There was a blog post on the Inside Search Google blog a few days ago, it has a brief summary of the recent algorithm changes and it also has an excellent video discussing how they test potential changes to the algorithm (see below).

So what are these algorithm changes and what are the potential effects for SEOs?

Here are some of the more significant ones for SEOs:

Fresh Results = Good

First up is the “fresher” results update, affecting 35% of search queries. This, quite obviously, means that the more recent your content the higher it is likely to rank for some search terms – so blogs are likely to be more important now.

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Following on from Dave’s experiment last week on (not provided) keywords – we decided to track logged in Google users on a site which gets a lot more traffic. Before I show you the results, here is the breakdown of the actual audience that visits this site, so you have some idea over how this might skew the results.

As you can see from the traffic stats above, it gets a reasonable amount of traffic – so we got some good results in a short space of time. There is an audience bias though, as shown below:

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The online SEO community was up in arms after Google announced that signed-in  users would get the encrypted search results as standard on google.com, meaning that all the referring keyword data would be lost in any analytic package.

Short term, this is unlikely to cause a too much of an upset and most people are saying they are only seeing 2-3% of all searches coming through with the (not provided) keywords.

Personally, I’m seeing 2.57%  (not provided) keywords over the last few days, but then when I’m logged in I don’t actually get the SSL search results, which made me think, how many people are?

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If you’re expecting me to tell you what you need to do to get out of the “Panda Pen”, you can move on right now . If you want to learn a little about the way I’m thinking about Panda read on :

Everything I write from here, is pure guess work and what would I do if I was Google. I have had this rattling around my head for a while now, but just haven’t got round to writing it up.

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As has become customary at this time of year there’s a new design for Dave’s blog for all to enjoy, and as the post title kind of alludes to this is actually the 6th time I’ve had my grubby designer hands all over Dave’s blog.

A new design for Dave’s website can be borne simply out of a desire to refresh the look of the site but before jumping into Photoshop there always needs to be better reason that this to warrant the time refreshing a site that most are perfectly happy with already. This time that reason came down to mobile.

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The news of Google removing keyword referral data for logged in users caused quite a stir.

Traditionally, when you went from a search engine to a website it would pass the referrer string with it so you could determine what keyword the user originally searched for. Google are now preventing that data being passed for those users who are logged in and using the secure version of Google (https://www.google.com) – they are also making that the default search for those users that are logged in.

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Comments for the course review page.

This didn’t go on to the blog and instead went into a page on the site. That means no comments unfortunately so I’m posting the link to the page here in case anybody wants to give any feedback in the comments section of this post.

Ignore the above, comments have now been enabled on the page:

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/seo-training-courses-for-seo-certifications

So here are some of the questions that were covered in Dave’s Q & A session at A4UExpo earlier this week. It was great to see so many people made it to the early morning session to learn some up to the minute views from Dave.

(image: Kasper )

Should you cloak affiliate links?

No!

What do you think about the new change that Google brought in with not showing the search referrer in Analytics?

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