Archive for February, 2012
Google Panda Algorithm Update Is Presently A Year Old
February 24,2012 was the one year anniversary of Google released one of the most spoken about algorithm updates ever – the Google Panda update. Panda is a filter that lets Google sift out content deemed to be short of substantial substance. Panda is just 1 of over 200 diverse factors Google uses in order to rank pages.
Following is the history of the update created so far:
Panda 1.0 – February 24th
Panda 2.0 – April 11th or so.
Panda 2.1 – May 9th or so.
Panda 2.2 – June 18th or so.
Panda 2.3 – Around July 22nd.
Panda 2.4 – August
Panda 2.5 – September 28th
Panda 2.5.1 – October 9th
Panda 2.5.2 – October 13th
Panda 2.5.3 – October 19/20th
Panda 3.1 – November 18th
Panda 3.2 – about January 15th
Latest figures and surveys reveal that after a year only 13% webmasters have confirmed to be completely recovered from the Panda slap.The rest are still making updations to come back in SERPs.
Google Takes a Dive into the Deep Blue Sea
The highlight of the project is that it has two robots which can explore depths not feasible even for scuba divers and if one of the robots gets stuck in the coral reef, the other can help it out.
If both get stuck at the same time then this can get into troubled waters…
Google Images Related Searches Update
Google have had the feature of related searches for quite some time now. One can remember seeing blue links at the top of image search results suggesting possible search terms the user would be interested in. This feature has been explained in the Google Inside search blog as ‘Helping you find what’s in the mind’s eye’.
Now to make this feature more visually appealing and to give more options for Google image search users, now they have added a hover feature. This hover feature will present before users a panel of images once we mouse over the related search terms.
For instance if you search for the term Soccer then you can see related terms at top like soccer ball, funny soccer, soccer player and soccer field. If you hover (mouse over) soccer player then you can see a panel displaying a set of images for that term
Google Specifies 500KB Crawl Limit For Robots.txt Files
John Mueller, the Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland has stated that Google is restricted to only dealing up to 500KB of their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you place on your site to convey to search robots which pages you would like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means compulsory for search engines but usually search engines obey what they are asked not to do.
John Mueller made a statement on his Google+ page that stated that if you have a giant robots.txt file, bear in mind that Googlebot will only read the first 500kb. If your robots.txt is longer, it can result in a line being truncated in an unnecessary way. The simple solution is to limit your robots.txt files to a realistic size.
If your robot.txt file is of a large size and goes beyond 500 KB, then not only will it result in Googlebot ignoring everything that follows the limit but it will also auto truncate the file, which may cause your website’s health in Google search.
John Mueller is currently answering all queries regarding robots.txt handling on his Google+ page https://plus.google.com/113006028898915385825/posts/Wbk17p6bMSe