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Search Engine Optimization encompasses a wide variety of techniques in which your website can be better tracked and displayed by Google (the largest search engine). Through comprehensive management your site can have the largest chance of succeeding.
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New Google Algorithm Update: Panda 4.0 Released May 19th, 2014 virginiaseo.org /blog/new-google-algorithm-update-panda-4-0-released-may-19-2014/ Chris Dill
New Google Algorithm Update: Panda 4.0 Released May 19th If you pay any attention to SEO at all, you will often hear words like Panda, Penguin, and Antelope tossed around. Well OK, not the last one. If you do some digging, you can find out literally millions of blog posts and articles about the changes and how they rock the face of the internet upon release. Well, the big G is at it again! This time they released a smaller update to their Panda algorithm. Here is a quick explanation of what these original algo updates were- I will put them into terms a business owners or lay person can understand, and then link to the more complex and in-depth explanation. Panda
Panda Update – Feb. 23, 2011 You can read the official Q & A with Google here. The Panda update was put into place to combat so-called “thin” content. This affected roughly 12% of all internet searches- so it was a big one. Thin content is when a web page was designed only to promote links, or cluttered with ads, or containing duplicate and un-valuable content. This was Google’s answer to SEO companies gaming the system by creating huge websites full of rubbish and using them to rank sites that were only designed to generate ad traffic or affiliate clicks. Penguin
Penguin Update – Apr. 23, 2012 The Penguin is known as the SEO update. This update was designed specifically to combat spam and negative SEO. This update devalued sites with large quantities of bad links, keyword stuffing, and other spammy behavior. If your site had 1000 links to it from another site which had 1 million outbound links, that site and most likely your site would have been affected. Here is a good article on Penguin between Search Engine Land and Googler Matt Cutts. All Updates
All Updates – 2000 – Current If you are interested in this sort of thing, feel free to check out Moz’s big list of all algorithm updates, which is pretty awesome. As you can see, there have been a lot of upgrades and changes to the way Google views your site, and the way they rank your site compared to that of your competition whether that is on a local or global scale. A lot of small business owners were put out of business with the Penguin update, losing their entire business when their spammy website got pushed to page 300.
Enter Panda Update 4.0 – May 19th, 2014 While experts say that it might only have affected 7.5% of queries using the English language, that really won’t matter to you if your site got hit. Moz author Peter Meyers posted an interesting blog post about it here, in which he tracks the changes to a couple of large online storefronts such as ebay.com and Amazon.com. It is probably too early to tell exactly what changes the algo update brings, but we can certainly speculate, track, and comment. I manage a web property which was hit- and it is fully a legit site. The site itself was managed by a
blogger who did not know or care about SEO until recently. As such, there were lots of mistaken duplicate posts, thin content, and broken links. For instance when a revised product was released, the blog owner copied the old product content into the new post, and left the old post up. A recent switch from Blogger to WordPress was successful, when all of a sudden the sites search queries plummeted‌ only to rise and fall again. As you can see from the chart, Google has been messing around behind the wheel. Moz.com states that they released a smaller algo update on May 16th which was aimed at and nicknamed the Payday Loan Update.
As you can clearly see from the chart, we started working on the site mid April and all was well until May 15/16 which is when the trouble started to happen. We have currently adjusted some links, removed some parameters, and added some canonical links to duplicate content to fight the affect of these two updates. I do not personally believe that this is something to be worried about, and I do think this scale will go back to normal shortly. The reason I believe this is that the traffic for the site through Google Analytics has continued to maintain/rise, and sales are where they should be. To be honest this chart above does not really even concern me one bit, until I notice something else on the site slipping or get an alert from Google.
This Website A small update: This website took a plummet in SERPs right before the 16th, but has since risen back to the top for even more keywords than we originally held. It would seem that this small update has pumped some extra blood back into Virginia SEO!
Chris Dill SEO Expert at Virginia SEO Christopher Dill is a Christian entrepreneur who loves web design, marketing, and anything on a computer. He is the creator and author of The Dill Design, a local Virginia web design company. He also runs Virginia SEO, which is a SEO and inbound marketing company. Chris is currently finishing up his Master of Information Systems at University of Phoenix, and works by day as a Senior Network Engineer.
Latest posts by Chris Dill (see all) New Google Algorithm Update: Panda 4.0 Released May 19th, 2014 - May 27, 2014 Why Your Business Needs to Consider Inbound Marketing - May 10, 2014 Content Is King – Why the Future of SEO Depends on It - May 7, 2014