If you’re wondering what’s in store from Google for 2013, the video above shows Matt Cutts giving an elaborate explanation of what to expect.
Coming soon is the newest version of the Penguin algorithm, called Penguin 2.0. This update will have serious improvements from the last Penguin 1.0, and we should expect it any day now. The new Penguin will detect black hat SEO, go deeper into the websites, and have a larger impact than the previous updates. Sites should get ready by using Google’s Disavow Tool to defer any spammy links.
Along with Penguin, a new Panda update is coming. This update is expected to have an enormous impact on many websites and Google will try to “lower” the affects to keep from harming websites. The last major Panda update had serious impact on all websites. We should expect something similar for this one. The fact that Google states they need to “tone it down” means it’s going to be HUGE.
After punishing Interflora and a few UK Newspapers, Google will start looking into advertorials and other types of advertising that directly violate Google’s guidelines. Paying money for advertising in order to pass the PageRank is one of the issues that Google has been regularly monitoring this year. A number of link networks have already been shut down or heavily penalized.
Many users in England complained about pay day loans and other pornographic queries that appeared on Google.co.uk. Google will introduce two new changes in the area of spammy queries. One method is to detect links “upstream” in an effort to reduce the value of the spam links. Along with monitoring links in a new way, Google plans develop advanced link analysis software that will make Google’s search engine understand the linking flow better.
When certain websites present an authority in a certain field like travel, medicine, real estate, and so on, Google will try and boost the authority of those pages allowing them to top on the search result pages. This is great for existing authoritative websites but it will make it harder for new websites to join the race. In addition to handing out higher authority, Google will make another attempt at cleaning the “cluster issue”. The cluster issue was presented back in 2012 for websites that dominate the first page for a single keyword. That includes websites like yelp, and possibly even Google Maps, YouTube, or other Google entities. This is an attempt to diversify the results and offer the end-user a wider range of information.
Last but not least, Google hopes to improve the communication with the webmasters. This is great for white hat developers and we’ve already seen some improvements after Matt Cutts announced the best method for handling a manual Google penalty. When dealing with webmasters, Google announced that they will be providing more detailed and explicit information to the webmasters in their Webmaster Tools. That was something that Google was always criticized about and anyone who’s dealt with this can relate.
By the sounds of things, Google has a few good ideas that are going to help webmasters on the way. The improved communication sounds great but everyone should be prepped for both Penguin 2.0 and the upcoming version of Panda.
