On Monday April 11th, Google announced officially to the world that the Panda Update now applied to Google results outside of North America.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html
Now on the face of it the new update has by and large seemed OK so far to us here at “Leveraging Central”. If anything the only thing we have noticed is that the average SERPS level of pages has risen and that for some reason the Nett Yield on the Adsense units has also increased. We’re not too sure whether there is any correlation here or whether this has more to do with the start of the Advertising Second Quarter and hence more budget being freed up but nonetheless any increase in revenue is gratefully appreciated in these “inclement economic times”.
So back to what Google have been up to.
As we have mentioned before, the update appears to be concentrating very much on ensuring that quality reigns supreme but then Google go and do what only Google do best and that is to push things so far that ultimately they screw up.
When you consider matters pertaining to Google I’m often reminded of the old sixties classic duet between Frank and Nancy Sinatra “Something Stupid” where the line goes “and then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid….” only in this case it’s doing something and that stupid thing in our books is the new addition of the facility within the new Google Chrome Extension that allows viewers to block domains from their results if required. Now this in isolation is not necessarily a bad thing if handled ethically and correctly but therein lies the rub. This facility has other features and aspects too.
In a couple of comments that I found disconcerting Google via Matt Cutts let this one slip out of the bag:
” If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.”
Another Google insider also stated:
“While we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.”
Now as Chris Crum in Webpronews.com said:
“One has to wonder how Google would use such a signal in a way that could not be gamed by people getting their competitors’ sites blocked. There are other potential abuse scenarios as well. Personal spite comes to mind.
It’s possible that it could become a ranking signal and nobody will ever know for sure. Google will not reveal its entire list of signals. They may keep this one close to the chest, although that doesn’t mean it won’t still get abused based on hunches.”
Overall the new “algo” change could be a good thing but to be honest, my advice to all of our Clients in our SEO Division is to really consider diversifying all of their SEO Promotion and to proactively go after good results in Yahoo and Bing as to be honest no one knows where this new Google Direction is going to end up