GOOGLE’S JANUARY ACTIVITIES: WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN UP TO SO FAR THIS YEAR?

As the New Year is now in full swing, it may be surprising that the next Penguin update has not arrived yet… Especially as it was anticipated to arrive before the dawn of 2016. Before we go on any further, what exactly is the “real-time Penguin” that has been the talk of the SEO town over the past few months?

 

The Penguin update was first released back in 2012 and was a measure that was taken by Google to stop naughty link building processes such as buying links and dealing with link networks. Google had finally had enough of websites acquiring unrelated and low quality ‘spam’ links that were simply obtained in an effort to boost rankings.

 

The wrath of the Penguin was felt in force as many sites experienced a harsh reduction in rankings as a penalty for their black-hat techniques. Fast forward to 2016 and we await the next generation Penguin that aims to speed up the process of penalising sites that have ‘spammy’ backlink profiles. By processing penalties for sites with shady backlinks as soon as they are found, Google will be issuing penalties far quicker than previously. This is also to work in reverse – so if a site has taken satisfactory measures to clean up its backlink portfolio, Google will remove penalties there and then. That’s right, webmasters will no longer be anxiously waiting months to see their sites recover from a penalty!

 

So what exactly has Google been up to so far this year? There was indeed a noticeable shake-up in search rankings earlier this month and this has been confirmed to be a core algorithm update. What’s hard to distinguish is the reason why some sites experienced a change in rankings. The founder and CEO of Yoast, a company who is responsible for a great SEO plugin for WordPress sites, talks of site structure being a possibility.

 

It might be handy to take note of his point too. If your site lists products, jobs or any other subject that is extremely changeable and susceptible to having pages that expire, the importance of category pages is emphasised. Instead of having specific pages compete against each other to rank, it is advised that a site’s structure includes categories to act as landing pages for a given search term. From here, the user is able to navigate to specific pages.

 

Another point of view comes from Jennifer Slegg, writing here on The SEM Post. It seems as though the way that sites are ranked for brand terms has had a bit of treatment, more specifically sites that are not actually owned by the brand itself. However, as per usual in the world of SEO, things are far from 100{06e29518e582b1cc2da09f8f2ea316dadc41c520023bcca83a4deb5e6ad0a3c6} clear.

 

Thanks for reading our ‘Google’s January Activities: What have they been up to so far this year?’ article. Be sure to visit the rest of our Digital Marketing Blog for all the latest happenings in Digital Marketing.

 

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