Weekly SEO news: 16 October 2012
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

Some days ago, Google published a list of the ranking algorithm updates that were done during the last two months. How do these changes influence the position of your website in Google's search results and what do you have to do to make sure that your website gets high rankings?

In the news: Another Google ranking algorithm update, Google's Matt Cutts talks about schema.org markup and guest blogging, and more.

Table of contents:

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Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Official Google statement: changes in Google's ranking algorithm

Some days ago, Google published a list of the ranking algorithm updates that were done during the last two months. How do these changes influence the position of your website in Google's search results and what do you have to do to make sure that your website gets high rankings?

New Google

Here's a summary of the most important changes that can have an influence on your website rankings:

Web page quality and evaluation

  • #82862. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
  • #83135. [project “Query Understanding”] This change updated term-proximity scoring.
  • Imadex. [project “Freshness”] This change updated handling of stale content and applies a more granular function based on document age.
  • #83689. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
  • #84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
  • #83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant for a given search query.
Web page ranking and indexing
  • LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.
  • #82279. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We changed to fewer results for some queries to show the most relevant results as quickly as possible.
  • #83709. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change was a minor bug fix related to the way links are used in ranking.
  • #82546. [project “Indexing”] We made back-end improvements to video indexing to improve the efficiency of our systems.
  • #84010. [project “Page Quality”] We refreshed data for the “Panda” high-quality sites algorithm.
  • #83777. [project “Synonyms”] This change made improvements to rely on fewer “low-confidence” synonyms when the user’s original query has good results.
  • #84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.

For some reason, Google doesn't mention the latest Panda updates and the EMD (exact match domain) algorithm update in the list.

How do you have to react to these changes?

If you followed our advice in the past, Google's recent updates won't have a negative effect on your search engine rankings. Google tries to filter spam sites from the search results while giving pages with good content a boost.

Your website will only get in trouble if you used spammy methods to promote your website in the past. For example, you should avoid automatically created backlinks (forum profile links, blog spam, etc.) and keyword stuffing.

If you used white-hat SEO methods to promote your website, Google's recent changes mean that your pages will probably get higher rankings.

To make sure that your web pages get high rankings that last, use search engine optimization methods that are compatible with Google's requirements.

The advantage of white-hat SEO methods is that they lead to high rankings that are immune to Google's anti-spam ranking algorithm updates. Use IBP to make sure that your website gets the best possible rankings.

IBP only uses white-hat SEO methods that lead to lasting results. Download the free IBP demo version or buy the full version risk free.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

StatisticsInternet ad revenues rise to historic $17 billion

"In the first half of 2012, Internet advertising revenues climbed to an all-time high of $17 billion. [...]

Search revenues in the first half of the year totaled $8.1 billion, up 19 percent from nearly $6.8 billion during the same time frame in 2011."

Editor's note: more than half of the revenue was generated through search ads. That proves that it is very important to be listed in the regular search results.


YouTube now ranks videos based on time watched

"We've started adjusting the ranking of videos in YouTube search to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching. [..]

The experimental results of this change have proven positive -- less clicking, more watching. We expect the amount of time viewers spend watching videos from search and across the site to increase."

Matt CuttsAnother Google algorithm update

Another algorithm update was announced by Matt Cutts on Twitter:

"Minor weather report: Update of http://goo.gl/OpIDL  launching today. ~0.7% of English queries noticeably affected. [...]

If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward."



Video: does the use of schema.org markup create a ranking benefit?

Google's Matt Cutts answers this question in a video. He said the implementation of schema.org markup does not mean that a website will rank higher. The markup can have a positive influence on the clickthrough-rate.



Video: what is Google's view on guest blogging for links?

Matt Cutts also answers this question in a video. He said that low quality blog posts that are published on many different websites are not a good idea. Google won't count these links.

If an article is good and only available on some related pages then Google will count the links.


Search engine newslets
  • Microsoft introduces additional enhancements on the ad preview tool for Bing Ads.
  • Google's page speed Apache module is out of beta.
  • Local searches constitute 24% of Google queries.
  • Survey: 68% say that a full recovery from Google Panda is not possible.
  • Impersonal Google search results are few and far between, DuckDuckGo finds.
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3. Recommended resources

seoprofiler

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