Panda, Penguin and Mobilegeddon

Posted On: 2015-04-24

Right now it's Friday in this part of the world and my partner and I should be looking forward to the weekend, a weekend where we could just do our own thing.

And that's what we worked hard to achieve; a couple of weeks of very late nights and early mornings and we're clear to do whatever we want to do this weekend. So what do we want to do this weekend? We want to move house.

Sad isn't it? We work our nuts off for weeks so we can spend this weekend working our nuts off even more; but then that may turn out to be a good thing for us. We may be moving away from the beachfront but the new place is quieter and bigger and the only neighbours we will have are a couple of cows. That means that we can try some new things that we couldn't really accomplish where we are now so we're looking forward to the move.

So is where you're living/working right now really suitable or could a move improve things and give you the opportunity to expand your business? I know that the thought of moving house is on the same level as extracting your own teeth with a hammer and chisel and it's not something anyone really wants to do but could a move expand your possibilities?

The chance to move to the new place just fell into our laps, we weren't really thinking of moving but when it was offered to us we just couldn't refuse so it's madness and mayhem around here for the next couple of days.

Mobilegeddon has come and gone and at first I had to wonder what was going to be so different about mobile search after April 21. We were watching for a change in the mobile search results because there was a suggestion that we would see a marked improvement in the rankings for several of our clients but at first it all seemed like nothing much was going to happen.

At least one well known search engine specialist here in Australia was loudly proclaiming that some major sites would be impacted and he even went as far as to produce a video the day before the changes were to happen where he talked as if they had happened. I'm not sure how he feels about that now because it has actually taken three days for any real changes to appear and now that they are beginning to appear a lot of predictions that people have made are not turning into reality.

While other SEO people are seeing considerable differences in the rankings for some sites in mobile searches compared to desktop searches that's not something that we've seen. In the verticals that we've been looking at we've noticed that a couple of old HTML sites that are not mobile friendly are still holding their rankings and one of our directory sites is in that group that have yet to be impacted.

Of course that might all change in the next few days and we've already got plans to turn that old directory site into something more mobile friendly and I know that we should have done it long ago but we never got round to it.

Actually we should have had that site ready for mobile a long time ago because as far back as 2013 Google was making some noise about pushing non-mobile friendly sites down in the mobile search rankings. Google even talked about it again early last year but I guess that a lot of us weren't listening so we I guess that we should be thankful that Google actually made a lot more noise about it a month or two ago. At least this time we listened.

Of course listening to Google can be a bit of a trap. We know that they sometimes announce things just to mess with the heads of those who play in the black-hat area and then sometimes they say things that are simply not true because the Google employee who is making the statement doesn't know what he is talking about.

If some of your websites were hit by the last Panda or Penguin update you may have been spending a lot of time and effort to overcome those penalties and, if you were, then the recent announcement that Penguin and Panda were now running continually would have been wonderful news. Panda and Penguin penalties are not removed till those parts of the algorithm are run again and so you would have been waiting for the next release.

Unfortunately Penguin and Panda are not running continually despite what at least one Google spokesman has said. In fact neither of them have been run since early last year so any site that was hit back then is still in Google's version of outer darkness no matter what their owners have done to improve things.

If some of your sites were hit back in 2014 then you're going to have to wait even longer and I'm sure that is not the sort of news you wanted to hear. If you weren't hit back in 2014 but you know that you came close then you have a little more time to improve your websites because who wants to be whacked by Panda or Penguin penalties that could last for a year or more?