Posted on May 15, 2012

Panda and Penguin Updates-What does this mean for Search Engine Optimization?

Here are some notes about the Panda and Penguin update from this spring. These items indicate what Google is doing to create better, more relevant results for their visitors. If you are a Glacial Multimedia, Inc. customer, you will have no worries because we do not engage with this type of SEO technique. We follow the 3 C’s of SEO that Onur Birsen, our CTO, coined over 8 years ago: CODE, CONTENT, and CONNECTIVITY. Here are the main rank affecting changes since the end of March 2012:

“Blog spam” – mid March 2012
“Unnatural” linking – end of March 2012
Parked domains – April 16-18, 2012
Panda 3.5 – April 19, 2012
Penguin – April 24, 2012

New SEO factors

  1. Branding
  2. Behavior
  3. Social

Branding

Google favors sites with a wide range of factors that big brands just happen to display. Factors like:

  • Brand mentions, shares and links in social media.
  • Brand mentions and links on highly trusted sites.
  • Searches with brand and domain names.

Behavior

Google can measure via its toolbar, search results pages and other data sources it might choose to use from its vast store of information. Factors like:

  • Time spent on site when clicking through from a ranked page
  • Bounce rate
  • Bounce rate back to a ranked page
  • Time on site
  • Return visits

Social

All forms of engagement including comments, likes, tweets, +1s, and mentions, either:

  • Might be found by search engines and directly used in their algorithms
  • Share your content with a person or website, (it may be automated), that then might mention or link to your website in a way that is used directly in search engine algorithms.

Also, such engagement might also lead to repeat and new direct visits and response.

That social might work and work for SEO is clear. The question then becomes: “Is it significant?” The answer is: “Yes.”