The Latest in SEO: Your Need-to-Know SEO News Roundup (Week of 9/22/14)

What’s this? A new face on the Pam Ann Marketing blog? Well it would only be polite of me to introduce myself.

I’m Matt Southern, a new member of Pam’s team, it’s nice to meet you! If you follow the SEO industry, you may recognize me as the lead news writer at Search Engine Journal. If you don’t recognize me that’s cool too, we’ll get to know each other here as time goes on.

As someone who covers the SEO industry for a living I’m on top of every major or minor change happening within Google, Bing, Yahoo, and anything else that has a search box. A lot happens in a week, so I’m here to sift through all that news and bring you only the things that you urgently need to know about.

For example, if something happened in Google throughout the week that may affect your business, you’ll be able to read about it in the posts I’ll be publishing right here every week.

So let’s get on with it, shall we? Something major did happen to Google search this week, so let’s not waste any more time getting to it.

Latest SEO News: Week Ending 9/26/14

Google Releases A New Update To Their Panda Algorithm

Google’s Panda algorithm, which penalizes websites with thin content that adds little or no value, received an update this week that’s said to affect around 3-5% of queries.

I know everyone gets a little nervous when Google does something to their algorithm, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you have been working hard to add deep, useful content to your site over the past few months then you may actually be rewarded by this change. If you see an increase in traffic after this week, then it’s a sign this update worked in your favor

However, if you start to see a sharp decline in traffic after this week, then there’s a good chance you were penalized by this update. But don’t worry, you can get your traffic back. How do you beat Panda? Start beefing up your site with deeper content!

Google Cracks Down On Private Blog Networks

Google laid down massive penalties to private blog networks (PBNs) this week. A PBN is a group of blogs or sites often published by the same party, with the sole intention of using those sites to build links to help their content rank higher in Google.

This tactic has been rising in popularity as a way to manipulate Google search rankings. Any significant deliberate manipulation of inbound linking falls outside of Google’s webmaster guidelines, so they are cracking down hard on PBNs.

If you have ever worked with an SEO agency and believe they engaged in anything like this as a way to build links to your site, it’s a good idea to let us know about it here at Pam Ann Marketing. We can get those links removed so you’re not affected by the penalties that Google is handing out.

Google+ Profiles No Longer Mandatory

This piece of news won’t have a profound effect on your business, so feel free to skip over it if you want, I’m just including it because I thought it was interesting.

When you signed up to Gmail for the first time, were you pressured into setting up a Google+ profile? For a few years they used to be mandatory for every new user, but now Google is easing up on that requirement.

Does this mean they don’t care about Google+ as much as they used to? I don’t think so, I think they’re finally getting the message that they should stop shoving it in everyone’s face.

Have Questions?

That’s it for this week. If you had any questions about anything in this post, let me know in the comments section and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Pam Aungst

President & Chief Web Traffic Controller at Pam Ann Marketing

Pam Ann Aungst, M.B.A., President of Pam Ann Marketing, LLC, is widely recognized as an expert in search engine optimization (SEO). A self-proclaimed “geek”, Pam began studying computer programming at 6 years old, started creating websites in 1997 and has been working professionally in the field of e-commerce since 2005. Referred to by Sprout Social as a “Twitter Success Story,” she harnessed the power of social media to launch her own agency in 2011. Pam has been interviewed by publications such as Internet Retailer magazine, regularly publishes articles in top internet marketing news sources, and speaks on topics such as SEO and social media. Click here to read her full bio.

Latest posts by Pam Aungst (see all)

• 16 Tips for Forensic SEO Audit Success [Checklist] - September 16, 2019
• Is Your Web Developer Spoofing Your PageSpeed Insights Score? - November 29, 2018
• A Walkthrough (and Critique) of the New URL Inspection Tool in Search Console - June 26, 2018