It has been an interesting several weeks for the SEO world. Whether the hat you wear is white, gray, or black, chances are you have been affected by the recent Google algo changes. To complicate matters, Google has sent thousands of messages via webmaster tools warning of unnatural links and phishing for information. These are of course timed to coincide with the devaluing of links so most people are only too happy to comply by providing  G with every scrap of information they can in the futile hope that all will be forgiven.

All of this reminds me of some strange 12 step program that I imagine framed and hanging behind Matt Cutts’ desk at the Googleplex. See if you can spot the changes I made to the original 12 steps.

1. We admitted we were powerless over rankings—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Google as we understood It.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our back link profile.
5. Admitted to Google, to ourselves, and to another human beings the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have Google remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Google to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through reading the Google Webmaster Guidelines to improve our conscious contact with Google as we understood It, asking only for knowledge of Google’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to webmasters, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This week Google announced over 40 updates and improvements to search, the largest update since they have been releasing updates monthly. Of course the two big take-aways include the latest iteration of Panda and the vague announcement that one of the link signals that Google has been using for several years has been dropped. There is a lot of speculation on that one but it is doubtful that the link signal that was dropped was a very strong one to begin with. Also, as with any update, new changes in spam protection.

While most SEO’s are focusing on the big changes, I think there are quite a few hidden gems in this announcement, especially if you are concerned with local SEO, keyword diversification, or freshness.

More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.

These are both significant for anyone doing keyword research. The big question for the coverage change; what data source is being brought into play? Maybe something dealing with Google + and related searches? Who knows. Since we no longer get keyword data from logged in users, any additional indicators for trending keywords is welcome. Hopefully, related searches will be more accurate and refreshed more frequently.

“Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

I use the “Site:” query daily so any improvements are welcome. I hope that this removes duplicate pages that are common to blog queries that include “tag” and “category” pages.

Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.

Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.

Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.

The freshness algo seems to be getting a lot of updates this time around. It would be interesting to know what freshness signals are now outdated. Pretty good bet that social signals may make older methods obsolete.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

National brands dealing with skewed local results will welcome the first change. Not sure how the localized docs improvement will work. Will have to keep a look out for those results. Have you started localizing your YouTube videos? No time like the present. Be sure to utilize the map function when uploading your videos if you want Google to recognize them as localized.

Which of these improvements will have the most effect on your day to day SEO or marketing activities?

After weeks of having Chrome turn unresponsive or just crash on pages that had YouTube videos, I finally thought to look at the plug-ins page and see if I could just blow away flash or something. Turns out there were 2 instances of Flash that Chrome was using, not good. One is the built in version that Chrome installs on it’s own and the other is the stand alone version that FireFox and other apps use.

To check this out on your own just enter chrome://plugins/ in your browser and you will see something like this:

Next, click details in the top right and you will see the locations of both Flash installations. From here, just click disable and restart Chrome and any Flash issues you were having will probably go away. I took this opportunity to update the stand alone Flash as well just in case. You can get the latest version from Adobe but not if your browser is having issues with Flash

So I of course signed every petition that I was sent a link to concerning SOPA and one of those was the one on whitehouse.gov. Then, last week I received an invitation to attend a conference call on the matter. Well, apparently I was one of the first 100 to RSVP because I received this email this morning with the details. Not sure how this will work but if you have any opinions, questions that you would like me to pass on to these VIP’s just let me know

Received this email from Zappos early this morning warning me that Zappos’ customer database was hacked:

First, the bad news:We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).THE BETTER NEWS: The database that stores your critical credit card and other payment data was NOT affected or accessed. SECURITY PRECAUTIONS: For your protection and to prevent unauthorized access, we have expired and reset your password so you can create a new password. Please follow the instructions below to create a new password. We also recommend that you change your password on any other web site where you use the same or a similar password. As always, please remember that Zappos.com will never ask you for personal or account information in an e-mail. Please exercise caution if you receive any emails or phone calls that ask for personal information or direct you to a web site where you are asked to provide personal information.

We can probably expect a flood of Zappos phishing emails as a result. Not too many details available at this point. 24 million customer accounts are effected and the FBI is involved. You can read the internal company email on the Zappos blog.

As 2011 comes to an end, I thought I would do recap on probably the biggest series of events in the SEO world to happen in 2011; the Panda updates. The shear scope of Panda pretty much guaranteed that everyone operating a web site felt it’s effects, probably in a negative way. It also resulted in the worst words ever; Pandified and Pandification.

It’s About Rankings Stupid

Google’s algo is real-time and is constantly making calculations based on it’s link graph of the web. This includes the hallowed PageRank as well as the other hundreds of other factors that determine day-to-day standings on the results pages.

Panda is a separate algo that operates independent of the main algo and is specifically designed to filter specific types of sites from the search results. Unlike the main algo, Panda does not occur in real-time. Instead, it is manually pushed out, the results evaluated, and changes made before the next manual push.

Panda Timeline

February 24 - Panda 1.0

This was the one that started it all. Originally code-named “Farmer”. In one update, 12% of search results were effected. The primary targets of this update and the following updates were content farms, scraper sites, and any page that Google determined as low quality.

 Biggest losers – wisegeek.com, ezinearticles.com, suite101.com, hubpages.com

Biggest Winners – Youtube, ebay.com, facebook.com, instructables.com

April 11 – Panda 2.0

Original update goes live to all English-speaking countries. Incorporated user data from Chrome extension and block button in search results. Widened the net to longer tail results.

May 10 – Panda 2.1

Minor update.

June 16 – Panda 2.2

Improved scraper detection. Matt Cutts states that there were no manual exceptions made for sites that may have been wrongly affected. Also states that Panda updates are manually pushed out and not occurring in real time.

July 23 – Panda 2.3

Minor update.

August 12 – Panda 2.4

Launched to all international sites. Impacts 6-9% of international queries.

September 28 – Panda 2.5

The longest gap in major Panda updates since 1.0.

October 3 – Panda Flux

October 13 – Panda Flux

November 18 – Panda Flux

Recently I realized that the last dozen or so connections I have made on LinkedIn have happened because I clicked a link or badge in someone’s email signature. This realization, along with my constant need for virtual validation through social networks, has finally convinced me to add some pretty social badges and links to my signature. For years I have kept a pretty neat and tidy sig with a minimum of formatting and absolutely no images. Nothing is more annoying than looking for an attachment from someone and seeing that little paperclip next to every single email they have sent because of those pesky little images in their signature.

I plan on keeping it simple for emails sent to people in my immediate circle of colleagues and friends. But for new business, introductory emails, etc., I will have this new pimped out custom signature with my top social platforms:

So, this is how you do it.

Firstly, go grab yourself some social networking icons over at Komodo Media. Select the sizes and designs that you like best. I chose the  32×32 sizes for the signature above but you also have 16×16 option as well. It’s also a good idea to go ahead and have the url’s to your profile pages ready. Next, open your mail preferences and select and existing signature or start a new one. You can then just drag your icons over to the signature. Once done, select the icon and go to Edit>Add Link or use the keyboard shortcut Command + K and your link will be added to the icon. Then repeat for the rest of your icons. Fun tip: keep adding a new one everyday and see how many it takes to get all of your emails filtered as spam.

If you learn better via the moving pictures, here is the long version by MacFusionTV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO25YE-g2eM

Last week Google announced that they would soon be placing usage limits on the Google Maps API beginning on January 1, 2012. This move is primarily targeted at larger sites in the travel and real estate industries that have come to rely on Google Maps as an integral part of their services.

To keep using Maps for free, your daily map loads must not exceed 25,000 per day and map loads using the custom map feature must not exceed 2,500. Google estimates that the new policy will affect only 0.35% of users and insists that the new pricing is necessary to continue Maps development.

Google has offered 3 different solutions for those that are exceeding the API limit, the first is to reduce your usage but if you can’t do that then you can either pay $4 per 1,000 map loads over the limit or purchase a Maps Premier License which will set you back at least $10,000 per year but will cover up to 100,000 map loads per day. Pricing also depends on usage so if you are hotels.com, you will probably be paying a lot more. On the bright side, it looks like Premier members will have access to substantially higher resolution street view and larger static maps than those now available.

It really was only a matter of time before Maps adopted a pay to play strategy for big enterprise users as Google Apps and Google Analytics have done. I think we will soon see a similar strategy adopted for other Google services like YouTube and Translate. 

Last week Google announced that SSL search would be turned on by default for users that were signed in to Google. This means that keyword data from these searches will no longer be available to site administrators. Those searches will just show as Google organic traffic. Those of us in the SEO game should have seen the writing on the wall back in 2010 when Google introduced encrypted search. But alas, multiple Panda updates and leaked quality guidelines have distracted us from the real big changes coming down the pike. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a big deal and just one more step on the way to having true search personalization and forcing advertisers to rely on paid search rather than the unpredictable organic results.

How the Change Impacts Analytics

First, no more keyword data from signed in users. Instead, these search queries will be tagged as (not provided). You will still be able to see an aggregate list of the top 1,000 queries via Webmaster tools but no individual keyword data. Users can also navigate to https://www.google.com and have their searches encrypted without logging in.

Conversion information will still track at the Source/Medium level so they will show as google/organic but you will no longer know what keyword query resulted in a conversion. This is a big deal, especially if you are not an Adwords advertiser since CPC information will still track on the keyword level. Is this a ploy by Google to force more advertisers into Adwords? Maybe, but I think it is just the beginning of a new spam reduction strategy.

Bait and Switch?

So Google announces that they are protecting users privacy by restricting the information passed to other websites, how altruistic of them. I think that they are just encouraging more users to stay logged into Google services like Plus or Gmail where advertising can be easily targeted. Google continues to move toward a more intent or interest based search model where search results are determined by user behavior rather than signals that can be easily manipulated like backlinks. This is not necessarily a bad thing but I wish they would be upfront about it instead of trying sell it as privacy protection when it is anything but.

So What Should You Do?

When in doubt, scream and shout. After that, be sure you make use of the annotate function in Google Analytics and note that October 18th was the date your keyword data started to disappear. Remember that you still have Bing data to work with although in my experience getting accurate data from Bing has been more than a little problematic. If you can’t or won’t advertise on certain terms but still need an idea of the volume, the Adwords keyword tool is OK although remember that it only shows Adwords information. Other than that, I guess we just hope that people start using meta search engines again. Dogpile anyone?