It seemed as though the Google brains must have been on vacation in July as SEOs saw very little upheaval from algorithm changes and updates.
Besides one, finely tuned Panda update – and a late month content/link warning – the SEO world was very quiet last month. Even the SEOmoz Google Algorithm Change Calendar only had one entry!
What we did see was a lot of advice coming from Matt Cutts videos and they were actually pretty useful. Here are the SEO headlines from July 2013.
Panda Rollout – It didn’t make much of a splash, but Google rolled out one Panda update in July. The general consensus is that this, kinder and gentler, update was a 10-day rolling update and didn’t involve significant changes. For the most part, casino affiliates seemed untouched by what Google described as a, “finely tuned,” update.
DuckDuck Go Sees ‘Snowden Bump’ – American leaker/traitor Edward Snowden’s revelations about government surveillance gave the privacy-oriented DuckDuck Go search engine a major boost this month. For the first time ever, the site topped the two million daily search mark. (Just 998,000,000 more and they’ll have Google by the tail.)
Google Issues Link Scheme Warnings – Idle threats aren’t a technique Google is really fond of so when they issue warnings, it’s time to listen. This month they warned about new penalties for excessive anchor links in guest blog postings and other advertorial content that steps over the advertising line. Cutts and company warned that these types of links need to be coded with a no-follow tag.
Cutts is Cool with Downtime – Cutts did take to YouTube to remind web publishers that a little downtime is not going to tank their rank. In the mid-month video he said that bots that encountered a downed site would simply return 24 hours later. That sounds pretty reasonable.
I Meant the Other Kind of Duplicate Content! – If you’ve been confused about the duplicate content penalty, you’re hardly alone. In a late month video, the man behind Google’s Web Spam team said that duplicate content isn’t really so bad, so long as it isn’t spammy. In his words:
I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.
So there you have it – don’t stress or be spammy.
Did any of July’s SEO headlines have a big impact on your sites? Share your experiences in the comments section below.