The Latest SEO Updates by Google – 2012

Google’s SEO updates for 2012 include nine Google Panda Updates and the Google Penguin Update launched on April 24. Here’s a quick look at the changes brought about by these updates and what you can do to maintain your search engine rankings.

The Google Panda Updates

The Panda Update, which affected 12% of search queries, first released on February 24 2011.  It was designed to target and penalize pages that weren’t necessarily spam but also those that didn’t have great quality. Among the nine updates released since January 2012, the latest update released on August 20 affected less than 1% of search queries. The Panda updates continue to monitor and target low quality, keyword stuffed articles that offer little or no real value for the reader.

Google Penguin Updates

According to the Google blog, the Penguin Update is an “important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.” Affecting about 3.1% of search queries, the Penguin Update targets typical black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links, aggressive use of exact-match anchor text and exact-match domains, low-quality article marketing and blog spam.

What you can do about it

Since both the Panda and Penguin are algorithm updates and not manual penalties, a reconsideration request to Google won’t make much of a difference in case you lost your website rankings. The only option is to repair your site and wait for a refresh before your site will recover. Meanwhile here are a few must-dos to keep up your website rankings.

  • Update your website with fresh content at least once every week.
  • Keep building strong social profiles (Facebook and Twitter) as it helps Google assign authority to your site.
  • Use original images and infographics and share them (on Pinintrest, for example).
  • Add the Google +1 buttons to your website.
  • Use a variety of anchor text (not just keywords) to deep link to all pages on your website.
  • Issue regular press releases as news content will keep you above others in the SERPs.
  • Add video marketing (mini videos work great too) as part of your SEO game plan.

Make use of multiple sources to build backlinks.

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