A Quick January 2009 SEO Update

Many SEOs and SEMs have been noticing updates at Google, Yahoo and Ask.com this past week. I thought I catch you up on what has been noticed at each engine.

On the Google front, as reported at the Search Engine Roundtable, many webmasters noticed their PageRank scores drop. After a lot of discussion, concern and debate, Matt Cutts of Google commented explaining that the PageRank scores are fluctuating due to the canonicalization updates Google is pushing through. He said, as long as you are not selling links, “Don’t Panic.” These things will work themselves out and your rankings should not be impacted.

Google is not the only search engine people are taking notice of recently. I reported that webmasters are also noticing an update at Yahoo and even at Ask.com. Yahoo has not announced a “weather report” at the main Yahoo Search Blog, they have however announced it at the Japanese blog. Many are of the belief that Yahoo has done some sort of update and it is impacting search referrals for many. Many have also noticed that Ask.com did some sort of test update. This Ask update does not seem to be related to the super vertical push they are making, but rather an influx of Google ads into the listings. It is hard to say for sure, because only some are part of this test.

In addition, Google Blog Search continues to adjust their algorithms and indexing techniques. Some are reporting that Google Blog Search is failing to index their new blog posts, while others continue to complain about how they adapted to index the full text of the blog post.

That is a quick snapshot of what took place on the SEO front this week.