2014 latest seo updates

Panda 4.1 (#27) — September 23, 2014

Google announced a significant Panda update, which included an algorithmic component. They estimated the impact at 3-5% of queries affected. Given the "slow rollout," the exact timing was unclear.

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Authorship Removed — August 28, 2014

Following up on the June 28th drop of authorship photos, Google announced that they would be completely removing authorship markup (and would no longer process it). By the next morning, authorship bylines had disappeared from all SERPs.

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HTTPS/SSL Update — August 6, 2014

After months of speculation, Google announced that they would be giving preference to secure sites, and that adding encryption would provide a "lightweight" rankings boost. They stressed that this boost would start out small, but implied it might increase if the changed proved to be positive.

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Pigeon — July 24, 2014

Google shook the local SEO world with an update that dramatically altered some local results and modified how they handle and interpret location cues. Google claimed that Pigeon created closer ties between the local algorithm and core algorithm(s).

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Authorship Photo Drop — June 28, 2014

John Mueller made a surprise announcement (on June 25th) that Google would be dropping all authorship photos from SERPs (after heavily promoting authorship as a connection to Google+). The drop was complete around June 28th.

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Payday Loan 3.0 — June 12, 2014

Less than a month after the Payday Loan 2.0 anti-spam update, Google launched another major iteration. Official statements suggested that 2.0 targeted specific sites, while 3.0 targeted spammy queries.

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Panda 4.0 (#26) — May 19, 2014

Google confirmed a major Panda update that likely included both an algorithm update and a data refresh. Officially, about 7.5% of English-language queries were affected. While Matt Cutts said it began

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Payday Loan 2.0 — May 16, 2014

Just prior to Panda 4.0, Google updated it's "payday loan" algorithm, which targets especially spammy queries. The exact date of the roll-out was unclear (Google said "this past weekend" on 5/20), and the back-to-back updates made the details difficult to sort out.

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Unnamed Update — March 24, 2014

Major algorithm flux trackers and webmaster chatter spiked around 3/24-3/25, and some speculated that the new, "softer" Panda update had arrived. Many sites reported ranking changes, but this update was never confirmed by Google.

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Page Layout #3 — February 6, 2014

Google "refreshed" their page layout algorithm, also known as "top heavy". Originally launched in January 2012, the page layout algorithm penalizes sites with too many ads above the fold.

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Don’t Upload Articles To Directories- Google To Writers

Google has put out a new “Webmaster Help” video advising webmasters and writers against submitting articles to online article directories. It’s been pretty well-known that Google isn’t incredibly fond of these types of sites for a while now, but the search team is still getting questions about it, so head of webspam Matt Cutts had some advice to share.
“I think over time, article directories have gotten a little bit of the worst name,” says Cutts. “So just to refresh everybody’s memory, an article directory is basically where you write three, four, or five hundred words of content, and then you’ll include a little bio or some information about you at the bottom of the article, and you might have say three links with keyword-rich anchor text at the bottom of that article, and then you can submit that to a bunch of what are known as ‘article directories,’ which then anybody can download, or maybe they pay to download them, and they’ll use them on their own website. And the theory behind that is that if somebody finds it useful, and puts it on their webpage, then you might get a few links.”

He continues, “Now, in practice, what we’ve seen is this often turns to be a little bit of lower quality stuff, and in fact, we’ve seen more and more instances where you end up with really kind of spammy content getting sprayed and syndicated all over the entire web, so in my particular opinion, article directories and just trying to write one article and just syndicating it wildly or just uploading it to every site in the world, and hoping that everybody else will download it and use it on their website – I wouldn’t necessarily count on that being effective. We certainly have some algorithmic things that would mean that it’s probably a little less likely to be successful now compared to a few years ago, for example. My personal recommendation would be probably not to upload an article like that.”

Google’s Panda update, launched in 2011, had a particularly devastating effect on a lot of article directory sites. It’s hard to imagine anybody being able to get much out of this kind of article submission in the post-Panda world.

In fact, Google is even advising against guest blog posts (for SEO) these days for pretty much the same reasons it advises against article directories. Guest blogging, you would think, would tend to cater a little bit more to the higher quality side of things, but that doesn’t appear to be how Google views it.

Of course, Google’s advice assumes that all the articles you’d upload to a directory would be low quality. There’s no way anyone could ever submit high quality content, right?


Source:  http://www.webpronews.com/google-to-writers-dont-upload-articles-to-directories-2014-01

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