SEO & Search - Round Up, 07 June 2013

Google took to its Webmaster Central blog on Friday to share some tips for international sites. This comes at a time when an increasing number of online marketing professionals are viewing international SEO as gaining importance. "Many websites exist in more than one language, and more and more websites are made available for more than one language," Google's Web Studio team writes.

There's no doubt that Google's algorithm is more complex - and volatile - than ever. The days where SEO was all about meta tags and backlinks is long gone. Google now uses at least 200 ranking factors in their algorithm, including social signals, user-interaction signals, and trust.

Last week I wrote about How Do You Uncover Your Spammy Links? There I said, when you want to disavow links or have them removed, using Google Webmaster Tools link report is probably not enough. You probably need to use third party tools as well.

Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released another video today named What are some misconceptions in the SEO industry? In short, Matt outlined three topics in this five-minute video. (1) SEOs confuse algorithm updates with data refreshes. (2) Panda & Penguin algorithms are not about making Google more money in the short term.

At the end of last week, some discussion on Hacker News started after a post claimed that Authorship created a 90% drop in traffic. Later, Matt Cutts jumped in to note that it was Penguin and not Authorship that caused the drop. I thought it would be useful to talk about how social annotation is changing user behavior.

Penguin 2.0 happened. Perhaps you've heard about it? Yeah, figured. Just as with the initial release of Google's Penguin update last year, SEOs all over the web are writing post-mortems about aggressive link building tactics that were once the bread-and-butter of successful search engine optimization, but are now resigned to the dustbin of internet history.

If you own an online business, or work in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), then you probably know by now that SEO is not an exact science. Unlike chemistry, there is no formula that guarantees success. It does not suffice to mix the right ingredients together in order to get a substance which will be the same every time.

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts announced that Penguin 2.0 went live on May 22 and webmasters braced for the worst. With the release of the much-anticipated algorithm update, many in the industry wondered how bad the damage would actually be.

A new video by Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, talks about how potentially using rel="author" structured data can help Google's web spam team improve search quality. Matt Cutts explains that moving from the anonymous web to a web with identity helps Google understand the authority and trust of the person writing that content.