An interview with Barry Schwartz about Penguin update, Google’s plans and SEO market

Sure, Penguin 3.0 in bullet points:

1. Started rolling out late Friday night, October 17th.
2. Will continue to roll out for next few weeks.
3. Is a worldwide roll out.
4. Impacts less than 1% of English queries (but may have a smaller or greater impact in other languages).
5. Only a refresh, no new signals added.
6. It helps sites to recover from previous Penguin updates that fixed their link profile.
7. It demotes sites that have a bad link profile.

Well, we do not know for sure if it had no new signals but that is my feeling based on the limited communication from Google. Why? I think they were in no rush and then looked back six months later and started to think of a refresh but ran into many obstacles. So it took longer than they wanted but I have a feeling it has to do with both waiting and also technical issues.

Yes, manual actions are known to expire by themselves. But they can and do return if no webmaster action is taken. So you can see traffic improve after the action expires and then drop down shortly later after a manual action is renewed. This is fairly common.

Like any advertising market, it had an impact. Hard to say, since SEO is growing in terms of ad budget year to year. Would it have grown faster in a good economy, no doubt, but by how much? I am not sure.

I do not know of any US companies that hired these European SEO agencies. I do know that the US market is typically a year or two ahead of other markets, especially markets not in the English language, in terms of SEO and penalties.

I suspect so, but I wouldn't know first hand.

1. Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Google Analytics.
3. Backlink profile.
4. Index saturation.

Sure, but there is a huge risk to that. I wouldn't recommend it.

I think it exists, I think it does work in some cases. Google giving us a disavow tool proves there is valid concern for this. I don't think anyone should do negative SEO, it isn't a nice thing. :)

They shouldn't if you do the href lang annotations properly.

1. Poor internal search.
2. Not mobile friendly.
3. No SSL on checkout.
4. Not having auto-fill.
5. Hard to navigate.

Fastest is via webmaster tools, but I'd do all, noindex, robots, etc.

Not in the next few years, no. I highly doubt we would see Bing or another player take over 10 percent from Google's market share.

1. Search Engine Land.
2. Search Engine Roundtable.
3. Google Webmaster Blog.

I'll stop there not to insult anyone. :)

Read our interviews with Rand Fishkin and Ann Smarty.