SEO Recap: Oct. 28, 2011

As I’m crawling (pun intended) through my favorite SEO blogs and forums, I see a lot of stuff. Some of it is interesting. Some of it, well, not so much. I thought it would be fun to make a list of recent SEO happenings. Maybe it will be good. Maybe it won’t. I dunno. Here we go!

Google gives us the Heisman when it comes to the keyword query data of logged-in users
This is an interesting development. I kind side with Joost on this one. Google is being a bit hypocritical with their decision to withhold query data. It looks like more of a PR move on their part. Here are the two official Google press releases, and here is an extensive write-up by Danny Sullivan.

Google gets a patent granted after waiting 8 years
If there was a VENN diagram with ‘SEOs’ and ‘People who like to read patents and patent applications’, SEObytheSea would be the overlapping area. When it comes to brute force research into patents related to search, there is no one better. And Google’s recently awarded patent (about exact match domains) is interesting because it affects SEOs, affiliates and/or domainers.  It also comes at a time when Googler JohnMu wrote in a Webmaster Help thread that “Having keywords in your domain name does not automatically result in your site ranking first for those keywords – our algorithms do much more than just look at keywords in a domain name 🙂 .” Oh, thanks a lot, JohnMu. Now you tell us?!? Oh wait. This patent application was filed in 2003. I’m pretty sure exact match keyword domains have been getting less and less weight in the ranking algorithm anyways. Breaking up is hard to do. And now it’s official.

Google’s Panda 2.5.2 update is out. WTF is it all about?
On or around 14-Oct-2011, Google released Panda update 2.5.2. You can read all about the Panda update history here. But this recent Panda update has got some people wondering: “WTF is Google doing?” A recent seroundtable.com post cites a WebmasterWorld thread where several SEOs are noticing a massive jump for some websites with a backlink portfolio that is…well…pretty crappy. Did the Panda 2.5.2 update have an affect on paid link detection? Who knows. At this point, I think it’s entirely possible that Google invented Panda as a way to troll SEOs. It would be totally awesome and funny if Panda was a complete fabrication. I would LOL for sure.

.Alright. I hope you enjoyed that brief recap of some of my favorite SEO topics from the past couple of weeks. Until next time, happy content spinning!