It’s been about 10 days now since the Penguin 3.0 update started to roll out. It seems like it still has some way to go, but here are some observations so far: Penguin 3.0 Seems Much Milder A lot of SEOs (and webmasters in general) fear Penguin updates. This is because the original iteration of Penguin was so severe and some say indiscriminate in the damage it did. Updates since have varied between having slight effects to more severe effects, but the original still stands out as the most jarring. Personally I’d say that’s only because it was the first...

If you keep hearing about the “Penguin” and don’t’ know what it is all about, keep reading. This article will give you a basic understanding of what it is all about – the Penguin Algorithm. Penguin is the name given to a particular algorithmic filter (basically a piece of software that scans Google’s database of websites looking for certain patterns) that Google runs to filter out low quality sites from their search results. This one specifically looks for sites with low quality links and punishes them accordingly (I say accordingly as determined by Google – some website owners would disagree)....

Google has just announced that they are now including whether a site uses SSL / HTTPS on its pages as a rankings signal – basically meaning that if your site is secure it may receive a ranking boost. Here’s an announcment on this from Google on the 6th: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html The reason being (or at least the theory is) that it’s safer for the user (when exchanging data as most sites and applications do these days) and Google always has the user’s experience in mind first and foremost. Google have also said that from their testing over a number of months,...