High Impact SEO Blog

Google’s latest Page Rank tool bar update on 18.07.11 was the second in under a month, this is a fairly unusual occurrence, as normally Google sticks to a reasonably predictable schedule regarding exporting tool bar updates. Exports can roughly be interpreted as occurring quarterly, or four to five times a year.

The last time Google exported page rank updates in this manner was back in 2007, when the PR Algorithm was adjusted to penalise websites which were selling links. It could therefore be fair to assume that the fact there have been two updates in the last 30 days might mean that another PR algorithm adjustment is underfoot, possibly Panda related.

Google must be having a busy month with all the recent changes they are making, today I noticed another change to the SERP results on Google.co.uk, the URL of pages shown in the SERP’s is now positioned just under the pages title, whereas before it was displayed at the bottom of the listing. Looking back at the screen shot I took yesterday for my article on Google +1, which also shows the URL in its new position, it seems that the changes were likely made at the same time as Google rolled out the +1 button.

Those of you who follow search engine news closely will know that Google officially released the plus one button globally on the 27th of June. You may have noticed the recent addition of the +1 button in search results on Google.co.uk which allows people to recommend your content to other Google users.

Something that immediately struck my attention is the fact that the +1button does not currently show next to local results, although Adwords paid results can be +1′d. Whether this will be addressed at a later date remains to be seen. Google also announced the addition of +1 reporting today in Webmaster tools and Google analytics.

To +1 a site, you must be logged in to a Google account with a public profile, +1′d sites are added to a list within your Google profile, and should a member of your Google network view any of the pages that you have +1′d in the SERPs, that result will be enhanced.

It seems that the +1 button is actually part of a bigger picture, a picture which is now beginning to reveal itself as Google’s latest attempt to break into the world of social media. Named “Google Plus” the social media network will not initially be open to the public, and membership is being granted on a “by invitation only” basis. Information regarding the social media network is thin on the ground at the moment, but it definitely appears that Google are squaring up firmly against social media giants Facebook.

Google rolled out the latest Panda update (2.2) on the 16th of June, Increasing the efficiency in which they are able to detect and remove low quality pages from prominent search result positions.

It is important to recognise that Panda is not actually an algorithm update in the traditional sense, but more accurately a new ranking factor which attributes a score to the quality of content on each of your pages.  Pages with high quality unique content will attain a preferential score and pass under the filters unhindered, whereas pages with low quality or scraped content will be flagged and penalised. Domains with a high number of  flagged pages may even find themselves penalised as a whole.

Panda is based the on the principals of machine learning, a complexed algorithm which allows Google to make intelligent decisions regarding the credibility and value of the content on a web page.  Because machine learning algorithms are so complexed, they require an extraordinary amount of computational power to run. For this reason Google does not run currently run Panda continually, but rather on a periodic basis.

The fact that Panda is run periodically means that if your website has been penalised by the update, you cannot expect your rankings to recover until Panda is run again, even if you have effectively resolved the content quality problems which caused you to be penalised in the first place.

There does seem to be a schedule emerging regarding the frequency in which Google run the Panda filter, as since Panda was introduced the filter has been run once each calender month. This schedule has not been to the day however, and the duration between runs has varied from 4 to 7 weeks.

The Panda algorithm is still very much a work in progress, 2.2 is the third update that Google have applied since Panda was originally launched on the 24th of February 2011. Each update is intended to improve the algorithms accuracy and efficiency at detecting low quality content. Matt Cutts (Googles Search quality Spokesperson) announced that the latest update is intended to increase Panda’s efficiency at detecting scraped content in particular, it is therefore possible that a site which displays duplicate content, which was previously unaffected by Panda, may find itself penalised after this, or future updates.

Pagerank is a backlink analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical importance value to each page in Google’s index, these values range from one to ten, with ten indicating a page of supreme importance.

Contrary to popular understanding, the inbound link median required to advance a “Pagerank level” is not actually twice that which was required to gain your current pagerank, but actually around 5.5 times the link median.
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