As there are so many posts going about right now, rather than add to it, I’m just going to link to some of the ones that have caught my eye.

Google release third update of their Penguin update

Late on Friday night, Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google announced on his Twitter that there was to be a Penguin algorithm update.

The latest Penguin update, a data refresh and the first update of Penguin for over four months is likely to impact 0.3% of English search queries.

To see if your site has been affected, you will need to check your visitor numbers for over the weekend. Compare them against other weekends, if there is a dramatic drop in numbers from previous weekends, your site may have been affected by the Penguin update.

Equally, if your site has a decent increase in visitor numbers, you may have benefited from the update.

SEOmoz have released MozCast, their very own Google weather report!

The weather report is used to chart changes in Google’s algorithm. A typical day will see the MozCast display a sun with clear skies. The more changes that have been made to the algorithm in 24 hours, the hotter and stormier the weather will be shown in MozCast.

 Here is the range of weather symbols shown in MozCast...



On the left, a bright sun indicates just a normal day, with minimal changes in Google search. The far right shows lightning storms, this means that changes are registering in Google search and indicates there has been an algorithm change. To check the weather report yourself, you can visit the Mozcast by clicking here.

A neat little feature has been added to Google search recently.

Google search could be used to find answers for sums a bit like a calculator.

If you typed “2 + 2” into the search box and clicked search, Google would tell you the answer was 4. Brilliant!

Not only does Google still answer your sums for you, they also offer a fully interactive, 34 button scientific calculator to work out more calculations

Pretty cool!

Google have added a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools. From now on, webmasters will be able to see just when Google discovered links to their site when downloading link data from Webmaster Tools.

Google have added a “Download latest links” button in the “Links to Your Site” in Webmaster Tools.


When you use this feature, you will see there are a list of the links in the left hand column and the date of when Google discovered these links on the right column in the report.



I’m sure many Google will be commended for this extra data. It will help to see how long it actually takes Google to index certain links as well as several other advantages.

Google have announced that they plan to introduce a ranking penalty that will punish websites that seem to have purposely been over optimised or over SEO’d.

Google say they have been working on this over optimisation penalty for a few months now and are getting ready to launch it probably sometime this month.

The over optimisation penalty is going to “level the playing field” according to Google. This means that once the update has been rolled out, websites that have great relevant content has a better chance to rank well in the SERPs.

Websites that have poorer quality content, rely on keyword stuffing techniques or exchanging too many links could suffer in the rankings in the near future.

Many will say "well this isn't new, Google have been doing this for a while now" however it is they way they are going to tackle it from now on that is the real change.

Google intend to use notifications through their own Webmaster Tools to inform webmasters whether their site has been over optimised. This is all part of Google's attempts to be more transparent.

We'll see how this affects the SEO world once it kicks in.

It is widely expected that Google will be applying more modifications to it’s search algorithm in the near future. This will see Google roll out it’s Panda 2.2 update.

Google’s Matt Cutts revealed at the SMX Advance conference in Seattle that the next update has been approved and will be released some time soon.

The latest Panda update is reported to trace websites that republish content to get higher page ranks and superior positioning in search rankings and punish them. It is hoped that the update will also fix the false positives (sites that were wrongly penalised by the 1st Panda update).

Cutts did confirm that the updated algorithm will be on the look out for pages that may use “hidden text”. If any of these pages are spotted, they could be penalised on search rankings.

It will be a nervy few weeks for website owners and SEOers at our SEO Scotland office as the Panda update rolls out, waiting to see what effect the new algorithm update on their sites.