Google Updates and DuckDuckGo Advances

Just as suspected last month, Google was brewing up several updates.  Those updates have now gone live and what were the results?  Actually, for most it wasn’t too bad.  In fact some sites which previously had been knocked down by Panda saw their rankings rebound.

At this point, however, with Panda and Penguin well established in the SEO world, more and more people are getting the point that they need quality content and natural link building.  Sure, there will always be someone coming up with a new trick and trying to get away with a slick new strategy, but I think more and more we’ll see these updates effect fewer and fewer sites negatively.  I’ll talk more about the updates in this month’s video.

In other news, DuckDuckGo made some slick moves this past month, not only launching a new layout and features, but scoring a deal with Apple to be given as the privacy protected search option in both their IOS 8 (mobile) and OS X (desktop) operating systems.

I’ll tell you all about DuckDuckGo’s improvements, Google’s updates and more in this month’s SEO Update video:

Full Transcript:

Hi,

I’m Kurt Steinbrueck with OurChurch.Com, and this is your monthly SEO update, keeping you informed on what’s going on in the search engines.

Google

This month, we’re going to start with Google because Google’s been pretty active. If you watched the video last month, I said that there was a lot of fluctuations going on in the rankings, and it looked like there might be a Google update coming. Well, no sooner had I hit the “Publish” button to send that article out when Google announced that yes, indeed, they had released a new algorithm update – in fact, two.

New Panda Update
The first one that they released was a Panda update. This was a Panda 4.0, and if you’re not familiar with Panda, Panda deals with the quality of web pages and websites, so they’re looking at how thin is the content, do you duplicate content, are you keyword stuffing, how many ads do you have on your page, and are they mostly at the top? Things like that. They’re trying to determine the quality of the pages so that that can affect the rankings, because of course, they want to deliver quality results.

So they released this, and this Panda update, not only did it try to deal with some of the newer quality issues, but also they were trying to soften up the way Panda deals with sites. Basically, they’d found that a lot of sites that really didn’t deserve to get hit by Panda had been hit previously, and so they wanted to find a way to be able to allow those sites to come back in the search rankings – the quality sites that they had that had been mislabeled as non-quality sites.

PayDay Loan Update
The other update that Google did was their Payday Loan update. Now what the Payday Loan update is, is it deals with the particularly spammy niches. These are things like payday loans, cheap pharmaceuticals, gambling, things like that – these niches that tend to get a lot of spam, and so they have to deal with them a little bit differently. So they released that update as well at the same time. Probably doesn’t affect most of you just because you’re probably not in an extremely spammy niche, but if it does, then it’s something to be watching for and see what your rankings have been doing.

Google+ Change
In addition to these two updates, Google released a few new features. One of them is that they’ve created a way to be able to migrate the Google+ Branded pages with the Google+ Local pages, because they’d found that a lot of local organizations had Branded pages instead of Local pages, or both, and they didn’t want them to have both. They really thought it’d be better if they had the Local pages, because then you get the benefits with the Google Map listings and all that. So they have now created a way to migrate the two and join the two together.

So if you have a Branded page and you’re a local organization, definitely want to look at migrating it over. If you’re with OurChurch.Com, don’t worry; we’re taking care of that for you. In fact, most of you already had that taken care of because we’ve been dealing with bringing people over to Google+ Local for awhile now.

But if you don’t have either, guess what? You need to! So go get yourself a Google+ Local page, because you’re way behind the times.

Changes in Video Marketing
So that’s it for – actually, no, there’s one more thing that Google announced: that they are now putting more videos into their Knowledge Graph instant answers. Their instant answers are when you do a search, they’re trying to be able to give you that data or those answers without you necessarily having to even look at the search results.  A lot of times, those are at the very top of the results or over on the right side. They’ve been collecting a lot of information to be able to give you those instant answers, and up until now, it’s been all text and graphics, pictures and things like that. Now they’re starting to include video.

So if you do video marketing, this is great for you. This may give you the ability to be able to jump ahead of competitors who aren’t doing video marketing, but maybe they have a stronger site than you – maybe they’ve been around longer or are able to do a little bit more as far as the SEO for their site – these results generally show up above all the search results, so you can vault ahead of them, and this is just a great opportunity for you. And even if you’re already doing well, why not also get the video up there?

So, I highly encourage video marketing. If you’re already doing it, just make sure that you’re doing great work with those videos and that you’re optimizing them. If you’re not doing video marketing, you might want to think about it. And we can help you with that as well, actually.

Apple

Apple Switches Default Search Engine
So that’s it for Google as far as their updates. However, we do have a Google-related announcement, which is that Apple said, “Guess what? Google, we’re dropping you.” On the new OS X, the Yosemite release that’s supposed to come out next fall, Apple has announced that they are switching from Google to Bing for that desktop search feature.

So, I don’t know how much that’s going to impact the search results. It should help Bing as far as their market share; it might hurt Google a little bit, but I’m not exactly sure how much of the market share is taken up by Apple and their desktop searches.

New Apple OS(s) Adds DuckDuckGo
In related news, Apple also announced at the same time that they’re adding DuckDuckGo to both the OS X Yosemite release and to the iOS 8 release, and they’re going to basically offer it as a private search feature. Privacy has become a really big topic for people, a real big concern, especially with the news of the NSA snooping and with all the tracking that Google and Bing do, and so people have been concerned about that.

DuckDuckGo happens to be there and saying, “Guess what? We don’t do any tracking. We don’t track you at all, we don’t save any information about you at all.” So all of your searches are completely private. Not only does that mean that they don’t track you, but it also means that if any government contacts them and says “We want to know what so-and-so has been searching about,” they say, “Guess what? We don’t know. We don’t save that information, so we can’t help you.” So nobody can track you, and that’s really something that people have liked, that people are looking for.

So we’ve actually seen, they’ve had about a 40% increase, a 40% growth over the last 6 months. So, they’re growing. They’re still very small, but they’re growing, and they seem to have really gotten in there at just the right time for the type of service that they offer.

DuckDuckGo

New version of DuckDuckGo
They also then announced – this is a DuckDuckGo announcement; we don’t have too many of those – they announced that they have released a new version of DuckDuckGo, and they’ve kind of revamped the appearance, added several features. So they have a lot of new search features, like local map searches, they have recipe searches – which they actually just teams up with a recipe company to be able to offer even more of those – weather search, and some other different kinds of searches like that.

They’re also trying to improve their instant answers, and they’ve done some work with that, and they’re growing. Still small, but they’re growing. They’re certainly trying to be able to provide a more robust search experience for the people that are using them.

Local Marketing Survey Says…

So that’s it as far as the search engine updates. There’s one more thing to mention, which is that there was a survey that was released a couple of days ago that surveyed 288 people that were either owners of small to medium-sized businesses or local SEO people that worked with small and medium-sized businesses, and they asked “What are the best marketing channels for you? What brings in the most traffic? What’s the best return on investment?”

For both of those, organic search optimization got the #1, that brings in the most traffic and it’s the best return on investment. Google+, they were second, and then Yahoo! and Bing Local came a few spots down, usually about fourth or fifth, I believe. All of those together, though, made up a huge percentage of the traffic that these people were able to bring in, and certainly had the best ROI.

Here at OurChurch.Com, with our local SEO, we actually do all of those. Our local SEO includes organic search engine optimization as well as dealing with the listings in Google and Yahoo! and Bing and several other local listing sites. If you’re interested, we’d love to help you out with that. But it’s certainly something that, if you have a local organization, you want to be doing, whether it’s with us or it’s with someone else.

So that’s what’s been going on. Just remember, we live in this internet age, so it’s important that you stay strong in the search engines so that you can achieve your mission online. And we’re here to help you do that.

God bless!