Is It Penguin 4 Update or Penguin 2.0 Update ?

Note that Cutts refers “Penguin 2.0″ as the coming rollout. How can that be, when we’ve had three confirmed Penguin updates already, with Penguin 3 happening in October?

This all goes back to a different update, the Panda Update, which first launched in February 2011. That was Panda Update 1. Of course, we didn’t call it Panda 1 then, because as the first Panda Update, it was just called “The Panda Update.”

Two months later, Google made a huge change to Panda, so the next version was called Panda 2. But when the third release happened, and people started calling that Panda 3, Google said that because the changes to the filter weren’t so dramatic, it would better be called Panda 2.1.

That left it to Google to call the shots on whether a Panda Update was big enough to go through a full point change or not. And that became ridiculous when we got to something like Panda 3.92, last September. As we explained then, when the updates started going to two decimal places, we felt maybe just a straight Panda 1, 2, 3 and so on number order made sense, no decimals involved.

Matt Cutts tweeted about Penguin 2 & 3 that these two are downgrade to Penguin 1.1 & 1.2. Upcoming release is the true 2.0.

In our numbering system, regardless of how “big” the next Penguin Update is, we’ll still call it Penguin 4.

It will be big. We know that already from what Cutts has said in the past. In fact, it’s so big that internally, Matt said today that Google refers to it as Penguin 2.0.

Renumbering The Pandas

1. Panda Update 1, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
2. Panda Update 2, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
3. Panda Update 3, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
4. Panda Update 4, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
5. Panda Update 5, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
6. Panda Update 6, Aug. 12, 2011 (6-9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
7. Panda Update 7, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
8. Panda Update 8, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
9. Panda Update 9, Nov. 18, 2011: (less than 1% of queries; announced)
10. Panda Update 10, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
11. Panda Update 11, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
12. Panda Update 12, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
13. Panda Update 13, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
14. Panda Update 14, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
15. Panda Update 15, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
16. Panda Update 16, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
17. Panda Update 17, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
18. Panda Update 18, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
19. Panda Update 19, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)
20. Panda Update 20, Sept. 27, 2012 (2.4% English queries, impacted, belatedly announced
21. Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English-language queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)
22. Panda Update 22, Nov. 21, 2012 (0.8% of English queries were affected; confirmed, not announced)
23. Panda Update 23, Dec. 21, 2012 (1.3% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
24. Panda Update 24, Jan. 22, 2013 (1.2% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
25. Panda Update 25, March 15, 2013 (confirmed as coming; not confirmed as having happened)

1. Penguin 1: April 24, 2012 (3.1% queries affected)
2. Penguin 2: May 26, 2012 (less than 0.1%)
3. Penguin 3: Oct. 5, 2012 (0.3%)

Nearly 90% of Affluent Consumers Use Social Media [Study]

About 90 percent of mass affluent consumers use social media, according to a recent LinkedIn study.

The study, Influencing the Mass Affluent, classifies the mass affluent as consumers who have investable assets between $100,000 and $1 million. LinkedIn says that this group is active on social media and could prove a key market for financial institutions.

Of that 90 percent of the mass affluent that use social media, 44 percent engage with financial institutions on social media. LinkedIn reports that another 34 percent actively engage with financial institutions' content through social networking.

LinkedIn found that the mass affluent use social media primarily for professional reasons. The firm's study reported that one out of every two surveyed use social media to connect with other professionals. While one in three use social media to engage with professional content.

"Members on our platform have a value exchange and sense of trust with the platform. Because of that we have seen financial firms really adopt [LinkedIn] beyond just display advertising," said LinkedIn's lead executive in financial services, Jennifer Grazel.

According to the report, 36 percent of the mass affluent use social media for discovery and consideration. LinkedIn classifies discovery as learning about trends, products, and services, while the firm denotes that consideration as actively seeking advice on the things they've learned through social media.

LinkedIn classifies the mass affluent in three categories. The firm says that the mass affluent is either acquiring wealth, about to retire, or already retired. According to the research, financial institutions must tailor their social networking campaigns differently for each group.

"The key that struck a cord with us was the types of information mass affluents are getting through social media," Grazel saud.

For those accumulating wealth, relevant content is the most important factor for financial companies using social media. Those soon to retire find that timely updates are the most important factor when using social media. While retired consumers care more about strong customer support through social media.

Across all consumer types, information about new product information was found to be very important. Those surveyed said that they would like to see new product information posted on social media for both brokerage firms and credit/debit card companies.

LinkedIn also recommends that financial institutions must be mindful to drive conversation through social media. The company says that proper discussion on social media leads to greater influence and improved lead generation.

Matt Cutts Tells SEOs to Stop Worrying About Google Search Patents

If you're an avid SEO professional, you likely pay close attention to any new Google patents that are attached to the Search or Search Quality teams. It often gives insight about where the future of search could be headed, along with plenty of speculation about just how the patent could be applied and how it would affect webmasters.

Well, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts brings up the topic of the many Google patents in his latest Google Webmaster Help video, which was an answer to the question about the latest SEO misconception he would like to put to rest.

“Just because a patent issues that has somebody’s name on it or someone who works at search quality or someone who works at Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are using that patent at that moment,” Cutts said in the video. “So sometimes you will see speculation Google had a patent where they mentioned using the length of time that a domain was registered. That doesn’t mean that we are necessarily doing that, it just means that mechanism is patented.”

He continues to describe another patent where Google looked at websites that were being updated after they did an update, which of course concerned webmasters that this could flag them, as they reacted to each update.

“Patents are a lot of interesting ideas, so you can see a lot of stuff mentioned in them, but don’t take it as an automatic golden truth that we are doing any particular thing mentioned in a patent,” he said.

Twitter Ads Self-Serve Platform Opens to All U.S. Users

Twitter's self-serve ad platform is now available to all U.S. users, rather than just on an invitation-only basis.

The social media platform has also added enhancements designed to help advertisers better analyze and manage their ad campaigns.

In an online statement, Twitter said it has widened reporting on user engagement with Promoted Tweets – the sponsored tweets that appear at the top of its news feed – to include not just paid media but also earned media, or those that are voluntarily retweeted or commented on by other Twitter users.

"This change gives marketers more complete insight into the impact Promoted Tweets have in driving engagement and exposure on Twitter," the company said.

Twitter also made changes in its ads center that it claims gives advertisers more detail on audience segments, allowing them to view their audience, for example, by device, location, gender, and interest.

Twitter has been slowly phasing in Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts over the past few years, and in March announced the availability of a self-serve ad platform to a limited number of companies by invitation only. For some marketers, the wider availability of Twitter's ad platform comes none too soon.

"People have been salivating for an ad platform on Twitter for quite a while. If they had launched this one or two years ago, it would have been rolling along by now," says Maciej Fita, SEO director at Brandignity, a Naples, Florida-based agency that helps small-to-medium-sized companies with digital marketing efforts.

Fita, who said a few of his clients have tried out the platform in beta, welcomed the new analytics abilities but said that Twitter still had a long way to go in terms of offering a mature ad platform.

"I don't think the conversion tracking is that good and maneuvering though the ad platform is somewhat confusing," he said, noting that it would take Twitter a while to approach the level of Google AdWords or Facebook in allowing companies to see precisely where conversions were coming from.

Do Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Links affect the whole site or just part of the site?

Penguin: Penguin usually affects a site on a page and keyword level. Let's say that you have a page called example.com/greenwidgets/ and you have been building links to this page all containing the anchor text, "green widgets". If Penguin affected you, then it would mean that this particular page would no longer rank well for "green widgets". Penguin generally does not affect an entire site. However, quite often when sites have been affected by Penguin, they have built many anchor texted links, possibly for many different keywords all to the homepage. This can mean that the homepage will not rank for a number of terms.

Unnatural Links: A manual unnatural links penalty can affect the entire site, or just a page, or even just one keyword. Sometimes a site can be penalized and be totally removed from the Google index. Other times, the site can still be in the index but not be shown in the first 10 pages for any of its keywords. Or, sometimes the penalty will not be as severe and may only affect one or two keywords.

Panda: Panda can affect an entire site, or sometimes one section such as a news blog on the site. Panda does not tend to affect just single pages of a website. If you have a site that has some good content, but a lot of thin and duplicate content, then the Panda filter can cause the entire site to have trouble ranking, not just the thin and duplicate pages.

Google Penalized Mozilla Only One Page Out of 22 Million

We announced yesterday that Google punished Mozilla over user generated content. Today, we tend to learn that it absolutely was a extremely, very little penalty that solely compact one page out of Mozilla’s ~22 million webpages.

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, additional to the Google thread explaining that this manual penalty was applied in a very granular manner. In fact, it solely compact one page on Mozilla’s name, blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about.

Besides that being an improbable range of spammy comments on one page, it's disconcerting to check however confused Mozilla’s webmaster was over Google’s penalty notification. Don’t get Maine wrong, i'm an enormous fan of Google obtaining additional elaborate in their Webmaster Tools penalty notifications. however as you'll be able to see from our coverage of the penalty and Mozilla’s questions about the penalty, it appeared that this was a trifle larger than simply impacting one page on this huge web site.

This is an identical scenario as once the BBC was punished, and it clothed to be a penalty on one page.

Mozilla Penalised by Google for Over User Generated Content

In summary, Google told Mozilla that it has some type of spam issue that was so bad as to generate a penalty. But, Google didn’t explain what exactly this spam was, so that it could be easily removed. Worse, Google may have already removed some of the spam from its own listings, so that a publisher like Mozilla can’t even locate it using Google search.

Not only does this sound crazy, but it also sounds familiar. Last month, the BBC received a similar warning, one about having unnatural links. A puzzled BBC rep took to the forums to ask for help, since the message didn’t explain more in detail and the site has so much content. Eventually, Mueller answered that the warning came from having one single page that was deemed having unnatural links pointing at it and that “granular” action was taken.

Mozilla hasn’t been penalized — only specific parts. It could be a single page. It could be a range of pages. While that sounds reassuring, that the entire site wasn’t hit, the uncertainty over just how much or little was “granularly” effected adds a whole new worry.