What a busy month we had in October with Google core SEO topics, from RankBrain being announced to the new hacked sites algorithm, we saw a lot of changes this past month. We also noticed several potential updates that Google would not confirm. We are waiting on Penguin to touch down by the end of this year as well.
Mobile searches passed desktop searches in Google worldwide. Google launched the app ad interstitial penalty and started showing iOS apps in mobile search results. Let's not forget the Zombie traffic Google is sending users.
It has been a busy month and now, there is some very early chatter at WebmasterWorld about some fluctuations in the Google SERPs. Time will tell.
Here is a recap of stories I pulled out that I think are important:
Google Algorithms:
- Live Already: Google RankBrain; Query Interpretation Using Artificial Intelligence
- Google Releases New Hacked Site Algorithm Impacting 5% Of Queries
- Google's Hacked Sites Algorithm Only Impacts Spammy Queries
- Google: That May Have Been A Core Ranking Algorithm Update; Which We Won't Confirm
- More Signs Of The Google Halloween Zombie Update
- Google Update October 14/15th: ZOMBIE Update Or Panda Rolling?
- Google Search Fluctuations & Ranking Changes Chatter Continues
- Google: Penguin 4.2 Should Be Real-Time & Continuous
- Google: Penguin Update Will Still Happen In 2015
- Google: It's Not Too Late To Clean Your Links For Penguin
- Google: Penguin Still Not Ready For Primetime
- Webmaster: Google Panda Rollout Moving At Recrawl Rate Pace
- Fresh Data On My Google Panda 4.2 Recovery
- Google To Penalize Deceptive & Sneaky Mobile Redirects
- Did Google Penalize A New Set Of Sape Link Scheme Web Sites?
- Google: Mobile Search Volume Surpasses Desktop Searches Worldwide
- Google: The App Install Interstitial Penalty Is Now Live
- Google To Show iOS App Content In Index By End Of October
- Google: iOS Apps Don't Get App Indexing API Ranking Boost
- Google: iOS Apps Now Showing In Mobile Safari Searches In Google
- Google: Don't Build Apps Just For Ranking Boost
- Google Supports Multilingual Apps With App Indexing
- Google Revamping Google Search Console App Content Mismatch Data
- Google Has Internal Search Commands For App Content (i.e. site: cache: etc)
- Google: 40% Of Searches Return App-Indexed Results In Top Five
- Google Search Console: Upload Your APKs For Fetch As Google For App-Indexing
- Google Red "Live" Label In Mobile Search Results
- Google Accelerated Mobile Pages Project : Will It Last?
- Google: Scrapers Only Outrank Sites That Have Other Search Quality Issues
- What's Up With The Google Zombie Traffic
- After Months Of Warnings; Google Kills Their AJAX Crawling Scheme
- Google: It's Not A Good Idea To Build Web Sites On Public Data
- Google Confirms They'd Use Rel=Author If More People Were Using It
- Google's Gary Illyes: Make Thin Content Thicker OR Use NoIndex
- Google: We Don't Recommend You Remove Content To Fix Panda Issues
- Google: Duplicate Content Issues & Panda Issues Are Two Different Things
- Google: Don't Make A Dynamically Generated robots.txt
- Google: We May Make Your 302 Temporary Redirects As 301 Permanent Redirects
- Google: Your Site Can Have Both Manual Actions & Algorithmic Penalties
- Google: Numbers In URLs Don't Matter For Rankings
- Google: Want Featured Snippets, Try Using Schema Markup
- Preview The Google Search App New Features Before They Are Released
- Local SEOs: It's Harder Than Ever To Find Duplicate Local Listings In Google
- Google: "Not Set" In Google Analytics SEO Report Isn't A Bug
- Vote On The Google Search Console Feature You Want
- Google Working On "Sets" To Consolidate Google Search Console Profiles
- Google: Search Console To Get More Accurate, Faster & Useful Reports
Last month's recap can be found here.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.