SEO Monthly News Round Up
Posted: Wednesday 31 October, 2012
Jessica Ward
As many of you may know, we provide the latest search industry news in our weekly Search Engine Intelligence reports (email sei@punchcomms.com to be signed up). Now, we have also decided to share an overview of the most popular news from the month for our blog readers. So, stay tuned for these monthly wrap-ups!
As for October, the month got started with Google confirming it had rolled out a substantial update to its Panda algorithm on 27th September. This impacted 2.4 per cent of English search queries, which many regular users will probably have noticed.
Google also surpassed Microsoft to become the second largest technology company in the world, as well as launching a new Disavow Links Tool, designed to help users clean up the backlinks of their websites. This was welcome news to webmasters whose sites may have lost places in the SERPs since Google’s Panda algorithm update. The tool allows users to notify Google of any ‘unnatural’ links pointing at their websites and request that they are ignored to avoid any further penalisation. However, Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, said that the tool should be used with caution as it is not suited to everyone and the requests will take some time to be reviewed.
In other news, industry Q3 earnings were released, with Google mistakenly posting these early via an unfinished press release. Bing began to feature news writers within its Social Sidebar under the ‘People Who know’ section, as well as updating its reporting interface to make it faster and easier for users.
Finally, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has announced the company’s plans for the future, saying that she hopes to make technological innovation the main goal. She also revealed that the search giant will be mainly focussing on aspects that have made it successful in the past, such as core search and mail, saying that “Yahoo’s best days lie ahead.”
