Updated: October 27, 2015
Happy Halloween everybody! While everyone else has been getting ready for the mobs of trick-or-treaters this week, many SEOs have been pouring over ranking analyses to see if their sites were impacted by the latest Penguin update.
Born one year after its predecessor, the new Penguin 3.0 algorithm was launched on October 17th amidst much skepticism and suspense. The anticipation for the chaos the update could bring has been building up ever since Search Engine Watch published a “bloodbath” depiction of what Penguin 3.0 could mean to SEOs (complete with a cartoon of a grim reaper penguin as the featured image).
However, so far, Penguin 3.0 only seems to have affected less than 1% of US search queries. If true, it’s one of the easiest updates SEOs have seen in a while. Almost too easy, say some experts…
Linkarati contributor Jesse Stoler isn’t totally convinced that Penguin 3.0 has been completely rolled out yet, pointing to conflicting message from Google and lack of news coverage. Stoler writes: “On this Wednesday, October 22, I’m here to tell you that Penguin 3.0 has not been such a bloodbath. In fact, Penguin 3.0 might not be Penguin 3.0 at all.”
You can read his entire article here. Be sure to scroll down to the comments section for some interesting (and a few farfetched) theories.
Here are some brief summaries of other SEO headlines and distinguished content from the last couple weeks:
- Speaking of Halloween, what Google is capable of these days is just downright creepy, as this Sprout piece (It’s Alive! Google is Morphing into a Human and Changing SEO Content) clearly demonstrates.
- The Google Webmaster Tools team just announced an update to their technical guidelines, warning site admins that “disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings.” Click here to read.
- For all you SEOs ready to burn Google at the stake for constantly updating their algorithms without any consideration to how it negatively impacts you and your clients’ websites and business, take a deep breath and read this article to gain a more reasonable perspective on Google and SEO.
Link Building
- Run out of ideas for link prospects? Get some expert tips on how to go even further with backlink analysis.
- Find out how to knock out two birds with one stone by building industry authority at the same time you’re building links.
- Be sure to check out this awesome blog post from one of our writers about why it’s still important to use direct outreach to promote your own content yourself.
Content Marketing
- Halloween may have only just ended, but it’s already time for content marketers to dust off their holiday content plan and prep for the internet’s busiest season. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to make sure this holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year for your websites.
- Learn why this Moz blogger says it’s time to stop treating content as an “add-on or separate thing,” and time to start recognizing that content is an integral part of the user experience.
- This recent post from the Wordstream blog entitled 11 Kick-Ass Call to Action Examples, and Why They Work pretty much explains itself…
- Lastly, here are some great content ideas for November that may help drive more ecommerce traffic to your site and build customer relationships.
I also wanted to do a quick self-plug here and encourage you to check out our post 3 Ways to Get an Accurate Measurement of Your Website’s Search Engine Ranking. This can be great resource for seeing your site’s true SERP rankings and measuring the success of your SEO strategy.
See you next time for another SEO roundup!