Search Engine Land’s Top 10 News Stories Of 2014: When Pandas, Penguins & Pigeons Attack

We begin two weeks of year-in-review articles with a look at the most popular news stories we covered in 2014.

The clock is ticking on 2014. In a matter of days, we’ll all turn our calendars to 2015 and close the books on another year. Before we do that, the editorial team that brings you daily news and features on Search Engine Land and Marketing Land is going to look back at the most popular content we published during these past 12 months.

If you’re a new or recent reader, you’ll likely find some important news and commentary that you missed the first time around. If you’ve been reading our sites all year, you’ll hopefully enjoy a reminder of the year’s important marketing news. (And thanks for being a long-time reader!)

Over the next week two weeks, we’ll reveal our most popular columns (overall, and broken down by topic) and our most shared stories on the main social networks. But let’s start today with a look back at the most popular news stories we published in 2014.

Search Engine Land’s Most Popular News Stories Of 2014

This list is based on pageviews, and includes news stories published through December 18th.

1.) Google Begins Rolling Out Panda 4.0 Now

Barry Schwartz, May 20: “Is this the softer and gentler Panda algorithm? From talking to Google, it sounds like this update will be gentler for some sites, and lay the groundwork for future changes in that direction.

“Google told us that Panda 4.0 affects different languages to different degrees. In English for example, the impact is ~7.5% of queries that are affected to a degree that a regular user might notice.”

2.) Google’s Logo Moves Some Pixels Around

Barry Schwartz, May 26: “Google made a slight change to their logo recently, as a Reddit user posted. The “g” in the latter part of the word was moved left one pixel and the “l” in the Google logo was moved down a pixel.”

3.) It’s Over: The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results

Eric Enge, August 28: “The primary reason behind this shuffle of products is Google’s unswerving commitment to testing. Every product, and every change or innovation within each product, is constantly tested and evaluated. Anything that the data show as not meeting Google’s goals, not having sufficient user adoption, or not providing significant user value, will get the axe.”

4.) Panda 4.1 — Google’s 27th Panda Update — Is Rolling Out

Danny Sullivan, September 25: “The rollout means anyone who was penalized by Panda in the last update has a chance to emerge, if they made the right changes. So if you were hit by Panda, made alterations to your site, you’ll know by the end of next week if those were good enough, if you see an increase in traffic.

“The rollout also means that new sites not previously hit by Panda might get impacted. If you’ve seen a sudden traffic drop from Google this week, or note one in the coming days, then this latest Panda Update is likely to blame.”

5.) Google Releases Penguin 3.0 — First Penguin Update In Over A Year

Barry Schwartz, October 19: “Publishers hit by the last version of Penguin — back in October 2013 — have been waiting until now to see if actions they’re tried such as removing spammy links have worked. If so, they’re likely seeing some improvement in traffic this weekend. If not, they have to try making more changes and then waiting until however long it takes for Google to release Penguin again.

“By the way, for those who tried disavowing bad links, if you did that within the last three weeks, that was too late for this Penguin update.”

6.) Google “Pigeon” Updates Local Search Algorithm With Stronger Ties To Web Search Signal

Barry Schwartz, July 24: “Google told us that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more.

“In addition, Google said that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.”

7.) Google’s “Olympic Charter” Logo Stands Up To Russia’s Anti-Gay Legislation

Danny Sullivan, February 6: “If you had any doubts over how Google feels about Russia’s legislation against gay “propaganda,” just go the Google home page. The company has started what will be a string of special logos for the Olympics with one that includes a quote stressing that the official Olympic Charter is against discrimination and using the colors of the rainbow gay pride flag.”

8.) Apple Drops Google For Bing As “Spotlight” Search Provider In iOS 8 & Mac OS X “Yosemite”

Danny Sullivan, June 2: “This is a big new integration for Bing, which last year knocked Google out of Siri. Currently, Spotlight offers a “Web Searches” option which launches Safari (if you haven’t changed your default browser), which in turn runs a Google search, as Google is the default on Safari.”

9.) How A Single Guest Post May Have Gotten An Entire Site Penalized By Google

Danny Sullivan, March 26: “More broadly, while it’s easy to dismiss all this as some type of SEO squawking, it should be pretty disturbing to any publisher that Google might fairly broadly decide just how narrow your site has to be, in order to escape a penalty, if you have guest authors it deems writing off-topic.”

10.) Is eBay A Big Loser In Google’s Panda 4.0 Update? — Winners & Losers Data

Barry Schwartz, May 21: “Yesterday, Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed to punch low-quality content. That’s generated both “winners” who have moved up in rankings as “losers” have dropped down — and eBay might be one of the big losers.”

With just a couple exceptions, the top 10 articles are specifically about Google rankings, algorithms and search results — which is no surprise. Last year’s list was 100 percent Google-related, and also filled with articles about Google’s various animal-related algorithm updates/filters. If you need a refresher on those beyond the articles linked above, see our article library to get caught up:

• Google: Panda Update
• Google: Penguin Update
• Google: Pigeon Update

We’ve also compiled a similar list on our sister site, Marketing Land: Marketing Land’s Top 10 News Stories Of 2014: Facebook Layout Changes, Oscar Selfies, CIA Tweets & More.

On behalf of the Search Engine Land editorial team, thanks for reading us during 2014. Happy holidays to you and best wishes for 2015!

Source Of: http://searchengineland.com/sel-top-10-news-stories-of-2014-211443

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2014 Year In Review: A Look Back On What Happened With SEO

Columnist Erin Everhart provides a round-up of the biggest SEO developments of 2014.

Every year, we say how much has changed in the industry – and every year, we’re right.

It never ceases to  amaze me how much SEO constantly refines itself to more sophisticated Google guidelines and smarter, savvier searchers. Think about it: Since 2011, Moz has counted more than 83 major algorithm updates to the search engine giant.

That’s 83 times we’ve had to change our tactics in three years! Can you think of any other industry that has gone through that much fluctuation? Unlikely.

So, as part of the end-of-year trends, let’s take a look back on everything that went down this in 2014.

January

Expedia was the first big brand of the year to get reportedly hit by a penalty for unnatural link building. Rankings plummeted, and Searchmetrics suggested the company lost 25% of its visibility in Google because of the penalty.

Matt Cutts put the hammer down on guest blogging, urging any SEO using this tactic as a way to build links to cease fire of suffer the consequences.

Rap Genius is finally back on Google after getting doled a manual penalty in late 2013 for link schemes.

Google announced a new Googlebot user-agent for crawling mobile content. “Googlebot-Mobile” was retired in place of the standard Googlebot, causing webmasters to update their robots.txt and technical structure of their site for mobile optimization.

February

In late 2013, Google moved to 100% secure search, thus taking all of our keyword data with it. By February, Not Provided had topped more than 80%.

March

Webmasters started chatting about an update after seeing fluctuations in Google’s search results. Google never confirmed an update, but 

SERPs.com (among many others) noted a heavy increase in Google’s index volatility.

Google redesigned its SERPs for desktop users, removing underlined hyperlinks, increasing the font size slightly for title tags, and changing how ads are displayed.

April

The Heartbleed bug was revealed. Google, Rackspace, AWS and a host of security software used by millions of websites were affected, causing serious privacy concerns among anyone who uses the Internet.

Vic Gundotra, head of Google+ and Google’s social efforts, announced his departure from Google. Many questioned what this would mean for Google+ and its integration into organic search results. TechCrunch got word from multiple sources that Google+ will no longer be a product, but a platform, thus ending competition with Facebook and Twitter.

May

Panda 4.0 rolled out, the next wave in targeting sites with low quality content. Ask.com and RetailMeNot were among the big brands affected by the change.

eBay is the latest big brand to get hit by a (speculated) manual search engine penalty in addition to the Panda 4.0 update. eBay later suggested that this cost the business $200 million in revenue.

June

Authorship photos in SERPs listings were removed. Many questioned if this was the end to the entire program itself.

Google hosted its main event of the year, I/O 2014, where it announced news about the company and its future vision, including a new, consistent design across Chrome, Android and the web, an updated visual element to search, and wearables. You can read more about all the announcements at Verge.

July

Google added another animal to the algorithm apocalypse, releasing a local search algorithm update dubbed “Pigeon.” This update drastically changed which factors Google looks at when determining local rankings, including stronger ties to traditional web ranking signals.

Matt Cutts announced he was going on leave from Google, planning to return in October, and leaving his web spam duties behind. People panicked but were, on the whole, supportive.

Groupon ran a study showing that 60% of its direct traffic was actually organic search traffic, proving something many SEOs had long thought about their own “direct” traffic. Following that experiment, Conductor updated their 2013 study of web traffic, claiming that now 64% of all web traffic was from organic search.

August

Google announced that it would begin using HTTPS as a ranking signal, encouraging everyone to move from HTTP to HTTPS. This was seen as a sign that Google is trying to take this whole Internet privacy thing seriously.

We all saw this coming: Two months after the removed authorship photos, Google abandoned its Authorship program, which aimed to provide a stronger tie between content writers and content publishers.

The blogosphere was all abuzz over an influx of negative SEO extortion emails in which someone claimed they’d ruin your site’s rankings unless you wired them $XX amount of money.

September

Dentsu Aegis Network, a multinational media and digital communications company, acquired Covario, one of the largest search agencies in the United States. Rio SEO, Covario’s software business, was not a part of the deal.

Searchmetrics released their 2014 SEO Ranking Factors. High quality content, strong page architecture, and user signals saw the biggest increases in affecting ranking, while keyword links and social signals both decreased in value.

October

Authority Labs released one of the most comprehensive organic CTR studies. It segmented out desktop and mobile clicks, branded and non-branded keywords, and search intent (e.g. informational vs. transactional).

Google finally refreshed Penguin, the algorithm filter that targets web spam, over optimization and unnatural links. This was particularly noteworthy because it meant that everyone who was hit by the last Penguin and submitted a reconsideration request could finally get the opportunity to be reinstated into Google’s good graces.

Microsoft laid off Duane Forrester, Bing’s longest-serving face to the SEO community, not to mention the darling of the industry, having just won Search Personality of the Year.

Just a day later, Cutts decided Google web spam hadn’t crumbled in his absence and extended his time off until 2015. Speculations of a pending retirement ensued.

November

Google ditched its Local Carousel for hotels, restaurants, nightlight and entertainment. The SEO industry rejoiced.

Mobile became even more important to SEO as Google rolled out the mobile-friendly search label for mobile search results and a mobile friendly test tool in Google Webmaster Tools. This was the beginning of Google experimenting with a new ranking algorithm for mobile friendly sites.

December

Bing released its version of Panda, and frankly, did a better job at outlining what it actually considers good content.

Stone Temple Consulting released an extensive Twitter engagement study of more than 4 million tweets. One of the big findings was that time of day had little to no impact on “retweetability.”

What a year, right? I know I didn’t get it all, so what did I miss? What else monumental happened in 2015?

Source Of: http://searchengineland.com/2014-year-review-look-back-happened-seo-210959

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Google Maps, Yelp & Local SEO In 2015

When it comes to digital marketing, we tend to focus heavily on our websites. But columnist Rachel Lindteigen reminds us that optimizing external web properties is crucial.

When it comes to digital marketing and SEO for your business, it’s important to look beyond just your website. For local businesses, a strong online marketing effort requires an investment in local directories, maps and review sites, too.

If all of your optimization efforts are spent on your site, you’re likely missing out on opportunities.

Google’s Pigeon algorithm update, released in July 2014, gave more prominence to local map and directory sites such as Yelp. In many instances, Yelp listings now rank above the business’ website.

For example, when you search on the query [bakery phoenix], you have to scroll past three map listings and three organic listings before you finally see a local business website listing. That first local business website is in position 7, essentially.

How many potential customers are going to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to find your actual website? Nowhere near as many as are likely going to click on the map or directory listings that are more prominently positioned at the top of the search results page.

Thus, it’s important to make sure you’re watching these listings on a regular basis and optimizing your presence in the map and directory sites.

Step 1. Set Up Your Google My Business Account

The most important thing is to make sure you’re listed and your information is correct. You can do this for Google maps via Google My Business. Google My Business provides an easy way for a business owner to create a listing or claim an existing one, allowing them to ensure that their information is accurate and complete. Best of all, it’s free.

If you were signed up and verified through Google Places or Google + Pages, you should automatically be moved over to Google My Business.

Step 2. Get Started With Yelp

Claim your business listing on Yelp. Once you’ve claimed your business, you can update information, respond to reviews, upload photos and more. Yelp is the most popular consumer review site, and as such, it’s important to ensure your information is present (and accurate) on their site.

Step 3. Optimize Your Listings

Once you’ve claimed your listings and verified that your contact information is correct, it’s time to optimize your business information. You can add photos, hours of operation, contact information, your URL, and other information to make your listing more robust (allowing it to stand out from the crowd). You can also create deals, respond to reviews and more.

Step 4. Gather Reviews

Gather great reviews on your listings. I know, that’s easier said than done; this is one of the more critical and more difficult tasks to coordinate.

There are a few methods you can use to generate reviews. Some will advise you to “just ask for them,” but honestly, that’s not very organic. Yes, you can ask people to write reviews or offer an incentive to someone who reviews your business; however, you should be cautious with that type approach, as many review sites (including Yelp) discourage review solicitation.

As with everything else, Google wants to provide the best information to their customers (searchers), and that means it wants honest, reliable information. If you offer great products, provide great service, and take care of your customers, they’re going to be inclined to review you on these sites whether you ask them to do it or not.

Step 5. Engage With Customers Online

Respond to reviews. It’s likely you will have a mix of both good and bad reviews on Google Maps and Yelp. That’s normal.

Unfortunately, customers are often more inclined to leave negative feedback than positive – that’s why it’s critical that you respond.

There will of course be some customers that can’t be satisfied, and in certain instances you may feel that you were in the right and they were in the wrong. However, if you have multiple negative reviews that all talk about similar issues, that might warrant double-checking the situation to see if maybe what they’re saying is true.

In any case, respond, acknowledge their concerns and try to make them right where you can. It’s not necessary to air the entire concern publically; rather, respond and provide an email address or phone number where they can contact you further to work to resolve the situation.

Final Thoughts

By now, you understand the importance of working with local maps and directories such as Google Maps and Yelp. In today’s post-Pigeon world, this type of site will often rank above your own website – as such, you must be present there.

Managing your business on these sites needs to be part of your ongoing SEO strategy — in other words, it is not a one-time task. This “set it and forget it” mentality could leave you with outdated information, negative reviews that are unanswered, and other issues.

It’s likely that more customers will be exposed to your business through these sites than your actual website, at least initially. By including these sites in your overall strategy, you will be able to build your customer base and, hopefully, grow your business.

Source Of: http://searchengineland.com/google-maps-yelp-local-seo-2015-210846

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Effective Keyword Targeting: The Key To Growing Traffic & Revenue

Columnist Trond Lyngbo explains how proper keyword targeting is the key to improving your site's visibility in search engines.

When it comes to keywords, your aim shouldn’t be to target everything. Rather, you should aim to discover where the richest vein of gold lies, and then focus your efforts on extracting it. By correctly identifying areas of growth potential, you can transform a website into a traffic machine with high revenue potential.

With my e-commerce business clients, I begin by analyzing their market (keywords) and implementing a growth plan in selected areas with high traffic potential. I’ve usually found that most of them can boost traffic and sales with a simple optimization system.

The key to success is knowing where your biggest traffic and revenue increases are lying hidden, just waiting for you to uncover them. I call this “the low hanging fruit” of search marketing, where implementing small changes or just making a few small adjustments and fixes can reap rich rewards.

Discovering and capitalizing on this low-hanging fruit involves three steps:

1. Gather
2. Prioritize
3. Act

Let’s talk about each in more detail.

1. Gather Relevant Data

First, you want to know what your audience is looking for.

• Which keywords and phrases are users typing into Google to search for your business or your products?
• What is their intent while searching?
  
  • Is it to place an order right away?
  • To learn more about the product?
  • To compare your product against others?

Next, you should look at what you’re already offering them.

• Are you focusing on the right keywords?
• Are the branch terms, jargon and brand names your prospective buyers use to search the same ones your website is optimized for?

Keyword research and analysis can help answer these questions.

Your initial goal is to come up with the top 40 most popular keywords and phrases that have high search volume and for which pages on your website are generating revenue. Jot down these terms in one column of a spreadsheet.

For big e-commerce stores that sell a wide range of products, there will be many top level categories, with complex URL hierarchies leading to sub-categories and smaller sub-divisions, each loaded with a range of products and brands. In this case, you’ll want to write up a top 40 list of keywords for each category.

Before running a growth analysis, you’ll want a complete list of keywords that your prospective customers use to find information or buy products from your web store. Here are some tips and tools that will help.

a. Google Analytics: Go to the report page which lists top keywords and phrases that have sent search traffic to your website over the years. Export the list of keywords into your spreadsheet.

Look at data from as far back as you can. It’s particularly helpful if you can access keyword data from before September 2013, when Google moved to 100% secure search (thus taking away keyword referrer data for Google searches).

b. Google Webmaster Tools: Append all keyword data from your Google Webmaster Tools (or Bing, or Yandex) account to the same spreadsheet. You’ll now have a large collection of search terms, along with some general ranking data.

c. Internal Site Search: Collect keywords that your visitors are using on internal search tools on your web store when they navigate around it or seek specific information on products or categories. Add these terms to the spreadsheet.

d. Google AdWords: Export any data from your previous PPC campaigns to include in your growing list.

e. Google Keyword Planner: Type your web store URL and Google Keyword Planner will throw up keyword suggestions it thinks are relevant to your site. Add these terms to your growing collection.

Repeat the steps with URLs to your site’s category and sub-category pages, as well as your most important product pages.

You now have a meaty dataset to study.

Looking at the information you’ve gathered, it will become apparent that:

• The keywords are all related in one way or another to content available on your site.
• Most of these keywords drive search traffic to your website, some more than others.
• The list reflects your self-imposed limitations on which keywords you believed were right to use – or, to put it another way, there are probably many more keywords that your prospective buyers used to search for your products, but which are not found on your site!

Armed with this treasure trove of keyword data, you’re now ready to shift gears to enter the next phase of your strategy.

2. Prioritize Your Targets

Now that you’ve built up this big list of keywords related to your site, it is time to pare it down to those with the greatest potential to grow your traffic and revenue. From there, you can expand the list to include common variations of these high-value keywords.

You should also examine which keywords your successful competitors are focusing on — your research may uncover valuable keywords you hadn’t even thought to target!

Tip: Long-tail keywords are especially interesting because they have potential to quickly and easily rake in more revenue since they have generally lower competition and target visitors who are ready to buy.

To expand your list of existing high-value keywords, I recommend the following tools:

a. Keywordtool.io: This long-tail keyword research tool can provide thousands of keyword suggestions from real user queries. I recommend running it on all product category and sub-category names e.g. shoes, running shoes, and brand names (like “Nike running shoes”).

You’ll get plenty of long-tail keyword suggestions, which are often the most under-estimated assets for many of my ecommerce store clients.

While it’s true that general keywords like [shoes] and [running shoes] have higher search volume than a search phrase like [Nike running shoes red], the latter converts very well into sales because the visitor is almost ready to buy.

b. Google Correlate: By correlating words and topics, this helpful tool can throw up keyword suggestions, including variants on more popular and commonly used search terms.

c. Merge Words: By using this tool, you can expand your list by adding words like [cheap], [affordable], [expensive] and so on to the front (or end) of your keywords. e.g., [affordable Nike running shoes].

Do this for popular brands in your store. If your e-commerce store targets a local audience, include location data. Follow the same procedure, but add city/town, neighborhood or locality names to the keywords.

You can do the same with colors (e.g., [red Nike running shoes]), or try other variations based on trends, seasons, holidays, special occasions and so on.

To see which keywords your competitors are targeting, try the following tools:

a. SEMrush: SEMrush can provide data on keyword and ads (for organic and paid keywords) on your competition. You can find out which keywords others in your business are using, and include them in your growing list of search terms.

b. Google Keyword Planner: You used tool this in step 1 above to identify keywords which Google deemed relevant to your own site. Now, carry out this exercise using URLs of your competitors’ web stores.

c. Open Site Explorer: Investigate your competitor’s backlinks and find out which keywords are in their anchor texts. This works particularly well if you have competitors that have been around for many years and are performing very well in SEO terms.

Studying their link profiles and the keywords they target can offer clues for exploitation. Delete obviously irrelevant data, URLs and phrases like “click here.” Remove any duplicates, and then add the remaining data to your keyword list.

3. Take Action

From here, you can act on your data. The preparatory steps ensure that your actions will focus on the areas of highest ROI.

There are several steps in the action plan to dominate SERPs in each category, including:

• Content Marketing
• Topic marketing
• Positioning as an typical expert/authority
• Personalization
• Retargeting
• Niche specialization (e.g. by Weather, Season or Trends)

And when you take action on your priority areas, you’ll see results very fast.

• Focusing on high search volume keywords will naturally bring in more visitors as your rankings improve.
• Improving page titles and meta descriptions for keywords that you’re already ranking for will lead to a higher click-through rate. By your research and planning, you know these are keywords that serious prospects are already clicking on to buy – from your competitors. Direct that traffic to your store instead.
• Focusing on long-tail keywords will deliver prospects to sections of your site designed to maximize sales and profit, where a few simple tweaks and techniques will ensure that your pages outrank the weak competition on SERPs.

I’m constantly surprised at how difficult most e-commerce web store owners and search marketing consultants make this process. With proper keyword research, analysis and targeting, you can enjoy traffic and revenue boosts, too.

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The Decade Is Half-Over: Where SEO Has Been & Where It’s Going

Columnist Tom Schmitz takes an in-depth look at how SEO has changed over the past 5 years, complete with insights, observations and predictions for the future.

Search engine optimization shifted dramatically during the first half of this decade. I wonder how it will evolve?

Google Got Intelligent

Google has always been smart. When it launched, the PageRank algorithm changed everything, so much so that Google devoured a diverse community of now all but forgotten search engines. As smart as the early Google was, the pre-Caffeine Google was a shadow of this decade’s version.

Looking back, it seems much of Google’s quality assurance, protecting the search engine results pages (SERPs), depended on brute strength. Identify that which was unwanted — such as reciprocal links, directory links, paid text links, article repository links, etc. — and then write a program to recognize and deal with the webspam. This was even more true before the Big Daddy infrastructure update.

When the Caffeine indexing infrastructure went live in 2010, Maile Ohye of Google’s Webmaster Central said that “the entire web is expanding and evolving, and Caffeine means that we can better evolve with it.” She wasn’t kidding. After Caffeine launched, it appears Google got better at identifying what it likes.

For example, Google seeks content that contributes new information, ideas or thoughts to topics rather than rewriting and regurgitating what’s already ranking.

Yes, it has bigger hammers, too (like Panda and Penguin), but today Google feels more intelligent. It’s not just a beefed-up PageRank algorithm with add-on police routines.

Back to the early days: As smart as last decade’s Google was, the SEO community managed to isolate the important ranking factors long before anyone conducted a decent correlation study.

In some respects, the SEO community was smarter than Google. We just lacked the processors and storage capacity to systemize what we knew or thought we knew.

Later, Moore’s Law caught up and the cloud arrived. Companies like Majestic and Moz started crawling enough of the web in order to lift the veil and reveal big chunks of Google’s secret sauce.

You might argue that the height of SEO knowledge coincided with the launch of Caffeine. I cannot recall any mega revelations that were not announced by Google during this decade.

Is the period of discovery is over? Today, we SEOs refine what we already know and listen for Google’s announcements. At the same time, Google shares less and less.

In October, Google told us to say goodbye to PageRank – not that we were using it. They took away our keyword analytics and dumbed down the keyword tool. I wonder, as a ratio of knowledge vs. impact, do we know less now about SEO than we did at the start of the decade?

So where, after a half-decade, is SEO headed?

The Death Of SEO

When it comes to SEO, there are three types of website owners:

1. Those Who See SEO As A Marketing Channel. They pursue SEO as a means to drive traffic. They create content, optimize pages and build links for the sake of SEO.
2. Those Who Consider SEO Traffic As A Reward For Doing Everything Else Right. While they still chose their keywords and optimize their content, they focus on using content, social media, and promotions to drive engagement and awareness. They figure if they do everything else right, organic traffic is sure to follow.
3. Those Who Don’t SEO. Whether they admit it or not, this group is focused on having their content their way. They will not let SEO best practices influence the design, architecture or content on their web pages. I’m going to include those who hope SEO will follow but do not prepare for it in this group.

I see a growing number of the third type and for various reasons. Some are so caught-up in new HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript design tricks that they don’t want to do anything that could require change. Others have given-up, believing they cannot compete against well-funded brands.

Many SEOs are leaving the profession. Several are becoming content marketers or inbound marketers. They still include SEO in their work, but they’ve broadened their scope, because for them SEO is too limited.

Yes Virginia, there are still dedicated SEO specialists, but the profession seems to be in retreat.

Because Google gives brands such a huge advantage, mid-sized and small businesses find it increasingly difficult and hostile to compete against their larger competitors, especially small companies that sell nationally. Even at the startup and enterprise level, many companies are folding SEO into other positions.

Dedicated SEO professionals are definitely out there, but new opportunities for employment are shrinking. Today the dedicated SEO is pretty much an agency, independent or enterprise position.

The Death Of PageRank

Google’s announcement that it would no longer update PageRank was anticlimactic. What took them so long? More importantly, this is another example of Google removing information.

Google dumbed down the AdWords Keyword Tool. In Analytics, Google stopped reporting keyword referrals (old news). And while Google may beef up Google Webmaster Tools from time to time, the company hardly treats it like a serious software project with frequent, meaningful iterations.

Today’s mantra seems to be that any effort that does not contribute to Google’s ROI, or that might lessen PPC spend, is ripe for the guillotine.

Authorship not working out how you thought it would? Don’t fix it; drop it. Google+ +1 votes not as good an indicator as you hoped? Bye. Look for Google to find new ways to provide less.

The Death Of Keyword Targeting

Thanks to Hummingbird (and the general concept of entities), the new way to optimize web pages is to include all related keywords and variations on one page.

Prior to this development, SEO teams typically created a different page for every keyword. Google is forcing us to put lots of eggs in one basket. If you get it right, you can rank for lots of keywords, key phrases or variations. Get it wrong, though, and you sink.

At the same time, Google tells us to create new thoughts, not repeat what’s already been said. This creates a high bar for generating effective SEO content. What used to be many pages must now be one, and it has to be full of original ideas, not just original text. Ugh!

By the way: SEO agencies, take note. Google handed you a gift. Converting pre-Hummingbird content into entities is ripe for productizing. It goes hand-in-hand with Panda recovery. However, be careful not to mess up websites that continue to enjoy rankings and traffic.

The Death Of Link Building

Is link building more important than ever, or dead? Google seems to have cracked the code to enforce rewarding earned links while ignoring or penalizing placed links. (Hello, Penguin!)

People really ought to revisit Todd Maicoat’s link bait tutorial. (If it helps, ignore the phrase “link bait.”)

Google wants you to build an audience that rewards you with links and social media shares. If your content doesn’t drive activity or conversations, don’t expect it to drive links.

Pay attention to indicators like comment activity on blogs and to social media sharing. Keep in mind, not every article, post or page will go viral. If two in ten articles drive links you’re doing well. Three in ten will put you in the hall of fame.

I do think there is a place for link builders… not the type who cold call web admins to ask for a link, but rather the winning link builders – networkers who can bring together groups that will help each other.

Even when such groups cannot move the needle alone, they can get the snowball rolling so their readers and followers become motivated to comment, share and link based on the activity they see.

The best network will trump the best content. The best link builders will be influencers who belong to a social network of fellow influencers.

The Death Of Matt Cutts

I’m not giving Matt the 21-gun salute just yet. Hopefully, after a well-deserved respite, Matt will return to his role as Google Guy, their SEO community spokesperson. I’ll hold my breath but only in one lung, as I give it 50/50.

The info Matt provides helps non-enterprise sites more than it does Google’s enterprise PPC advertisers. And because it is far more difficult to build a small business into a big advertiser today than when the wild, wild web was young and in flux, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to provide SEO help beyond official announcement and updates.

Also, independent, agency and small business SEOs are more apt to ask pointed questions or gripe than are enterprise SEOs. By not showing up, Google gets to avoid all those awkward moments.

Does Google even need to answer questions? Google’s been largely supplanted as the Google expert by other companies. Companies like Moz, thanks to their tools and research, provide more data and answers to questions about SEO than Google ever did.

Other Google employees are online and answering questions, but they’ve been doing this for some time. No one is stepping up to fill Matt’s spokesperson shoes. We haven’t seen Adam Lansik recording Webmaster Q&A videos. Don’t be surprised if we see more pullback away from public speaking by Google engineers.

Final Thoughts

Lots of questions; few good answers. I think by the end of the decade, Google will have largely finished its transition from a PageRank or link-based search engine to one that recognizes quality over authority.

However, Google loves brands; this will not change, which means large companies will continue to expand across the SERPs and make ranking more difficult for smaller businesses. Most SEO professionals will have left the field and it will really be just a line in the job descriptions of web developers, designers and copywriters.

Source of: http://searchengineland.com/2015-seo-playbook-half-decade-edition-210082

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How Google’s Penguin 3.0 Is Playing Out Across The Web?

How has Penguin 3.0 resonated globally? Contributor Philip Petrescu of Advanced Web Ranking shares data on the algorithm update's impact.

There’s been a lot of debate about how big or small the latest Penguin 3.0 update was. This post won’t offer a measure, but will assemble the information we’ve gathered and suggest what may happen next.

I believe that the indisputable truth about Google’s updates belongs to Google only, and for all that we know, Penguin 3.0 impacted less than 1% of the English language queries. However, as with anything related to SEO, we can only take what we have and work ourselves out of the dark.

So, whenever big algorithmic changes are made, we gather every bit of information we can, then try to put the pieces together in order to understand what happened and what to expect next.

At my company, AWR, we have recently been performing some studies of our own on the impact of algorithm changes with the development of our latest Google Algorithm Changes tool.
According to the data we processed, was saw a very distinct fluctuation in rankings determined by Penguin 3.0, with the peak in ranking changes being recorded on October 18 and October 19. Overall, the changes came in at 4.4 on our scale of ranking changes.

For comparison, the highest ranking changes factor we’ve ever seen with our tool was 5.6 during the HTTPS/SSL as Ranking Signal update.

Some background: The Ranking Changes Factor is a metric we have calculated based on the changes we’ve seen in our data set, which includes 10,000 keywords and 500,000 URLs across various industries. The data is updated daily and shows the severity of the changes.

The Overall section (pictured above) shows the Ranking Changes Factor, which is computed using a proprietary algorithm. The Top 10-50 sections show the number of websites that have had their rankings changed (compared to the previous date) and the percentage (how many websites were affected from the total number of websites).

The more websites are affected, the higher the importance of the algorithm update. The blue line shows the organic visibility of all the websites that we track, rising when the sites experience higher rankings and lowering when the rankings drop.

Penguin 3.0 Hit Harder On Low-Ranking Websites

In addition to calculating the Ranking Changes Factor, we also wanted to take a closer look at the update’s impact across the search results spectrum. And so, we found that the turbulence generated by the update was heavier for pages that appeared beyond the second page of results.

Specifically, only 1 in 10 websites on the first page of search results (top 10) experienced changes that moved them 5 positions (screenshot-1). However, when you expand the scope to include the top 50 results, the number of websites impacted was considerably higher at 36.2% (screenshot-2).

The update did not generate a large number of dramatic changes within search engine results pages (SERPs). According to our data, fewer than 1 in 10 websites (7.7%) that ranked on the first page dropped by more than 10 positions after Penguin 3.0:

If this number were higher, we would be talking about disasters. A Top 10 listing experiencing a drop of more than 10 positions is kind of a big deal, while lower rankings are more volatile by nature.

Penguin Behaved Differently In Other Countries

All languages and regions around the world were affected by Penguin, as the update launched globally. However, what we found is that Penguin 3.0 behaved differently in countries outside of the U.S.

While on Google.com (in the U.S.) the damages of Penguin 3.0 were immediately seen on October 18, the update rolled out to other countries a bit more slowly. On Google UK, for example, the peak in turbulence was seen on October 20th:

Or take the case of Google Germany, where Penguin 3.0 did not lead to any big changes in search results:

Up until now, we have only processed data for a couple of countries, more as an experiment at first. But it proved to be an interesting direction for moving forward with our research, the data being extremely useful for people outside of U.S. to use as benchmark in times of ranking turmoil.

The Bottom Line

How much your site was impacted by Penguin 3.0 depends on the industry you’re in, the rankings you have, and the competition you’re sharing the SERP with (and potentially lots of other unknown factors).

You will never know for sure what happened unless you keep your eyes on Google. We will certainly do the same and share it with you if we spot anything out of the ordinary.

I hope you will share your thoughts, too, in the comments below and via Twitter (we’re using the hashtag #gac for Google Algorithm Changes).

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