Google Algorithm Weather Report: October 2015

Panda

Panda is still rolling out to this day, as confirmed from multiple sources at Google. The update seems to be rolling out at the same rate as a recrawl as theorized by a user in the Webmaster World Thread and it makes a lot of sense, bear in mind this is not officially confirmed by Google; it’s simply an educated guess.

Has your traffic been affected in the past couple of months, for better or worse? Let us know! It’s probably Panda.

Penguin

Gary Illyes reiterated at SMX earlier this month that Google plans on releasing the next Penguin update as a real time update, and hopefully it will hit by the end of the year. Originally John Mueller said this in a Google hangout (as seen below) two weeks prior, but it’s good to see extra clarification.

The general consensus was that Penguin might hit at the end of this month; however, more recently Gary Illyes made another statement about Penguin saying that “Penguin is not ready for primetime yet”, disappointing many webmasters. This makes it over a year since the last full Penguin update (minus minor tweaks).

@AGr4ves penguin is not ready for primetime yet.

— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 22, 2015

On the 28th, Andrew Isidoro on Twitter asked Gary Illyes again if he thinks we will see a roll-out this year, and the reply was a very simple ‘Yes’ as can be seen below.

@Andrew_Isidoro yes — Gary Illyes (@methode) October 28, 2015

App Indexing API Ranking Boost

Good news if your business also has an app. At SMX East, Google announced that there is a new app indexing API boost for people who use the new App Indexing API to deploy their Apps.
There is already an app ranking boost for using this, but it’s the first time we’ve heard about an app indexing API ranking boost too. Unfortunately, only Android apps currently get this boost, but we anticipate that iOS will soon, hopefully, follow. We do not recommend everyone to go out and build an app just to get the boost, but if it’s something you are already going to do or have done, using the new App Indexing API is a must.

 AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Test

Google released a test page version of mobile Google search results called Accelerated Mobile Pages. What this does is allows you to read news articles straight from Google search results without having to load up another page. The mobile SERPs almost feel like their own app with this new feature as everything loads instantly and has some very nice animations for scrolling through news articles.
If you want to give this a try, head over to http://g.co/ampdemo on your smartphone and try searching for something that is likely to produce news results (for example, “Mars”). From there you can read news articles, and swipe to the left or right when you want to read the next one. Below is an animation of this at work.

 Google Kills Their AJAX Crawling Scheme

Google has been saying since March that they will be dropping their guidelines for making AJAX crawlable (as can be seen here, notice the “officially deprecated as of October 2015” note.)

This does not mean that Google won’t index your AJAX website, but rather that you don’t need to use special workarounds to help Google understand it any more as they have gotten far better at crawling advanced javascript, they do however recommend you to implement industry best practices, such as progressive enhancement when making the next update to your site.

 “Ok Google” Dropped from Desktop SERPs

Google has dropped the “OK Google” voice command from desktop SERPs that allowed you to conduct a google search using just your voice due to it “not being used that much”. I honestly don’t think many people even knew about it as Google did not advertise it all that well, but it is still available on mobile via android and/or the Google app where it is arguably more useful anyway.