Is all of the buzz around Google’s SEO algorithm changes lately making you dizzy?
Here’s a quick recap of 2015, information courtesy of MOZ.com
- In early February webmasters noticed major changes in their page rankings and speculation points to either an ecommerce update or a mobile usability update, but Google has not confirmed either.
- In April the widely known “Mobilegeddon” update was placed into effect, giving sites with mobile friendly, optimized, or fully responsive sites a boost in the rankings.
- In May, Google launched a quality update, but did not announce it. The internet community quickly dubbed it the “Phanton 2 Update” and it appears to have deeply affected website rankings, both positively and negatively. Google acknowledged a core algorithm change impacting “quality signals”, but gave no detailed information.
So, what’s next up for Google in 2015, you ask?
Google’s Gary Illyes announced, on June 3rd, that website owners can expect a Panda refresh within the upcoming weeks . Let’s look at what this means.
First, for those of you who are a little lost on what Panda is: Panda was an algorithm update that was launched on February 23, 2011. The update was designed to work as a filter and it targeted low quality content and penalized entire websites (based on the domain name, not individual pages) and dropped them in the rankings.
The update that is about to be released is simply a data refresh. PRWeb.com says:
With the introduction of Panda, a huge number of sites that were considered low-quality suffered significant declines in search ranking. Unlike other algorithm components, which are updated continuously, Panda requires periodic data refreshes.
When data refreshes occur, webmasters can expect to see changes in page ranking, which may be positive or negative, depending on the new data. Sites that have followed SEO best practices may see an improvement in their ranking.
It is very important to note that this is not an algorithm change or a change in SEO best practices. The best thing to do is to keep an eye on your rankings over the coming days/weeks and see what happens.
If you have any questions regarding Mobilegeddon, read this article by Darren Burgfeld. If you have any questions regarding the data refresh, let us know by contacting us or email us at[email protected].