S ite Name Updates and a Penguin Retrospective
Google updates site names in search results after numerous complaints
By Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land
- “The fix is rolling out and while it does fix a number of inappropriate site names, it does not resolve all the reported issues.”
- “Google sometimes can disregard the specified site name and replace it what it thinks the site name should be. For example, when it came to searching for [salesforce], Google was showing a space between ‘sales’ and ‘force,’ and the CMO of Salesforce called it “extremely damaging to our brand.’”
- “Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, posted an update in the Google support forms saying a fix was pushed out that resolves some of the issues. ‘We recently rolled out a change that seems to be helping with some of the cases reported here and through our form (and likely some others that weren’t reported),’ he wrote. ‘This change may take time to populate so that internal pages also reflect updated sitenames,’ Sullivan added.”
Lookback: Google launched the Penguin algorithm update 11 years ago
By Zoe Ashbridge from Search Engine Land
- Penguin was a pretty big deal, and it impacted a lot of sites. What made this change frustrating for web owners and SEOs is that an algorithm change isn’t something a site owner can appeal to. There was no quick fix to recover from Penguin. If hit, it was made clear that website administrators needed to reduce spam on their sites.
- Before Penguin, the quantity of links was weighted in the algorithm. As a result, poor quality or spammy pages were ranking when they didn’t really deserve to.
- Recovering from Penguin was no easy feat for SEOs. There were long delays between updates which were incredibly frustrating. As an algorithm update, the only way out was a lot of hard work, cleaning a site of its spam, which for many was no easy feat.
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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