Category Archives: Search Engine News

Penguin 2.0 Has Arrived

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penguin-2The update many webmasters have been waiting for (and even more have dreaded) has now arrived. According to Google, an estimated 2.3% of English queries have been affected to a noticeable degree to the average user. For comparison, the original Penguin update affected 3.1% of English queries.

Our Results

None of our clients have been affected negatively, with over 70% seeing improved rankings through the update and the remaining clients maintaining stable rankings.

Here are the SERP rankings from one of our clients today (May 23, 2013). We have been working with them since March 2013 on an e-commerce term to boost product sales and gain more company exposure overall.

Here is a quick snapshot of rankings for this client on one of their primary terms, going back to when we first started working with them back in March (click to enlarge):

Across the web, I am seeing a few common themes in the websites that have been hit by the inevitable second massive Penguin update:

  • Heavy primary keyword anchor text, more often than not surrounded by low-quality spun content in Tier1
  • Thin website copy on money site, especially inner pages
  • Lack of branded anchor text

As Google has claimed in the past and more assuredly will in the future: it is quality, unique, and relevant content that is going to win out in the long run. In the near future, I personally believe we will see co-citation becoming increasingly important as exact-match anchor text is phased out, and many more on-page factors coming into play as the search engines evolve.

Whether you were hit by the latest Penguin update or are just looking to revamp your SEO efforts, contact me personally today using the form to the right and I will get back to you with some ideas on how we can work together to drive more targeted traffic to your website.

Bing is Making Moves

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Microsoft’s negative $5.5-billion-and-counting search engine has come a long way since its initial implementation in 2009, more than doubling its initial market share of 8.4%. The problem is that market share has not been chipped away from Google.

bing-loses-almost-1bil-per-quarter

Image courtesy of Microsoft and CNN

Now with the recent implementation of Bing Webmaster Tools and the brand new Disavow Links tool, Bing is really shaping up to take things to the next level with their engine. Google has been frustrating webmasters everywhere with Panda and Penguin, and now with the possibility of negative SEO on many minds a way to ask search engines to ignore ‘bad’ links is necessary.

I believe this move is meant to show consumers that Bing is more agile than Google and listens to consumers, with the obvious long term goal of increasing the Bing user base while at the same time lowering that of Google. Bing has also integrated many social signals directly into its search result pages, and forged numerous partnerships to deliver a better overall search experience. The coming months should be interesting to see how the search engines evolve, but I feel that Bing is definitely on the right track to become a true competitor to Google.

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