A Smattering of SEO News: 9/9/13

Hello my friends, happy Monday, and welcome to another smattering of SEO news covering the updates and news from last week. While we had a good amount of stuff coming from Google, as always, we also found some very interesting news covering Mozilla, Yelp and Twitter. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Google News:

• Google Update Possibly Underway As Of Late August – Last week, and in late August, tools that measure the volatility of search results — such as Mozcast and SERPs.com — noted significant increases in the volatility of the SERPs in Google. Many webmasters on forums such as WebmasterWorld and elsewhere also noticed volatility among their own tracked search results. This is leading many to believe that Google is conducting an unnaanounced algorithm update, and we’ll bring you more updates as we get them.
• Webaster Tools “Top Search Queries” To Be Extended From Ninety Days To One Year – In response to a Search Engine Land article in which the author too umbridge at the fact that Google’s “Not Provided” data in Analytics was growing, and that we had little historical data available to us in Webmaster Tools due to their ninety day window, someone from Google stated, “We plan to provide a year’s worth of data in the Top Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools.” If this is the case, it will provide webmasters and SEO experts with more data from which to build keyword lists and create SEO strategies for long-term growth. No word on when this would be implemented, however.
• Informal Poll: Only 7% Of Respondents Recovered From Penguin 2.0 – Search Engine Roundtable did an informal poll of its readers to see how many had recovered from Panda 2.0 a few months ago. After over 600 responses, it was found that 68% hadn’t recovered at all, 17% had partial recovery and only 7% had a full recovery. Whether these numbers are good or bad are up for interpretation.
• Cutts: Google Will Take Action On Auto-Generated Content – In a recent webmaster video, Matt Cutts was asked what Google does against sites that automatically generate content based on incoming search results. While this practice, typically called “Made for Adsense” website creation, is in much less use than it was years ago, one can still come across these almost useless sites. Cutts said that Google is absolutely willing to take action against pages with very little value to users, and warned webmasters to make sure pages like that aren’t indexed unless they’re “highly unusual,” such as containing data no one else has.

Other News:

• Mozilla Moves to Block Referrer Cookies In Next Browser – In a move some are calling a “nuclear first strike” against the advertiser community, Mozilla has announced that it will finally move ahead with its “Do Not Track” browser. This browser will, by default, block cookies that shows referral traffic to Google Analytics. This means that, rather than the traffic showing up in “Not Provided”, the traffic wouldn’t even make it to Google Analytics at all. No word on when this new browser will be launched, but a petition has already been started to prevent this browser from being launched at all.
• Topsy Indexes Entire History Of Public Twitter For Search Engine – Twitter “social search” engine Topsy.com recently announced it has now indexed all publicly available Tweets starting from Jack Dorsey’s first Tweet in March, 2006 and have made those results available in their new search engine.While the free version of Topsy.com is simply a search engine, the Pro version offers analytics features as well. In tests, it found many mentions of myself (my own Twitter isn’t private) as well as the public Tweets of friends going many years back. It’s a very nifty tool.
• Study: 90% Of Business Owners Are Influenced By Positive Yelp Reviews – In a study of over 800 business owners, Merchant Warehouse found that 90% of business owners are influenced by positive Yelp reviews, and that 72% of respondents put the same amount of trust in a Yelp review as they did in a review from someone they new personally. This shows just how massive an impact Yelp has become, and how important it can be for a business’ revenue stream if used properly. For example, businesses on average spend around $4,200 a year on Yelp advertising, but see an increase in revenue of around $23,000. That’s pretty darned amazing.
• Study: 22% Of Mobile Apps Are Used Only Once – In a recent study from Localytics, they found that the abandon rate of mobile apps (no mention of free or paid) was around 22%. The good news is that this is down from 26% in 2010. In better news, users reported the “stickiness” with their favorite apps – apps used 11 times or more was at 34% in 2013, up from 26% in 2010. According to the CEO of Localytics, he said apps were being abandoned 22% of the time because app creators aren’t creating compelling enough experiences for users to stick with.

Check back next week for more SEO news!

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