck some days ago. While it has been an expected move from Google, surprisingly, I think that it came in earlier than what Matt Cutts initially lead us to believe. Anyway, still a bit too early to actually have a clear picture on the outcome of this update, but SearchMetrics.com already reported the biggest losers, based on their available data. Do you like the “new results”? That is if you felt any difference at all.
Anyway, How about you? Do you think you have been hit (negatively) by this update? If you think that your traffic has gone down, you should know that it may or may not be due to this update. To avoid being repetitive and in case you’ve missed it, read why your traffic may have been affected, but not necessarily due to Penguin 2.0.
BTW, Matt Cutts tweeted recently that if you think that the Penguin roll-out may be still showing some spammy results, you can report this by using this special Penguin spam form.
On a different front (but still Google related), don’t know if you have heard about the new “Conversational Search” feature that is now live. I have to admit that it is quite impressive that “search by voice” is now a reality. To make this short, watch the small video I just did about this new feature. Does it work? You’ll find out soon enough.
And finally, Google has been recently making some modifications to their AdSense policy. For those of you who uses AdSense to monetize your blogs, know that you are now permitted to “modify” the ad code for a variety of reasons (e.g. ad responsive, a/b testing and more). You do know that it was not permitted before, right? Find out here on AdSense’s official blog. Also, below you will find a video from Google AdSense G+ page, clarifying more about what “adult” content is. May sound straight forward to you, but then again, it may not.
As usual, in no particular order:
Inbound Marketing/Analytics/Advertising
- The 9 Most Important Local SEO Elements For A Site
- Google Penguin 2013: How to Evolve Link Building into Real SEO
- The Hottest Online Marketing Tactics Used by Experts
Social/Blogging/Small Business Bites
- My Warrior Forum Trojan Horse & The World’s Worst Email List
- 7 Ways to Build Authority on Google+
- 30 Quick Editing Tips Every Content Creator Needs to Know
- The Power of The Nudge: How to Convert Visitors Into Customers
- Can Triberr Get You More Web Traffic [Or Is Traffic a False God]?
More Cool Stuff and Other Roundups
- Refer a Software Developer. Make $30,000! (Yep, you read that right. $30K smackers for referring a friend)
- What To Expect In WordPress 4.0 (Already?)
- Friday Finds – Google Plus, Penguin 2.0, Twitter & Teaching Children to Code #FridayFinds
AdSense Tips: Keeping your site family-safe
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend!
I seem to have taken a bit of a hit, but I’ve used it as motivation to freshen-up/work on my site a little and see where I stand in a few months.
That´s good thinking. Taking a bit of a hit and using that to drive you to move forward is a great attitude.. Good luck, hope you see things improving soon enough
Darek Kargul
I feel sorry for those websites that got hit buy the Penguin 2.0 update. Lucky for me I did not see any traffic drops in any of my websites.
For the Google Conversational Search do you have to install some kind of plugin? I check on Google Chrome and other browsers but I did not have the search by voice feature.
Hi Derek. NO, I did not have to install anything on Chrome. Perhaps your version needs to be updated? Take a look and see if the version is up to date…
Darek
I just realized it’s probably because I’m using Linux and Linux has a different version of the Chrome brwoser which doesn’t have this feature yet. Anyway thanks for the quick reply.
Joe Hart
Conversational search or voice enable search is really exciting…It’s the first step towards a holographic sound enabled encyclopedia envisioned in the movie The Time Machine…Can’t wait to see this in action.
Martin
Yeah, it’s basically coming to both the web at large and to Chrome. Chrome has, or will have soon on some platforms, a noticeable thing showing notifications. There’s actually a flag to enable it in about:flags, for Windows and Chrome OS.
Pitzer
I got lucky this time round, the update didnt hit me. I am not sure whether this is too early to make a conclusion. Just wondering if there is a software online that I can use to check. As for the voice search, I havent seen that on my browser. Thank you for the post.
Do you have Google Analytics installed? That should give you a good idea..
No I dont have that. I thought that google webmaster tools works the same as that. If not, I will have it added on my website. Thank you for pointing that out.
Ana Hoffman
Seems like my traffic actually went up – hopefully because Google has finally decided to separate the wheat from chaff. 🙂
Thanks for the shout, ma dear!
That´s good to know Ana… Finally your efforts are paying off. You got remarkable stuff 🙂
Penguin is everywhere and a lot of good sites have been hit this time as well. Not sure if the dust will settle sooner or later. It is not good for any small business to be at the mercy of Google! Time to build referral traffic sources!
I agree, we should not put all our eggs in one basket. I know that it is very tempting, but if the strategy for traffic is spread more evenly, then things may not impact as much