However, I don’t just write about this stuff – I do it. I’m a webmaster of multiple domains and I follow the SEO scene closely, so I voraciously consumed every bit of search news I could get my hands on. After all, I needed material, but I wanted to learn for my own sites, too.
And boy did I learn. Google’s morphed into a completely different animal than it was just one year prior. Algorithms have changed, new ones were added, websites have been manhandled and sandboxed, and webmasters now have a dizzying array of new tools and procedures at their collective disposal. To research for this post, I stepped back in time and hit the highlights of 2012. It astounded me how much the events of this year taught me about the changing face of search – not to mention the fact that the pattern we’ve witnessed is a powerful indicator of things to come in 2013.
Along Came a Penguin
Google’s April introduction of a new algo, affectionately dubbed the “Penguin” update, seemed to be the biggest game-changer of the year. Panda was already on the scene, but Google had yet to roll out an algorithm designed to directly target techniques used to spam the search results.
And man did it target them. In fact, Penguin caused many of the bad guys to fall right off the map. Sure, plenty of sites slipped through the cracks, and the algo is still perfecting itself via a series of ongoing updates, but overall – it worked.
We’d seen on-site issues tackled by the Panda update, but Penguin was a different animal (forgive the pun – I couldn’t help it). It targeted off-site issues – backlinks in particular. A Search Engine Watch article published earlier this year reported that the Penguin algorithm dealt with three primary components of the backlink profile for a website:
Image 1:
Penguin quickly scrubbed much of the spam from the SERPs that Panda failed to catch, but there was an unfortunate side effect of the change. Some legitimate webmasters were swept away with the trash, and although Google did some quick damage control via an online complaint form, many websites still have not made a full recovery.
A couple of takeaways from all the drama: don’t depend on Google traffic for your income. Just don’t do it. Also, if your site was hit by Penguin (or if it’s ever slapped by future Penguin updates), don’t run around pointing fingers. As Danny Sullivan so wisely pointed out in a Search Engine Land article published earlier this year:
Image 2:
I agree that you should seriously investigate your off-site issues after a Penguin slap, correct them immediately, and submit a reconsideration request pronto. However, for me, there’s a bigger lesson to be learned here. Simply put: diversifying your traffic sources and building yourself a community is the single best way to insulate yourself from Big G’s wrath. Google’s 2012 changes are only going to lead to new, more dramatic algorithms in the years to come.
Bank on it.
The EMD Update: Buh-Bye Microniche Sites
In late September, Google rolled out yet another new algo. This new change, simply called the “EMD algorithm,” was designed to seek and destroy a specific class of websites that both Panda and Penguin had failed to filter from the SERPs. These sites featured domain names that sported exact-match keyword strings.
For years, we’ve seen Internet marketing gurus tout the riches that can be gained by creating dozens – sometimes hundreds – of “microniche” sites. That’s just a fancy word for a website that is laser-focused on one specific thing and often features an exact match domain. Here’s an example: a niche site could be a website about power tools. A microniche site, however, would be something like splinedriverotaryhammers.com. Can you see the distinction?
There’s only so much a webmaster can write about one specific type of product. Not that microsite owners would want to, anyway – the concept employed a “set and forget” technique that involved creating the site, dropping in a few keyword-rich articles, and moving onto the next site. The exact-match domain helped the sites artificially rank for highly targeted keywords that boasted heavy search volume.
EMD microniche sites made many people very wealthy over the last few years. Now, however, all that’s changed. Lesson learned from the 2012 EMD update? Stick to building authority sites with high quality content and commit to stay with it for the long haul.
Going back to the investment analogy, building microniche sites is akin to day trading – it’s risky, unreliable, and you could lose it all overnight. Building an authority site is more like investing in a diversified, long-term retirement account. It’s still a gamble, but the risk is a thousand times lower.
New Tools for Webmasters
The third big SEO event this year happened twice. First, Bing introduced a disavow link tool for webmasters. This was huge for the SEO world – they’d been waiting for such a tool for years. Plus, the announcement reignited hope within the search community that Google would eventually follow suit.
Follow suit it did. At the end of 2012, Google announced its own disavow link tool for webmasters using the company’s Webmaster Tools platform. This was fantastic news since there had been a sharp uptick in negative SEO following Google’s new algo rollouts. Webmasters were dealing with links from spammy sites pointing to theirs, and they had no way to remove the links aside from begging the spam site owners to take them down. This method was long, tedious – and overwhelmingly unsuccessful.
Now, webmasters have complete control over their own backlink profiles. They can use the tool to instruct Google or Bing to ignore links from untrustworthy sites. After a year of steamrolling webmasters with never-ending algorithm changes, this event redeemed Google quite a bit.
Takeaways for 2013
Of course, there were quite a few other big SEO events this year. For instance, who could forget the takedown of the “Build my Rank” blog network, the massive Google Shopping overhaul, or Google’s addition of knowledge graphs? The list could go on and on.
However, for me, the three events discussed above were the biggies. Looking toward 2013, if the trend stays the same, community-building will become more important than ever before. Establishing yourself in your niche, massively diversifying your traffic sources, and creating your online brand will insulate you from the rising tide of SERP shifts. Truth time: what are you doing to accomplish those goals in 2013?
Which SEO event did you consider to be the biggest of 2012? Weigh in by commenting below!
Nell Terry. Post from: SiteProNews
What 2012 Taught Me about Search
