Social posting is similar to blogging in that you can broadcast and engage your community. To take this further with social you can begin to connect to your community, influencers, and ultimately customers. Social is also a great place to gain insight into what your customers want or need. You can also solicit feedback about your product or services. Testimonials or just feedback in general is crucial for securing and maintaining customers. In short if social isn’t part of your SEO look at starting to make sure you are connecting with your audience.

We have seen huge leaps in technology the past 20 years. A crucial part of this advancement is the development of cell phones and tablets. With cell phones and tablets becoming an integrated part of our daily lives comes the need to make content viewable on these devices. Because of this having a website with a responsive design has almost become a necessity to ensure good user experience on a desktop or mobile device. The best way to check if you site is mobile ready is to pull up your website on a mobile device. If your website doesn’t reformat to a better size automatically you may want to consider revising your website. 

To recap make sure that your SEO is functioning by today’s standards. If you begin to fall behind it is better to take the time to correct the ship while it’s moving rather than having it crash and sink. Recovery is a speculative and time consuming process with no immediate benefit. Make sure that your link building is being done with purpose. Stop making excuses and start being social this helps build a bridge between you and your customers. Lastly keep the increase in mobile traffic in mind it won’t be long before this source beats desktops. 

This is something I get asked fairly frequently at work and online. While I can agree that this feels like a penalty it is simply an Algorithm update. Specifically speaking to Penguin it was an update that judged external links to determine quality sites and content. Because of this review a lot of sites took a dive when it came to there SERP's. This dive could have been a multitude of things from referring links anchor text to link context and so on. 

To further this was what came during the prolong delay of another penguin update. During this time I conducted manual reviews of hundreds of websites and discovered a few things that plagued penguin victims. 

In very few cases did I find it was only one of these factors that affected penguin victims. Most of the time it was the culmination of a few of these issues. Another resounding issue that was frequent in competitive markets, was the lack of a brand. Meaning that links coming in rarely included or had mention of the business name or brand. It is my hypothesis that this was a bigger factor than indicated given that brand mentions are natural despite their lack of context relevance.

So in short I can see where the penguin update on October 4 2013 could have been perceived as a penalty. However we have to ultimately keep in mind that it was an algorithmic update that simply leveraged judgement when determining SERP placement. Because of this some people lost their momentum while others gained during the update. With a refresh the judgement were potentially lifted or lessened resulting in rank returns. 

What do you think the Penguin 3.0 was?