Confirmed: A Panda Refresh, Version #23

Update: Google has confirmed that this is a Panda refresh. This would make it version 23 and it impacted about 1.3% of English based queries. I should note, I am shocked they pushed out a refresh before the holiday seasons. Last year they promised they would not do a Panda update before the holidays. What a difference a year makes. A week ago, we reported on some very strong signs of a Google...

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Matt Cutts Finally Announces Link Disavow Tool For Google Webmaster Tools

After months of anticipation, Google’s Matt Cutts, at PubCon in Las Vegas today, finally announced a new tool in Webmaster Tools to disavow links. Cutts made comments at SMX Advanced back in July, indicating that a tool would be on the way, and it is now here. In text on the tool itself, Google says, “If you believe your site’s ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control,...

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Google Launches New Page Layout Update (Yes, ANOTHER Update)

Google is on a roll with these updates. I think webmasters are starting to understand what Google’s Matt Cutts meant when he said a while back that updates would start getting “jarring and jolting”. It seems, that rather than one major update, we’re getting a bunch of updates in a short amount of time. This past Friday, Google launched its latest Penguin refresh. A week before that, it was the...

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Google Penguin Update Gets A New Data Refresh

Oh that Google and their late Saturday 6th Oct announcements. Sometimes it’s the big monthly (at least they used to be) “search quality highlights” lists, but they were kind enough to release that on Thursday this past week. Still, Google’s Matt Cutts managed to sneak in a Penguin announcement on Friday. He tweeted: div.twitterditto254335294063656960 { background: #000000 url(http://a0.twimg.com/images/themes/theme10/bg.gif)...

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Google: By The Way, A Panda Update Is Rolling Out Alongside The EMD Update

Last Friday, Google announced the EMD update. It was billed as a small and minor update, but the effects seemed to be fairly large, with many webmasters claiming to have been hit. Google’s Matt Cutts made it a point to say that the algorithm change was unrelated to both Panda and Penguin. He then said it was not the only update that was rolling out during that timeframe, noting that Google...

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Matt Cutts Just Announced A Google Algorithm Change

says it will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results. It sounds like an extension of the last change he tweeted about, which was aimed at improving domain diversity. Here’s the new tweet: div.twitterditto251784203597910016 { background: #000000 url(http://a0.twimg.com/images/themes/theme10/bg.gif) no-repeat; padding: 20px; } div.twitterditto251784203597910016 a { color: #383838;...

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Google News Gets A New Ranking Signal, And It’s A Keywords Meta Tag

Google announced the news_keywords metatag for publishers in Google News to help Google better identify and understand content that is related to things that are in the news. Do you think this is a good direction for Google News? Let us know what you think. Here’s what it looks like: <meta name=”news_keywords” content=”World Cup, Brazil 2014, Spain vs Netherlands, soccer, football”> If...

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