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SearchMetrics Released SEO Ranking Factors For 2014: Content Now Really King? SearchMetrics  announced  their  2014 SEO ranking factors  study is now ready for download. Every year, SearchMetrics releases the study but this is the largest study they’ve done, with almost 100 pages and by adding dozens of new factors like time of site, bounce rate, fresh links and others. The key take away from here is that content may now be truly king. Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics said in the report that content is “no longer an addition to, but is the main focus of, SEO .” Here is a breakdown of the study with some charts showing parts of the analysis. But you can download the full report  over here . Content There is a measurable correlation between the quality of content and rankings. This is demonstrated by, among others, the analysis of two new features based primarily on word co-occurrence analysis: Proof and Relevant Terms. The length of content conti...

Did Google update Penguin or Panda algorithms? Your site is impacted by many algorithms says Google. I personally spend a lot of time within the SEO space investigating claims of Google algorithm updates; it is a fascinating topic because there are so many variables involved and a lot of secrecy on Google’s end around its search algorithms. Often, Google will not confirm updates or algorithm refreshes. Plus, with manual actions and link penalties happening all the time, it makes it hard to determine if Google updated its ranking algorithms or if a penalty was pushed out that impacted a large number of sites. Recently, there have been many rumors around Google  testing  a Penguin refresh. Note, it has been almost a year since the last official Penguin refresh, aka  Penguin 2.1 , so webmasters are eager to see their sites released from the algorithm. This past Friday, there  reports  from  some sources  of a Panda refresh. With...

Penguin: Google’s Punitive Algorithm – And A Call To Google To Fix It For many years, a staple of my discussions with people who had been penalized by Google was the following advice: “Don’t worry — at Google, there is a culture of letting you repent of your sins and then be forgiven.” Even if you had made some bad choices, if you started doing the right things, you could prosper once again in the search results. Boy, that has changed, and in a big way. Penguin is Google’s algorithm for punishing bad SEO link building — and not letting you get back up. I am not sure what changed internally at Google, but it sure feels like something has. I say this all with a very heavy heart, because I really love what Google has done over the years in many ways, but I don’t love their Penguin. To explain why I say that, let’s look at the facts. History Of Penguin The first release of Penguin took place on April 24, 2012, and it landed on the industry like a ton of bricks. From my p...

No, Google Says There’s Been No Penguin Update This morning, I noticed a lot of buzz around  a possible Google Penguin update . The SEO space was noticing huge changes in the search results from previously penalized sites, many that were impacted by the  Google Penguin update . The Google Penguin algorithm targets sites trying to manipulate their search results through link building efforts that they deem as unnatural. This is not the manual actions for unnatural links but rather an algorithm that detects these types of links automatically. A Google spokesperson told us at Search Engine Land, there is no Penguin or other spam efforts going on now. So this update, at least according to Google, is not spam related. In fact, Google made it sound like there was no update at all. There were many webmasters talking about changes in rankings over the past 24-48 hours, independent of the  Panda 4.0 update  from a week ago. Most of them said the update impacted the...