Evolution
of SEO

We can now confirm that Google has officially completed the March update as of April 19th, 45 days after their initial announcement. This was a more complex update that involved updating multiple core systems simultaneously, while also ending the standalone “helpful content” update.

Google is quoted saying, “As the web and spam tactics continue to evolve, we’ll continue to work to reduce low quality, unoriginal content in Search.”

And they added, “The March core update ranking improvements, which tackled spam and low quality content on Search, are now finished rolling out. As a reminder, on March 5th we launched a number of meaningful enhancements to our core systems, as well as several updates to our spam policies, to reduce content created for search engines on Search.

They originally said it would be a 40% reduction in low quality and unhelpful content. Well, now Google confirmed it was really closer to 45%.

Google’s reviews system evaluates articles, blog posts, pages or first-party content written with the purpose of providing a recommendation, giving an opinion, or providing analysis. It does not evaluate third-party reviews (those posted by users in the reviews section of a product or services page).

Here comes the Page Experience Update, which takes a closer look at Core Web Vitals, mobile UX, and site security. Search experts suggest webmasters use a mixture of free and paid tools to check a site’s CWV.

Google on this update: “the page experience update will consider several page experience signals, including the three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS (as well as Chrome’s recent fix to CLS). In addition, the Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content, as long as it meets the Google News policies. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.”

Google announced the product reviews update, better promoting content that does a good job at reviewing goods and services. From Google: “From this, we know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. That’s why we’re sharing an improvement to our ranking systems, which we call the product reviews update, that’s designed to better reward such content…”

About 4% of URLs fell from page one and then soon recovered.

After weeks of speculation about an “Over-optimization penalty”, Google finally rolled out the “Webspam Update”, which was soon after dubbed “Penguin.” Penguin adjusted a number of spam factors, including keyword stuffing, and impacted an estimated 3.1% of English queries.

Sources: Another step to reward high-quality sites (Google) and The Penguin Update: Google’s Webspam Algorithm Gets Official Name (SEL)

Although “Places” pages were rolled out in September of 2009, they were originally only a part of Google Maps. The official launch of Google Places re-branded the Local Business Center, integrated Places pages more closely with local search results, and added a number of features, including new local advertising options.

Sources: Introducing Google Places (Google)

Twitter launches Promoted Tweets, which allows advertisers to pay for tweets to be shown in a user’s feed.

Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7586446/Twitter-launches-promoted-tweets-in-a-bid-to-make-money.html