Latest Happenings in SEO – Penguin & Panda Update & Page Rank!

You all know the fact that SEO is an ever changing field. Recently Google launched the Panda 4.1 update, and people are waiting for Penguin update as well, and now the latest talk about Page Rank. Read this blog post on the latest happenings in SEO which includes Penguin Update, Panda Update and Page Rank.

It was around May 20 or 21, 2014 when Google rolled out Panda 4.0 update and then exactly after a gap of four months they rolled out another Panda update namely Panda 4.1. Though I posted about Panda 4.0 update, but did not found much interest about writing about Panda 4.1 update.

On the other hand many people and webmasters are eagerly waiting for a Penguin update as it was more than a year now that they updated it last time. I guess it was October 4th, 2013 when they rolled out Penguin 2.1 and since then many people are waiting for an update of Penguin, since the links which they disavowed in between will show its impact only when the update got refreshed.

There was a talk that Google might come up with a monthly refresh for Penguin update but since so far we have not seen any sign of a Penguin update, I have a serious doubt if that is going to be possible soon.

And now the latest update is that the webmasters should now forget about the Page Rank thing, as Google probably won’t update toolbar PageRank in future. Surprised?

I don’t think so; we all are almost sure about it. Is not it?

Google already removed the display of Page Rank on their toolbar a few years back and now the latest happening is that they are probably not going to update the Google Toolbar PageRank in the future.

Latest Happening in SEO – Penguin & Panda Update & Page Rank!

Let me give you all a few updates about SEO industry:

Page Rank

Are you still fascinated with the green bar on your Google toolbar? I guess they already removed that green bar from the Google toolbar around last year, and now they also announced that they are probably not going to update it anymore. So if your website has a PR of 3 then I suppose it will remain the same now forever. Unless Google decides to completely drop off the concept of PR.

There was a time when webmasters were desperate about page rank, a ranking criteria developed by Google and most probably depends on the number of links a web page had. Though I guess it was around the year 2006 when I stopped looking this green bar. I also suggested everyone not to consider it as a serious thing.

But there are so many webmasters out here who were too keen about having a Page Rank of their website. Frankly it was helpful for those who were thinking to sell out their domain or website.

Although Google did updated the Page Rank last year, I guess somewhere around the first week of December 2013, and it came as a surprise for many webmasters. As before that they updated it on around first week of February 2013 and then Matt Cutts gave a hint that probably Google won’t update it before 2014, but they did it before the end of the year 2013.

Since then it is already more than 10 months and yesterday John Mueller said in a Google Hangout video that Google will probably not update it any more. Might come as a surprise for many webmasters, but we SEO’s are not taking it as a big news.

So I might suggest everyone to bid goodbye to Page Rank concept as well, as they did for Orkut recently and might did to FeedBurner soon.

Panda 4.1 Update

Last month as everyone was expecting a Penguin update from Google, they surprised everyone with a Panda update. They last updated it 4 months back, as I mentioned above. Pierre Far of Google announced about this at this URL: https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/7CWs3a3yoeY as Matt Cutt is on a leave these days.

Normally it was considered that it is going to help small business websites. Those websites which got hit by Panda update in past, might get recovered from it if applied changes on the content of their website. Poor quality content and duplicate content were the things which penalized websites through Panda. Thus I can suggest everyone to never allow poor quality content on their site and make sure that the content on your website should be unique, even from the pages of your own website as well.

You can also read my blog on how to produce Panda-friendly content?

Penguin Update

It was probably the first week of October 2013 when Google last updated their famous Penguin update, which was meant for the quality of links of a website and penalize sites which has either poor quality back links for their site, or having links to poor quality sites on their website.

You can also read my blog on Penguin 4 or Penguin 2.0 update and how to survive your website from Google Penguin update?

So as the story behind Penguin update was that it penalizes websites having poor quality links, people started getting rid of such links. Getting rid of poor quality links from their own website was easier and everyone did the same, but then to remove links from other’s website was even difficult than developing those links.

Thank god Google already had Disavow Links tool, which helped webmasters to get rid of poor quality links. But then the impact of disavowing poor quality links won’t be displayed on your website, unless and until Google refreshes the Penguin update. And this is the reason why many webmasters were eagerly waiting for a Penguin update, so that they can see if their website got recovered of it or not.

Though Google is saying that they are planning to fix the refreshes of Penguin update on a monthly basis, but it will also probably come up with the next Penguin update only.

So these are some of the recent happenings of the SEO world and I thought to share them with you all. Hope you liked it, please do share your opinion about these updates in the form of comment and we will discuss about the same.

Please do let me know if I forget mentioning any latest happening of SEO industry in this post.