Weekly SEO news: 21 August 2012
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Matt Cutts has announced several more Penguin updates. People who spammed Google in the past will get into trouble. Will your website be affected?

In the news: Google's spammer patent, Google's John Mueller about subdomains, Google share of searches at 66% and more.

Table of contents:

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1. Matt Cutts: Google's updates are going the be jarring and jolting
Five days ago, Google's Matt Cutts announced in an online discussion that there will be further Penguin updates that will be upsetting for many webmasters:

Matt Cutts"Lots of people were asking me when the next Penguin update would happen, as if they expected Penguin updates to happen on a monthly basis and as if Penguin would only involve data refreshes.

If you remember, in the early days of Panda, it took several months for us to iterate on the algorithm, and the Panda impact tended to be somewhat larger (e.g. the April 2011 update incorporated new signals like sites that users block).

Later on, the Panda updates had less impact over time as we stabilized the signals/algorithm and Panda moved closer to near-monthly updates.
Likewise, we're still in the early stages of Penguin where the engineers are incorporating new signals and iterating to improve the algorithm.

Because of that, expect that the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact. It's not the case that people should just expect data refreshes for Penguin quite yet."

This announcement was a clarification of the statements that Matt Cutts made at the SES San Francisco:

"You don’t want the next Penguin update, the engineers have been working hard. [...] The updates are going the be jarring and jolting for a while. [...]

Webmasters who want to get as much visibility as possible should look at the spectrum of value their’re adding."

Do you have to be worried?

Google's Penguin updates target websites that use spam tactics to get high rankings on Google. Some of these tactics are cloaking, paid links, and automatically created links (forum profile links, blog comment spam, etc.)

If you use spam techniques to promote your website, chances are that your website rankings will drop with Google's next Penguin update. If you use any tools that uses words such as "secret trick", "exploit", "fully automated" or "auto-pilot" then it's likely that your rankings are at risk.

Websites that will be safe

For every loser in the search results, there will be a winner. If you don't use shady techniques to promote your website, you don't have to be afraid of Google's next Penguin updates.

The rankings of websites that use white-hat SEO methods will not be affected by algorithm updates that target spammers.

A win-win-win situation

If you want to be on the winning side, avoid spam techniques and use white-hat SEO methods that are beneficial to search engines, web searchers and your business.

The SEO methods that are used by IBP 12 are white-hat SEO methods that are safe to use. Use IBP 12 to optimize your pages and to get better backlinks. You will get high rankings that last.

2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Matt CuttsAnother Matt Cutts statement about Penguin

Matt Cutts tweeted an answer to the following question:

"Matt, can you please tell us exactly what to fix now then so we are not caught off guard? Don't give us the secret sauce, just be transparent and say 'watch your linking text' or 'check your HTML for inadvertent alt attributes with keywords in them' or 'delete all your old links on 'put-it-there-yourself' pages (or nofollow them)' or whatever this new penguin eats."

Matt's answer: "Certainly links are a primary area to monitor. Been true all this year; expect to continue."



The Google rank-modifying spammers patent

"A Google patent granted this week describes a few ways in which the search engine might respond when it believes there’s a possibility that such practices might be taking place on a page, where they might lead to the rankings of pages being improved in those search results."


John MuellerGoogle's John Mueller about subdomains

"In Webmaster Tools we generally treat data from subdomains as being internal with regards to the domain name. With regards to creating a site structure with subdomains or sub-subdomains, we generally leave that to the webmaster :) (though as with other infinite spaces, we discourage the use of wildcard subdomains)."

Editor's note: that does not mean that Google's ranking algorithm treats subdomains the same way.



Bing patent: indexing recent content in search engines

"The faster pages and content go from being published online to being included in a search index and search results, the less time there is to classify, categorize, and determine the quality of those results."



Google share of searches at 66 percent in July 2012

"Google accounted for 65.70 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending July 28, 2012. The combined Bing-powered search comprised 26.95 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 13.83 percent and 13.12 percent, respectively."


Search engine newslets
  • Microsoft AdCenter announced ad rotating feature.
  • Microsoft announces new API features in AdCenter.
  • Introducing the new visual Bing on Windows 8.
  • Google News can now index https pages.
  • India antitrust body investigating Google.
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3. Recommended resources

Download the brand-new IBP 12

The new version IBP 12 is now available for download. IBP 12 has many great new features. Download it now and see for yourself:

New version 12

If you haven't done it yet, you can download the free demo version of the brand-new IBP 12 now.

seoprofiler

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4. Previous articles

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