A major responsibility of ours as Internet Marketers is to keep our ears to the ground of any new updates from the major search engines online. September has been a big month regarding Google Algorithm updates.
Earlier this month, there was an initial update from Google that is currently being named Possum. By all accounts, even today, this update does not seem to be settled. The SEO community at large are collectively seeing ranking fluctuations – an indication that Google is still A/B testing results. Nonetheless, the general consensus is that Google made an update to local listings and local finder information. There is also speculation that a prior minor update before this current update impacted organic results. Detailed information regarding this can be found here.
Today, an additional announcement was released that Google has implemented another algorithm update to their Penguin filter – designed to catch sites deemed as spammy. Searchengineland.com broke the news earlier this morning. The key takeaways are:
- Penguin is now a real-time signal processed within its core search algorithm. Meaning, they are not releasing any future updates. This filter for catching spammy sites is fully integrated into their algorithm now.
- Google has stated: With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page.
- Penguin becomes more page specific, not site-wide only
- This real-time Penguin update is probably not fully live yet. It is now “rolling out,” Google said – it will take full effect over the next couple of weeks.
We will continue to keep our clients posted and informed of any new updates the arrive and how rankings are impacted.
