Have you noticed any changes in your organic search traffic volumes recently? It could be that your site’s search engine rankings and overall Google visibility is being affected by the wave of updates that Google is presently rolling out.
Yesterday Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Panda 4.0 is currently rolling out and that webmasters & SEO Consultants may see changes in the levels of traffic driven to their sites by Google.
Panda updates in the past have typically focused on on-site issues, topical relevance and content performance value, so websites with thin, poor quality, irrelevant or diluted content have been the ones to bear the brunt of the Panda algorithm changes previously and we expect these low value content websites to be the primary targets of the latest updates.
The Payday 2.0 update focuses on some of the spammier sectors of the web where affiliates, redirects, clone sites and other black hat tactics are used to try and trick Google.
As ever, there are also strong rumours about a new Penguin update rolling out soon along with some other Google algorithm changes. Google seldom rolls out just one update at once in isolation anymore which makes it trickier for SEO Consultants to pinpoint the exact reason for changes in the ranking and traffic volumes of client’s websites – it does help us to quantify the value we add though!
It is far too early yet for us to form any conclusions of the impact of the current changes but we expect to see some impact over the next few weeks and will provide a further update along with best practice SEO recommendations as soon as we can.
Here is a good article which covers the latest updates
If you would like to keep up to date with the latest search engine algorithm changes please leave a comment below or call us on 01273 822 755