In late July, Google released an unnamed update that heavily impacted local search results. Since Google didn’t give this update an official name, or reveal what percentage of English search queries were impacted, the folks at Search Engine Land started referring to it as the “Pigeon” update. According to Google, Pigeon allows local search to utilize many of the same core ranking factors that traditional web search uses.
Last Thursday Google’s Pierre Farr announced on his Google+ page that Panda 4.1 is currently in the process of rolling out. The last major Panda update hit on May 20th and impacted an estimated ~7.5 percent of English search queries. Although Panda 4.1 is said to have impacted only ~3.5 percent of English search queries, sit is still being considered a “significant” update.
Earlier this month, Barry Schwartz reported on Search Engine Land that Google was testing a new search feature that displayed knowledge graph data within search results snippets. Yesterday Google officially confirmed the new feature on their Research Blog. Google is calling is referring to this data as “structured snippets.”
Each year, Searchmetrics conducts a study where they evaluate the latest and greatest SEO ranking factors and correlations. This month, Searchmetrics released their largest study to date, with over 100 pages and a variety of new ranking factors, such as average time on site and bounce rate. Searchmetrics summed up their recent study by confirming what many SEOs have known for predicted for quite some time, stating that “content is no longer an addition to, but is the main focus of, SEO.”
Although we’ve seen a lot of changes from Google over the past couple of months, one thing that I have found to be a little bit unsettling is that it’s been nearly a year since the last Penguin update. In case you aren’t familiar with the update, Google Penguin was an update that targeted sites using spammy link-building techniques. Hundreds of thousands of sites were impacted and many of them still have not regained their pre-Penguin rankings. In my experience, Penguin has had the greatest and longest-lasting impact in terms of penalties.
