The reports of a Panda update by Google has been confirmed and it may rolled out anytime this week. Google has also told that there won’t be any algorithm changes and the update is just a data refresh of Google Panda algorithm.

A lot of webmasters have commented about the loss in rankings and many sites regained their traffic to Pre Panda level.

Google Panda 3.2

A lot of people may ask why 3.2 and not 2.x?One of the Googler told that “one of the 2.x updates was labeled as “minor” update and should have likely named as major update”. The updates are not numbered by Google so it is not easy to keep track of the updates.

The current “data fresh” update is just a minor update so this update is referred as 3.2 update. The last update was done during November and there was a long gap between two updates because Google said there would not be any updates during holidays.

Security start up Dasient, an anti-malware vendor for for large enterprises was acquired by Twitter. Dasient has been involved in the financial services,media and online sectors providing anti malware. Dasient’s technology will be used by Twitter to identify malicious ads that are submitted in their ad platform before they go live.

The company in their blog post yesterday said “Over the last year, we have been very active in securing the ads and content of the some of the industry’s largest ad networks and web sites”. They also said “By joining Twitter, Dasient will be able to apply its technology and team to the world’s largest real-time information network.”

Dasient’s attention mainly will include the legions of phising attacks that target the users with direct messages that include “Is it really you” and “Are you in this pic”. The blog post also added that adding new customers has been stopped and it will be shutting down it’s business. The details of the deal were not disclosed.

There has been changes made on how Google calculates average position metric.In an attempt to provide more accuracy to the rankings,the way of calculating average position in Google Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries and Google Analytics has undergone some changes.

This is a sample Google has put forward to understand about the changes it has made to average ranking position of pages in a site.

“Let’s say Adam searched for [blue berries] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Richard also searched for [blue berries] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Adam’s search and 5 for Richard’s search), for an Average Position of 4.” There won’t be any changes made to historical data.

A new master privacy policy and terms of service was announced by Google in it’s official blog.The users will be notified about the new changes in the coming days.The new terms of service and privacy policy will take effect on March 1.

Instead of 70 privacy documents,Google has created one privacy document to govern all it’s products.Google can pull information from one service and deliver it to you through other Google product you use.

Individual search has become more customized and this has brought a wonderful opportunity for the advertisers to reach their targeted audience.

Check out this video on Google’s Privacy Policy Update

These new changes from Google aslo helps them to make more revenue. It will result in better search results and ads. Google made sure that it will never sell user information and it still promotes data liberation. Google received a fare share of criticism for the changes in in it’s privacy policy in previous years.

Another update from Google on it’s search results and now you can see results for punctuation marks and symbols.Searching for the symbol equivalent of a percent sign,comma,carat and more symbols will return search results but the results are not exactly relevant.

Wikipedia page ranks as the top link for for the following punctuation marks.

• ^ (caret)
• ( ) { } [ ] (bracket) – parentheses, brackets and curly brackets are all combined into the same search result
• ~ (tilde)
• | (vertical bar)
• “ (quotation marks)
• < (less-than sign) > (greater-than sign)
• $ (dollar sign)
• . (full stop/period)
• , (comma)
• : (colon) – however, the colon that is a piece of the large intestine currently outranks the punctuation mark of the same name
• ; (semicolon)
• # (number sign)
• % (percent sign)
• @ (at sign)

These punctuation marks in Yahoo and Bing diplays “No results found” to the user.

Come this May,you could be witnessing Initial Public Offering from Facebook according to the report from “All Things Digital”. Facebook would be going public mostly during the third week of May.

It’s been a long term plan for Facebook which was planning for an IPO. Facebook in November said it is targeting the second quarter of 2012 for it’s stock offering. The recent evaluation of Facebook touched nearly $100 billion and Initial Public Offering from Facebook would be the largest from technology company

A prominent analyst from Enderle Group told “An IPO from Faceebook will shape the future of the Industry and as many company’s will base their own IPO decisions on the outcome of a Facebook offering”. Social networking site LinkedIn’s shares prices doubled within minutes of trading on New York Stock Exchange last year.A lot has also been expected from Facebook IPO during May this year

When Search Plus Your World was launched by Google a few days back it also marked the exit of ability to block web sites from search results. Google says the feature will return back but the timing was not disclosed.

How Blocking Worked

Previously the results contain a “Block All” link that appeared below them. Selecting this option will not display pages in the search results of the site you blocked. This option no longer appears.

Return of Blocking Will Take “Some Time”

The feature has been dropped earlier this week and Google told they are working on a fix.Search Plus Your World is still in the process of being rolled out. It’s only a short term problem and and it might take some time.

Response to Relevancy Complaints

The blocking site feature was released last February that allowed users to block sites only if they used Google Chrome. A lot of criticisms were made on Google that their relevancy had decreased to a great extent. Google have also addressed regarding this issue in their official blog.The ability to block sites, along with Google’s Panda Update, were part of that response.

Google has received criticism from Twitter on it’s major search update that was unveiled on Tuesday. Twitter claimed that it’s totally “bad” for web users as the update has made it harder for the users to find information.

The recent update Search Plus Your World allows Google to show results in SERP from it’s social networking platform in order to offer a personalized search experience for the users.

Twitter in a statement told that latest enhancements will not help the search engine giant when it comes to providing real time personalized information within its search results.

The statement said “Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant (search) results,” .”We’re concerned that, as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Alex Macgillivray tweeted that ” the update from Google is a bad day for internet”.Both Google and Twitter are battling for dominance in the social market which is currently headed by Facebook.

Come 2012 and Google has introduced quite a lot of features thats going to bring clarity to many features they have made over the past few months.These changes include the creation of their own social media network and implementation of SSL search. Over the next few days in Google.com you will be witnessing their new change called “Search Plus Your World”.

The new feature will bring results from Google+ in the search results at the click of a button.The results include People,Pages and Profiles that are fully integrated into search results.

When personalization icon is clicked for a search query it pulls out posts and pictures from their friends circle into their search results.Already in the search results Google + posts have began to outperform the original content. The new icon personalizes the search results to those within the user’s network that includes even the content shared privately.

The results does not show anything related to Facebook or Twiiter and this helps Google+ to promote their social network.Regarding this Amit Singhal said “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Check out this video to know more about Search, plus Your World

Time has come for say big “goodbye” to low quality link building altogether.The Panda update was primarily focused on low quality sites that had bad linking practises.

A lot of questions remain in the mind of link builders that competitors are ranking high because of thousands of pure spam links.

Here is a way to find low quality and high volume links in your analysis:

1. A big brand with a quite good reputation is good enough to rank for a particular keyword.

2.If it not then Google is close enough to crack those sites giving no space for spammy backlinks

How to Determine a Valuable Backlink Oppurtunity

You need to determine whether the backlink you are obtaining from a site is valuable.Here are some signs that makes Google to deem a site as low quality

1. Lots of Ads

If the site is covered with lots of advertising chunks or with five blocks of Adsense then you need to stay away from them

2. Lack of quality content

If your article gets approved immediately in a site then this is not the site for your needs. If poorly written articles are approved easily then Google’s algorithm has no other go other than acting harsh on your site.

3.Lots of content,low traffic

Blogs with a PageRank of 6 looks like a great place to spam a comment. If the blog lacks authority in terms of traffic and social sharing then it has a lot of chance to be devalued in the future.In previous cases Page Rank did not save the site from Panda Update.

4. Lack of Moderation

Lack of moderation can prove costly and you need to moderate your blog comments.When lots of spammy links are present in a page,you don’t want yours to go next to it.

It’s high time you need to change your link building strategies according to recent algorithmic changes. Feel free to share your thoughts on linkbuilding