marketing champlu

Online Marketing & Search Experience Optimization

Matt Cutts: What to Expect from Google in the Summer of 2013

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Here’s a rundown of the latest Matt Cutts video:

1. Penguin 2.0 is coming – Will be a significant change to previous Penguin updates. Someone called out a site recently to Matt Cutts and he said that it would be “hit hard” by the upcoming Penguin update. This led Alex Graves to believe Penguin 2.0 will go after SENuke style links.

2. Advertorials / Native Advertising – Ads should not have links that flow PageRank. Nothing new here. However, Google may start to punish the publisher and/or the advertiser as it sees fit. This strategy by Google seems like it continues to open the door to Negative SEO. Will be interesting to see what sort of effect this has.

3. There will likely be two upcoming changes geared towards tackling “traditionally more spammy” terms like [payday loans] or “pornographic queries.”

4. Minor comment (but potentially impactful) about “going upstream to deny the value to link spammers.” Will this be penalties? Will the link juice stop flowing? Something else? Expect this to roll out in the next few months.

5. Google is working on a more sophisticated link analysis system.

6. A more comprehensive hacked-site detection and communication.

7. Google is working on trying to rank niche authorities more highly.

8. Panda Refinement – They are looking for additional signals to help those that may have been caught in some gray areas. The language here is interesting as it implies they started at either end of the spectrum and are now working their way to the middle. It sounds like this will hopefully be a good thing as the algorithm may have been over-correcting in areas where it shouldn’t.

9. Host Clustering – Mentioned in another recent video, as you drill down through the SERPs, you will be less likely to see numerous results from the same domain. It will still happen, but for the very few that go past the first page of results, hopefully sites like Yelp won’t continue to crowd those results.

10. More information to help webmasters.

Google Chrome Switching to Secure Search (https) for All Users

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google chrome secure searchOn December 10, 2012 Google updated their Chrome browser and also began sending toolbar/omnibox searches through their SSL/secure search at https://www.google.com. This appears to have been a slow roll out as some colleagues saw this happening first. And even though I was using the same version of Chrome as them, I wasn’t getting sent to secure search.

Well, I was finally able to confirm it today and I’d expect more people to start seeing this happen. Whether you’re logged in or not, if you do a search in the “omnibox” or URL bar, then Google will take you to https://www.google.com/ and perform your search there. This will happen in both the standard mode and incognito mode.

Keep in mind that Google was already doing this if you were logged in to a Google account (such as Gmail), but were not doing this for non logged-in users.

Prepare for even less keyword data to be passed as Chrome usage goes up. And for certain niches where Chrome usage is especially high, such as tech and SEO, this will likely be even higher. As of now I’m not seeing this happen for Chrome on iPad, but I’d expect Google to roll this out for mobile as well.

Update 12/18/2012 – It appears Google is testing this as my Chrome browser has reverted back to using the non-secure version when searching from the omnibox. They may also be testing sending people that type in google.com to the https version instead. I haven’t been able to confirm this happening on my computer, but others have told me this was happening for them.