It isn't a massive update, like you'd see with a Penguin refresh but some speculated it might have been a small Panda refresh.
Google's John Mueller and friends, in a Google Webmaster Hangout on Google+ said at 5 minutes and 46 seconds in that the update we reported here was not related to Penguin or Panda as far as they know.
John
Mueller said, "I don’t think it is related to Penguin or Panda at the
moment," adding that Google makes tons of changes each day so it is hard
to say.
Just like the east coast weather reporters were
anticipating a huge storm in New York, it turned out to be much less.
Here too, the update I thought would be turning into something bigger,
seems a lot less. But yes, there are noticeable shifts both in snow
accumulations in New York and in the Google search algorithm - but not
blizzard type.
Google announced
that they've upgraded the events based knowledge graph to show official
ticket links, comedian events, venue events and delegated events sites.
They also upgraded the developer site to document much of this.
(1)
Official Ticket Links lets the knowledge graph add data such as on-sale
date, availability, and a direct link to your preferred ticketing site,
such as TicketMaster:
(2)
Delegated Event Listings for those of you who do not have this type of
data on your site, you can reference another site where it can pull the
data. You can do this using the delegate site markup.
(3)
Venue Events, where Google will show you the events at a specific
venue, such as Concert venues, theaters, libraries, fairgrounds, etc:
(4) Comedian Events where comedians are now considered artists by Google and they can show up in this knowledge graph as well.
Google has many updates to their Structured Data Testing Tool since launching in 2009, including renaming it in 2012 but yesterdays update may be one of the larger updates.
Google made the tool a lot easier to use and vastly improved the documentation around it. The updates include:
Validation for all Google features powered by structured data
Support for markup in the JSON-LD syntax, including in dynamic HTML pages
Clean display of the structured data items on your page
Syntax highlighting of markup problems right in your HTML source code
Here is a screen shot of the testing tool testing out my video page:
Perfect!
Google shared a photo of how it looks when it spots an error:
Plus, they revamped all the documentation around this, so you want to take a look, especially at the guidelines.
In a video hangout with Google's John Mueller, John said that even
without using the disavow file or removing bad links, it is possible to
recover from a Penguin penalty
(aka algorithm). Let me say that again... If you are hit by a Penguin
issue on your site and you don't want to remove the bad links either
manually or by using the disavow file, you can instead try to build up
better quality links.
Google's John Mueller said Penguin looks at
links at an "aggregated level across everything that we have from your
website" and thus, if the algorithm tips in the favor of good links,
then you are going to see a recovery. Now, he wouldn't say what the
percentage was - because (1) he doesn't likely know and (2) it probably
doesn't work on a percentage. But he said it is possible to recover
without disavowing or removing links, but he would still recommend you
remove bad links.
He said this 33 minutes and 52 seconds into the video, when he was asked this. Here is the transcript from YouTube:
Question:
Let's take a hypothetical situation where a webmaster doesn't know
about the Webmaster Tools disavow tool, and the majority of his links
are directories or websites selling links, and is obviously affected by
the Penguin penalty.
Meanwhile, he goes ahead and gets some
good-quality links, and the percentage of low-quality links changes--
gets smaller. But again, he doesn't use a disavow file or anything
else.
Would this help him-- so if the majority of the links
become the quality links, would this help him remove or would Google
robot remove the Penguin penalty?
JOHN MUELLER: That would definitely help. Yeah.
So,
I mean, we look at it on an aggregated level across everything that we
have from your website. And if we see that things are picking up and
things are going in the right direction, then that's something our
algorithms will be able to take into account. So in the hypothetical
situation of someone who doesn't know about any of this and they
realized they did something wrong in the past and they're working to
improve that in the future, then that's something that our algorithms
will pick up on and will be able to use as well.
Still, if you're
in that situation, it wouldn't be that I'd say you should ignore the
disavow tool and just focus on moving forward in a good way, but instead
really trying to clean up those old issues as well. And it's not
something where we'd say that using the disavow tool is a sign that
you're a knowledgeable SEO and that you should know better about these
links. It's essentially a technical thing on our side, where we don't
take those links into account anymore. It doesn't count negatively for
your website if you use a disavow tool. It's not something you should be
ashamed of using. If you know about this tool, if you know about
problematic links to your site, then I just recommend cleaning that up.
Question:
OK. I'm not really in that situation. Again, it was just a
hypothetical. I was mainly curious from a technical point of view. I
mean, would the penalty actually get removed if the majority of the
percentage of low-quality links diminishes? The actual Penguin penalty--
would it be removed?
JOHN
MUELLER: Yeah. That's something that our algorithms would take into
account-- where if they look at the site overall and they see that this
is essentially improving, if it looks like things are headed in the
right way and the important links are really good links that are
recommendations by other people, then they'll be able to take that into
account and modify whatever adjustment there was made with that change
there on that website.
So they would take that into account. I
wouldn't say that you have to have more than 50% and then the algorithm
will disappear for your website. Let's say there are lots of shades of
gray involved there, where the algorithm could say, well,
this is looked really bad in the beginning. They worked a lot to kind of
improve things overall. Things were improving significantly across the
web with lots of good recommendationsfor this site. So it's kind of
headed in the right direction. So it wouldn't be that it disappears
completely, but maybe it'll kind of step-by-step improve.
During the busiest holiday shopping season, Google was making ongoing updates to the Penguin algorithm. There is no disputing that, Google confirmed it.
But since the second week of December, Google seems to have stalled all updates.
John Mueller of Google said in a Google+hangout right before the new year, that the reason he had no updates on
Penguin is because the engineers may have been trying to take a break.
John said at around 5 minutes and 30 seconds
into the hangout, "I guess, one of the areas where the engineers are
trying to take a break and see how things go at the moment, so no big
changes happening there."
Here is the Q&A transcript:
JOSH
BACHYNSKI: So I guess we're obliged to ask about Penguin and if you
have any new information. And if you don't, that's no problem. We can
just quickly move on.
JOHN MUELLER: I don't really have anything new to share there, no. Sorry.
JOSH BACHYNSKI: OK.
JOHN
MUELLER: This is also, I guess, one of the areas where the engineers
are trying to take a break and see how things go at the moment, so no
big changes happening there.
Again, to see how active the Penguin changes were during the holiday season, see this post.
