Websites Frozen Out By The Google Penguin: Your Monthly SEO Update
The Penguin Causes A Flap
Google, the world famous search giant, has introduced a number of algorithm changes designed to push sites adopting black hat practices behind those which employ ethical SEO strategies. In recent times there have been updates such as Florida and Panda, both of which caused a great deal of humming and harring in the search industry. The newest instalment known as the Penguin, has been introduced as a means of reducing the amount of ‘black hat webspam’ that currently shows up in the search engine results pages.
Speaking of the update Matt Cutts said, “We’ve seen a few cases where we might want to investigate more, but this hasn’t had the same impact as Panda or Florida. No algorithm is perfect. While we’d like to achieve perfection, out litmus test is ‘Do things get better than before?‘
Whether the Penguin has had a positively significant impact is open to debate. Some webmasters have complained that their sites have been unfairly demoted, while others have noticed the increased visibility of ‘bad’ sites in the SERP’s. It seems that Google have a long way to go in the continuing clean up of the online world.
Google Change Ad Rotation Policy
Those website owners who invest money in pay per click advertising may well be interested to hear that Google have limited the ad rotation setting to 30 days. After this period the advertisement attracting the most clicks will be the one that shows up in the results pages. Although this will result in more click-throughs, it won’t necessarily translate to a conversion rate improvement. Advertisers must keep a constant track on their advertisements during the first month and perhaps use one of the advertising workarounds currently being tested to maximise profit.
Value Of Facebook Shares Continues To Drop
The company name hot on the lips of computer users over the last couple of weeks has been Facebook. However, rather unusually the major social networking site has been the focus of negative speculation. That’s because the value of Facebook shares, initially introduced at a price of $38, had decreased to $31.91 by May 25th. As time goes on the original valuation of the company at over $100 billion dollars is seeming increasingly ridiculous.
A spokesperson for Moor Insights & Strategy said, “The challenge is this will sully the long-term brand of Facebook, and in five years time people will look back on the IPO and have negative connotation and none of that is good for the Facebook brand and the Facebook service itself.”
So what do you think about the future of Facebook and the evolution of Google? We welcome and will respond to any comments you wish to make at the bottom of this post, also please feel free to tweet and Google+ this content!