Do you remember these stories?
Facebook Timeline
In March of this year, Facebook discarded the old business Pages for the snazzy new Timeline.As is common with the launch of most changes, many business owners were frustrated and confused. The Timeline format eliminated their ability to send users directly to a welcome landing page. Facebook also changed the layout of the Page making fan comments less noticeable.
While the changes seemed a poor decision, businesses soon caught on and embraced the new format. Did they really have a choice?
Google Took Down Build My Rank
It was like a scene from a horror flick—the long-time blog network was flourishing one day and murdered the next. Google decided to make a statement, and boy, did it hit the internet hard.Build My Rank closed its doors after Google discovered it was taking money in return for posting member’s content on blogs, links attached. Google discovered the footprints of the blogs in the network and one by one took them down.
We headlined this story when it happened. Read more here:
Hot Off the Presses! Google Takes Down a Popular Blog Network
If webmasters thought this action was scary…little did they know what was about to hit the internet three weeks later..
Enter Penguin…
Penguin
On April 24, 2012, the internet as we knew it was obliterated. Google launched Penguin, and I imagine many of you can attest that it has changed your marketing lives—forever.Google launched what was arguably one of the biggest updates to hit the search engine. The update targeted over-optimization, and just about every tactic SEOs used to rank sites was rendered useless, in one fair swoop.
Exact match anchor text, blog commenting, blog networks—terms once used to describe popular SEO techniques were now mentioned in the same category as keyword stuffing and doorway pages.
Negative SEO
Not long after the Penguin update, a slurry of press communication centered around the idea of “negative seo.” Even Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz jumped on the bandwagon in an attempt to prove the point that authoritative sites would outlast any negative SEO actions. He offered his site to anyone who would take the bait. Update: SEOmoz still remains one of the top SEO resources on the web.Though Rand won’t be biting his fingernails, many smaller websites will still need to deal with the threat of negative SEO and other webmasters sending “spammy” links their way in an effort to downgrade sites.
Disavow Links Tool
Amidst the rants about Penguin and negative SEO, Google created the Disavow Links Tool to give webmasters the ability to “disallow” spammy links pointing to their sites.But, there is one caveat…Google suggests using the tool ONLY under extreme circumstances after all other methods have been exhausted. If you received a message in your Webmaster Tools account or you are extremely knowledgeable with identifying spammy links, you may be a viable candidate for the tool. For the remaining 99.99% of the internet, you are on your own.
There are, however, some conflicting words about the tool. While on the one hand, webmasters are advised to avoid using it if possible, Google also says this in its blog post discussing the topic…
The primary purpose of this tool is to help clean up if you’ve hired a bad SEO or made mistakes in your own link-building. If you know of bad link-building done on your behalf (e.g., paid posts or paid links that pass PageRank), we recommend that you contact the sites that link to you and try to get links taken off the public web first. You’re also helping to protect your site’s image, since people will no longer find spammy links and jump to conclusions about your website or business. If, despite your best efforts, you’re unable to get a few backlinks taken down, that’s a good time to use the Disavow Links tool.
In general, Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking. However, if you’re worried that some backlinks might be affecting your site’s reputation, you can use the Disavow Links tool to indicate to Google that those links should be ignored. Again, we build our algorithms with an eye to preventing negative SEO, so the vast majority of webmasters don’t need to worry about negative SEO at all.
Exact Match Domain Update (EMD)
As if Penguin wasn’t enough to deal with in one year, Google began targeting exact match domain sites.The backlash following this update was nothing short of crazy. The forums were buzzing as many webmasters once again lost their traffic, profits and dignity.
After the dust settled, we realized that Google wasn’t targeting ALL exact match domains, just the “spammy” ones. If you glance through the search results, you will notice many EMDs still ranking well.
Why are many EMDs still ranking? Google is still tweaking the update, which is not uncommon after new launches. Also, Google doesn’t simply look at an EMD as the only factor that characterizes a low-quality site. I suspect that an EMD along with many other suspect issues like over-optimized link profiles, low-quality links, too many ads above the fold, thin content, and keyword stuffing, will tip the scales in favor of downgraded rankings.
The original article was published here
News from 2012 that Changed Your Life on the Web