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0:16 – A new Panda update will be released
1:02 – Penguin’s main focus is on merchant websites
1:21 – How can you make sure your rankings will not be affected?
2:09 – RIP Google Reader
2:39 – How to replace Google Reader
2:55 – Migrating your data from Google Reader to other accounts
3:26 – Get news as they are hot off the press
Fiona Soutter here from Super Savvy Business with a very important news update.
0:16 – A new Panda update will be released
It seems that Matt Cutts has warned that the latest refresh to the Panda update is about to hit, either today or Monday. Apparently, it is going to be one of the most significant refreshes that we’ve seen with Panda up to date.
Now, just for those of you who may not understand what the Panda update is, it’s a change to the way Google calculates its algorithm in order to show the best quality sites in the search results.
We have had some pretty major upsets over the past 18 months with
Panda with several refreshes and quite a lot of people noticed their sites drop overnight. And this is really being targeted at trying to reduce the amount of webspam out there.
1:02 – Penguin’s main focus is on merchant websites
The latest update is going to be looking – apparently closely – at the quality of merchant websites. So if you do have a merchant site, very much look at your web analytics over the next few days and monitor closely to see if your website is affected.
1:21 – How can you make sure your rankings will not be affected?
The other thing Matt Cutts warned about is that Google is going to be targeting more of the link networks in the coming months; specifically some of the bigger ones, he said.
So I suppose the thing we need to take from this is: it just comes back to having a strong content marketing strategy for your website for your business so that we are not doing anything underhand or anything black hat that is going to be found out in the long run and get your website into trouble.
There really are no shortcuts; we’re on a marathon, not a sprint. You can’t get results overnight; it’s really not worth cutting any corners to do so. You really got to play by the rules, as far as Google is concerned, in order to maintain consistent flow of traffic and to make sure that your rankings are not affected too much each time these changes to the algorithms concern.
2:09 – RIP Google Reader
Now the other bit of news which has come out over the past few days is that Google is going to be pulling back on some of their products. The most notable one that they have mentioned is Google Reader. Google Reader will be no more by the end of June and I know that a lot of people, including myself, use it as a way of aggregating a lot of feeds and Google alerts together into one place so that you can keep on top of what is going on within your industry and your competitors and in your niche.
2:39 – How to replace Google Reader
So what we need to do is to find an alternative to Google Reader and one of those I have come across is called Feedly. Now, Feedly also has a Chrome extension which means its usability is quite good and it’s very easy to be able to add your feeds into it.
2:55 – Migrating your data from Google Reader to other accounts
The question you might be asking is what do you do with all the data you got sitting in your Google Reader account? Well, fortunately, Google have something called Google Takeout, which will back everything up and allow you to import it into a third party service such as Feedly.
So don’t panic, you are not going to lose everything you have got sitting in there already and I know I have got years and years worth of things that I want to hang on to, so you can use Google Takeout that will help you to export it into a third party service.
3:26 – Get news as they are hot off the press
So there you have it: two big announcements from Google; we’re hearing it as it’s hot off the press from Super Savvy Business. If you want to stay on the cutting edge and the most up to date news when it comes to online marketing and developing your business online, then make sure you connect with us, you stay in touch with us. Subscribe to the weekly updates – we usually release two or three of them a week to let you know what is going on and to give you the latest hints, tips and strategies.
I hope you found this update useful; my name is Fiona Soutter and I’ll be looking to seeing you next week!