As 2013 unfolded, the entire SEO world was anticipating about the first Google algorithm update for the New Year. Now it turns out that the first update is a Panda Refresh which has its effect on 1.2% of the total English queries. With the official tweet from Google, the first algorithm update for the year is marked. Here is the original tweet:

Panda 2013

Remember the day when Google Panda scared everyone in the web marketing world back in February 2011? The first panda update was like a major earthquake; however the aftershocks which kept appearing in the form of data refreshes are not even noticed nowadays as they have become too common (this is the 3rd month in a row where we have seen panda refreshes). Whenever there is an algorithm update, everyone head to the analytics of their website to see if there were any changes in traffic. However, most of them fail to see the trend changes in third-party sites they have used for link building. There are several game changing trends that occur because of the algorithm updates which would help you in re-strategizing your SEO campaigns. The comeback of Squidoo after being heavily hit by the first panda update is an excellent example. Squidoo lenses have been ruled-out of the SEO strategies and many recent SEO packages just because of the fact that the site took a very bad hit by the Panda algorithm. However, squidoo lenses get ranked high on the search results nowadays and many of them which I have seen carry a page rank of 5. As you know, squidoo still offers do-follow links which would be very much valuable as well. Here are a few examples that I spotted:

I searched for the term “football cakes” which has “4400” phrase match searches per month and I found this squidoo lens on the 5th position and the lens seems to be created on January 13th 2013
I search for the term “Potato Toppings” which has over 4000 phrase match searches every month, I was presented with this lens http://www.squidoo.com/best-baked-potato-toppings which has a page rank of 5 as well.

After Google’s recent (May 22nd) algorithm update (Penguin 2.0), significance of Squidoo Lens has dropped drastically. As per Google’s Penguin 2.0, “Quality is what matters and not the quantity of the backlinks”.

As Google’s Penguin 2.0 targets websites with artificial, spammy and low-quality backlinks, auditing has become a must for all the websites.

Earlier Penguin updates focused just on home page backlinks, but Penguin 2.0 pays much attention to inner page backlinks. It has affected 2.3% of English-US queries.

Why all the websites must perform backlink auditing?

What will you do if your competitor builds hundreds of un-natural or spammy backlinks to your website? Do you know that using automatic submission tools thousands of backlinks can be created to a website within a few minutes? Hence, auditing is essential to remove bad backlinks and to improve your site’s performance.

Analyzing and removing individual backlink can be time consuming and tedious process. To simply the overall backlinks removal process, Google has introduced an advanced tool known as “Disavow Links” tool.

If you have considerable number of artificial or spammy backlinks from a particular domain, you can use Disavow links tool to disavow the entire domain.