Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great week. So, what does Panda+EMD+Penguin result to? Electronic Mass Destruction on search rankings? Actually, not quite, but close enough. In a little over a week, the so called “Google dance” strikes again. Google has confirmed that a Panda Update (not a refresh) was rolled out, immediately followed by the EMD (exact match domains filtering) and yesterday, a Penguin refresh. That’s a lot of “cleaning up” in a short period of time. Anyway, I won’t be repeating more stuff about this issue as there are really some great information out there that discusses about them (including the big list of algorithm changes released on August and September). If you are interested and want to know more, read some of the articles as highlighted on the SEO/Inbound Marketing section below.
As for QDF (Query that Deserves Freshness), Matt Cutts has published a video that clarifies a bit more about “content freshness” and its importance as a ranking factor. Since some of you may probably not fully understand the “need for having fresh content”, I highly recommend watching the video (below). As he points out, QDF is just among the 200+ factors Google applies for rankings. To combat all the Google Pandas, Penguins and EMD, start by applying the best SEO practices, and you should be good to go ๐
On a different front, Windows 8 has now an official launch date, that being on October 26. Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founder), in his blog post, shares some of his views (positive and negative) about the new OS and also provides some “cool” tips on how to overcome the confusing “bimodal interface”.
You may also be interested in Microsoft’s recent article about “Updating our built-in apps for Windows 8“. How about you? Are you excited about the new Windows 8?
BTW and just a heads up, have you heard about Google’s new product, called “Google Tag Manager“? Not sure what to make of it yet, but it is suppose to be a promising tool for marketers. I’m on it!
As usual, in no particular order:
Content Marketing/Small Business Bites
- The Art of Being Interesting
- 10 Words Every Successful Blogger Needs to Know
- Pay each other Through Your Skills and Services – QuickHaggle (interesting concept?)
- Save Time When Dealing With Link Building Companies Trying to Spam You
- How To Write Your Most Popular Blog Post
SEO/Inbound Marketing
- The Exact Match Domain Playbook: A Guide and Best Practices for EMDs
- Google Panda Update 20 Released, 2.4% Of English Queries Impacted
- EMD Update and the SEOs’ reactions
- Keyword Research in 15 Minutes or Less
- Author Rank: Dominate The Search Engines And Become An Authority In Your Niche
Social Web/Other Roundups and Cool Stuff
- 50+ Creative Twitter Headers for Your Inspiration
- The 10 Secrets That Make Networking Easy, Fun and Ridiculously Effective
- Google +1’s Confirmed To Have “No Direct” Impact On Rankings
- LinkedIn Embraces Publishing: This Week in Social Media
Is freshness an important signal for all sites?
That’s it! Enjoy and have a great weekend.
Jane
Hey Fran, Wow Google sets webmasters on fire. 3 updates in a short period of time? Have you got any news about the next page rank update?
Anyways, thanks so much for including my post in the list. Much appreciated ๐
Hi Jane. Welcome for your post.. it is gooood, LOL. Anyway, nice to see you got by the CF thing.. As for the next PR update, not really sure. To be honest I don’t wait for it anymore. I’m pretty sure that when it happens, we will know ๐
Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend
Tomasz
I am a newbie and found the information here useful, especially in the ‘best practices’ post. I am going to read that post more carefully now as I really think it not just another post but solid knowledge. Thank you for that!
Thanks for stopping by. Glad you found this post useful and as for the best practices, I agree, it does require a bit of time to go through all of it. Worth while though and definitely worth bookmarking ๐
I just watched the Matt Cutts freshness video you shared. He mentioned changing text or words in an article wouldn’t really help in terms of freshness ranking in most cases. The funny thing is I know some people do that and have been telling people they should do so. Such a waste of time if you ask me, and Matt pretty much confirmed so. Lots of chatter going on about the recent updates. As always some people are happy and others are ticked off.
Hi Ray. You are so right about the chatter.. Can’t please everyone I guess. The “freshness” thing really shed some light and quite frankly I am also boggled about people mentioning the “do some changes” here and there and you got fresh content. Better to write “evergreen” rather than anything else ๐ Have a nice day and and thanks for stopping by, as always
Anton Koekemoer
Hi DiTesco,
Great post – as always. Personally – I think the tag manager from Google would help a lot of people with simple websites and not the knowledge on how to optimize their keywords (and other SEO aspects) – and you can be sure to use the same keywords for organic and PPC from the same “CMS” interface.
Aditya
Updates Updates And just Updates.Three updates in a series and if there will be another one then i will not be surprised.I guess they have created a sense of fear among the SEO’s and if another update will happen then for some it may be the end of road.
I have used Windows 8 trial version and the interface is amazing.I can’t even wait to launch it officially.But there is one problem it works well on i3-i5 processors not on Core 2 duo.
Bhushan
HI there,
I think it is just taste of google to make internet and website world to make spam free and more clear.Heavily updates are going at this time in a short term period.
EMD is a new blast of google update.I think that for my old system windows 7 is good.
Juan
original and content freshness will help me improve my English and by blog too. I think the Google EMD is good for blogger to be a better blogger even though it slap my traffic, its ok… ๐
Margarita
Hi DiTesco,
I have not heard about Google Tag manager. What this might be about.
Great post about those endless Google updates. Thank you!
Fresh content is the foremost requisite of any website. I don’t really understand what it means to have quality content. I have been posting quality content and updating my website from time to time but haven’t seen any improvement from a long time. Google is really firing webmasters with these updates and that also so soon!
Mathew
I normally notice all of the Google updates but to be honest I haven’t noticed a thing in the last few months. I guess that’s a good thing!