What a year! Here are my favorite SEO ‘events’ of 2011:
1. Google Scraper Update (Jan 28) – Google updates the algorithm to decrease authority of “scraper sites,” – the dumping ground of content collected from the others and receive traffic because of their domain strength signals. About time! Hopefully now these sites will be less likely to outrank the original authors.
Further Reading: Mashable, Matt Cutts
2. Larry Page becomes CEO of Google (April 4) – Google co-founder and namesake of the PageRank secret sauce takes the big seat in Mountain View.
3. Google Panda Update aka Farmer Update (Feb 24) – Sites with heaps of low-quality content on large sites were knocked down a peg in the Most Talked About Update of the Year. I love this update, because it’s always been frustrating to justify the time required to create quality content around a keyword, when you know that a page on a site like ehow.com was entrenched. In recent years, Google has taken heat for the overemphasis on sites like these in it’s algorithm, exemplified by ehow.com, associated content, .gov, .edu, about.com and the like. Articles posted to these “content farms” likely did just fine in search – and because it was so easy, a lot of it, um, wasn’t very good.
Naturally, these sites became so spam-riddled and searchers were met with so much junk that something had to be done. Google appeared to be dragging its feet to deliver the death blow that current #4 search engine Blekko delivered when it banished content farms altogether. Blekko figured that any site that allows submitted content without discretion is doomed to become a wasteland of crap, and should just be ignored.
But Google reached for the the rifle instead of the shotgun with the Farmer update. It claims only the bad content on these sites are punished, and the now-rare quality article remains in its justified position.
Further Reading: Danny Sullivan
(SEO Sidenote: the link in the summary goes to an ehow article titled How to Get a Big Mac for $1 at McDonalds, which concludes a trip to McDonald’s is the prudent move. The page received countless links as an example of what was wrong with ehow.com and all this shit content being created. So what did ehow do with this article and all it’s links? The page now 301-redirects to a highly valuable page about Real Estate Investing, passing along all that link juice – an evil-genius move that deserves a link from me.)
4. Google + (Mar 30) – Google’s answer to the Facebook ‘Like’ button and semi-social environment where contacts can be easily segmented and authentic interactions can occur. This is another step to a system where social signals replace PageRank as the indicator of authority.
Further Reading: The Google Plus Videos series set to cool music that makes you feel cool to use Google Plus, Danny Sullivan
5. Query Encryption (Oct 18) – I’m still unclear as to why Google made this move and I hope they reverse it. It severely inhibits Content Marketing strategies and flies in the face of what I thought Google wanted us to be doing as SEOs.
With this update – users logged into Google during a search session will have their keyword choice “encrypted,” or hidden from 3rd party tools, including Google Analytics. So…keyword data from GA is going away.
For example:
Say you’re a doctor in Crystal Lake, Illinois and you blog regularly to engage with your patients as well as reach new ones. Being in suburban Chicago, sports physicals have become a cornerstone of your business. So, when the state announces student athletes must now receive a “concussion susceptibility exam” as a part of their physical to be considered valid, you felt it’d make for a good blog post. You turn to your keywords in Google Analytics to uncover varations in keywords associated with the topic (“doctors in crystal lake new physical rules” or “concussions illinois sports”, etc. etc. etc.). You create useful content to match the intentions of the searcher, rank for the various keywords, help your audience find answers, and earn new patients.
This strategy is essentially Content Marketing and is core to Google’s ZMOT or Zero Moment of Truth creed – that as a business owner, you should anticipate and help your customers solve problems and reach them at the moment of truth when they form their opinions on the topic. Well it’s harder to do that now because that specific keyword data is gone unless you upgrade to the new Google Analytics Premium Package – oh wait, this update makes complete sense.
Further Reading: Google
6. Yahoo! Site Explorer is (for real) gone (Nov 21) – Ever since the Bing Yahoo! agreement a few years back, it’s been widely believed that Y! Site Explorer – the best free link analysis tool, would be phased out. We had some great times YSE, RIP.
Further Reading: Y!SE Replacement Tools from SE Watch
7. Freshness Update (Nov 3) – Quickly: blogs are even more essential to compete for Google love and new information is what the people want to see for many queries, or in algorithm speak: “query deserves freshness.”
From Google: “…we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches (results, not queries) and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness…”
This was been a goal of Google’s for a while and makes sense with prior moves such as Caffeine and Plus. Again, the takeaway is that Content Marketing is where the focus should be these days.
For an example, check out the results below for ‘sandusky,’ on 11.11.11, it’s full of time stamps and news content. Before the story broke, the term was actually somewhat popular because Sandusky, Ohio is a tourist destination. The surge of searches for ‘sandusky’ tripped the Google algorithm to display “fresh” content about the PSU coach and not all the fun to be had in Ohio.
Results for 'sandusky' on 11.11.11
Some day, more people searching ‘Sundusy’ will want content for Ohio and the Freshness factor will fade away, but probably not for several years…
Further reading on the Freshness Update: Google Blog, SEO Moz Whiteboard Friday, Winners and Losers
Those are my top moves for me. Check out a great collection of the 2011 updates at SEOmoz.