This month has been a relatively quiet month in the world of search. However there have been some very interesting and important items of news that are worth noting.
Press Releases
After Panda 4.0 one of the biggest press release sites, PR Newswire lost a lot of rankings, traffic and visibility is down over 63%. In order to combat this they are putting in place a host of new policies and will be removing any old posts that do not need these new policies. We will be watching their progress with interest but it is yet another example of how Google deals with duplicate content.
Payday Loan 3.0
After rolling out Payday Loan 2.0 last month, an update that targeted spammy sites, Google released version 3.0 on the 12th of June and announced that it was to target spammy queries. It’s not entirely clear what they mean by this but it is likely to include terms like “payday loans”, “Viagra” and other terms commonly used in spam.
Right to be forgotten
At the end of last month Google introduced the “right to be forgotten” form, but only for those in the EU. Google have confirmed that it is not available for those outside of the EU.
The Wall Street Journal reported that 41,000 requests were made in the first four days and while those numbers haven’t continued there are still a high number of requests coming through. We will be continuing to watch the progress of this new service.
Updated advice for moving sites
After seeing a number of mistakes from webmasters when moving sites to new domains or changing CMS platforms and URL structures Google have updated their “Change of Address” advice. The advice can be found here.
Cutts Watch
This month Matt has confirmed that there was an update on the 17th of November 2012, he also confirmed that it was not Panda, penguin or another named Google update. However he would not be drawn on any other details which aren’t really of much use to reverse any issues that this update caused.
