Wow. So much has happened in the world of search over the last few months! It’s given me quite the ulcer… how about you? Webmasters far and wide have been scrambling to revise their SEO strategies, embarking on link-removal campaigns that could rival the Crusades and rabidly trimming the keyword-stuffed fat dripping from every page on their sites. Some are spitting mad, others are devastated, and a big chunk of spammers have dropped off the grid for good (not that we’re complaining about that last one).
But still, there are millions of well-meaning website owners licking their wounds and trying to make sense of what exactly caused their rankings to go haywire. The dust has finally begun to settle from Penguin’s initial rollout, and things were beginning to level out. Site owners breathed a sigh of relief and started the process of regrouping. Then, this:
Here we go again. Search Engine Roundtable announced the rollout shortly after Matt’s tweet, and the announcement post declared that all the past SE Roundtable reports about alleged Penguin updates were actually live tests that were simply preempting what everyone is seeing happen right now.
The post also speculated that webmasters who were thinking their sites were either hit or had recovered were simply seeing the effects of the testing and shifting in action. Now, however, the update is officially live. We’ve warned you countless times on Site Reference that this is not the end of the adjustments – it’s only the beginning. Google algorithm updates will always be with us, and all attempts at gaming the system will be shut down sooner or later. It’s nothing but a matter of time.
If you check out the comments below the SE Roundtable article, you’ll find that people’s websites are all over the map right now. Some have seen their sites jump in the SERPs, others have lost significant rankings, and still others are stuck in some weird holding pattern (aka Google Purgatory). It’s still early, however, and as with all Google updates, it will take a bit of time to really get a handle on where everyone’s websites now stand. All this activity leads me to wonder when the people with pitchforks and “SEO is dead” chants will begin to surface. Any time an algorithm change rattles the search landscape, it seems that this alarmist mentality runs rampant through Internet forums.
So, let’s think about that logic for a minute. Martin Sadler is the Bristol, England-based director of the Cloud and Security Lab at HP. He says that roughly 30 percent of the world’s population is online today, and by the year 2020, that amount will jump to nearly 50 percent, which is an addition of almost four billion people. How much more content will be added to the Web by that time? How much more information will be available for people? As long as the Internet is growing, so will the need for search. Google’s been called the “front door of the Internet” and interchangeably, “the Internet itself”. It’s not going away any time soon, so neither will SEO.
That said, let’s talk about what you can do in the wake of Penguin 1.1. I thought it best to illustrate best practices post-Penguin via a case study I’ve been following with great interest for the past couple of months.
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