A summary of SEO in 2012
As the year 2012 draws to a close, the news is full of ‘look back stories’. So what happened in 2012 with regards SEO?
Penguins in April.
The Penguin update in April sent the cat amongst the pigeons (rather too many animals here I fear). The Penguins were sent to fight web spam and over optimised link profiles. Google was using Penguins to fight back against the link building schemes. Is it a coincidence that since this date the numbers of emails we receive from link building companies has increased?
Arrival of disavow.
In 2011 disavow was a verb in the English language. By 2012 it has become a Google tool to help websites that had been hit by poor SEO work to apologise and remove link and pages. A rather unimaginative name – we prefer ‘Appeaser of the Penguins’, but disavow it is.
Pandas on patrol
The Panda update went after low quality sites (not just pages) with poor or copied content. The Pandas were sent to fight the content farms and did a remarkably good job, albeit taking out some useful sites as well.
Birdsong is sweet
SEO in 2012 was influenced more by social networks. One example of this was with twitter, and webpages that are tweeted showed up higher in search results. This tends to be rather short lived, as the tweets get drowned out by newer tweets.
Mobile is silent
Whilst Twitter is merrily chirping away, mobile phone users are silent; they are busy tweeting with thumbs whilst listening to music. Mobiles cease to be something you talk into and listen to, and start to become a major player in the search market. Savy marketing managers and agencies will have taken note of this in 2012.
Published on 29/12/2012
