So Google has done it again. Around the 25th April 2012 a major update hit the Google search engine algorithm (how Google crawl, index and rank websites) it went live globally affecting around three percent of all search queries.

For a quick overview of historic updates check the Google updates page. For the official release read it here straight from the horse’s mouth.

This update was named the Penguin update (named after another black & white animal – what’s next, the Zebra update or the Magpie update?). Just to recap a little, the last major update Google rolled out was the Panda update. That update was meant to tackle low/poor quality sites in their index.

The Panda update in a nutshell comes down to this question: ‘would you feel comfortable giving this website your credit card details’, if the answer is ‘yes I would’ then that would classify that website as good quality.

In summary. The Panda update was about content, user experience – and engagement. The Penguin update is about links.

The Penguin update is meant to tackle webspam. Spam comes in various forms, from cloaking (classic example here is ‘white text on white background), keyword stuffing and low quality artificial spam backlinks. The latter, links, is at the core of this update and Google believes this is the most widespread form of spam.

So what types of links are in the firing line? Basically links that are artificial and low quality e.g. can be links in blog comments or links in forum profile signatures, i.e. links that are really easy to get – and to game.

Google used to simply devalue these types of links, now with the Penguin update they can have a negative impact on rankings. Interestingly, and this is a bit worrying, is that with this update Google has opened the possibility for ‘negative SEO’ – i.e. de-rank competitors by building heaps of low quality links to their site.

How do you know if you site has been penalised by this update? Well if your search engine rankings in Google have plummeted then that is a clear indication you have been hit. What can you do to rectify the Penguin penalty? Remove the bad links! Get good quality – editorial links, get quality links that out-weight the poor links. If you have the ability, remove poor links where you can. Use tools such as majesticseo, ahrefs or opensiteexplorer to analyse your backlink profile.

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1. crawling
2. indexing (cataloguing)
3. calculating the search query’s relevancy & rankings
4. serving the results

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There are three main takeways explicitly affecting the SEO industry in a positive manner:

1. Business will spend more money! Australian businesses will spend more money on online marketing in 2012. The report states that “nearly three-quarters (70%) of client-side marketers say their companies will increase their digital marketing budget during 2012″.

2. SEO is a proven ROI channel! Search engine optimisation continue to grow as a key online marketing channel. The report says that “email marketing (87%) and search engine optimisation (81%) are the most widely practised digital marketing disciplines, but social media and online video are the areas where marketers are most likely to be increasing investment”. The report continues to say “Just under two thirds of companies (using these respective channels) say they will spend more this year on paid search (63%), SEO (63%) and email marketing (62%)”.

3. SEO professionals in Australia working either client or agency side have to up their game and become better educators as the study suggests that “there are also problems evident around knowledge of digital marketing, with 34% of client-side respondents saying there is an overall lack of understanding and education relating to digital within their businesses. Even more emphatically, 52% of supply-side respondents identified their clients‟ lack of understanding of digital as a major issue”.

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So what are the SEO ranking factors for social media? Here is a list with social media signals that impact on SEO:

• Number of followers (on Twitter)
• Quality of followers (on Twitter)
• Relevance of followers (on Twitter)
• Number of retweets (on Twitter)
• Number of fans (on Facebook)
• Number of comments (on Facebook)
• Number of views (on YouTube)
• User comments (on YouTube)
• References from independent profiles (on YouTube)
• Title of video (on YouTube)
• Percent of likes v.s. dislikes (on YouTube)
• Positive v.s. negative brand mentions (all Social Media)
• Number of social mentions (all Social Media)

The main learning here is that a combination of both quantity and quality signals matter and that social media signals are a must to appear as an authorative in the eyes of the search engines.

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Ask yourself this, when you go on Google and search for something, how often do you go beyond the first result page? 90% of click originate from the first result page, position 1 to 10, and the top three positions on Google get the majority of clicks. If your site is outside of the first page you are invisible! SEO can get you in top ranking positions

Unlike traditional marketing activities, banners, display, print and such, search marketing target highly qualified visitors. In fact your customers are actually actively looking for you but if you aren’t ranking they cannot find you! Why go out looking for customers when they are already looking for you?

SEO drives traffic. Your customers (and your competitors too for that matter) are online. Worldwide Google show up results for around 2 billion searches every day!

Customers avoid paid ads. Organic results (“left hand side results”) get 75% of clicks while paid results (“right hand side results”) only get 25% of clicks. Also, as soon as you stop paying for click your presence is gone! Poof. Organic results are free and 24/7 and 365!

SEO is holistic. Most of the work you do for – creating content, improving the site performance and link building – also improves conversion rate, grows your overall brand and strengthens other marketing efforts.

SEO has a proven ROI track record. If you spend $5,000 on SEO and then get 100 sales from it, it cost you $50 per sale. As your search engine rankings improve and you get say, 1,000 sales, your cost doesn’t increase. Now your cost per sale is $5.

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Off-Site SEO is the third step in the SEO work processes, preceded by On-site SEO and On-page SEO.

Search engine ranking factors such as the quantity and relevance of other websites linking to you, the link anchor text, page rank and domain name age factor in here. See our SEO glossary for more information.

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Search engines rank webpages not websites and the content on every webpage should be unique and rich in not only targeted keywords and phrases, but also offer easy reading for the intended target audience.

On-Page SEO is the second step in the SEO work processes, preceded by On-Site SEO and followed by Off-Site SEO.

Search engine ranking factors such as keyword usage within the actual text content as well as page titles, headers, meta descriptions, image alt texts are important here. See our SEO glossary for more information.

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