February 2012 Google Search Updates

Google shutting down AdSense for domains

As of April 18, 2012 Google will be shutting down AdSense for domains. This only applies for domains hosted by Google. It means that you will no longer be able to generate money from your undeveloped domain. While AdSense was based on quality content, many domains that opted for Adsense had no content whatsoever. This led to great dissatisfaction amongst advertisers, thus resulting in Google pulling the plug on this service.

Google Panda 3.1, Panda 3.2 and Panda 3.3 Update

The aim of Google Panda is to penalize sites that are trying to fool Google into improving their ranking i.e. that have no real content, just incredible amounts of text and links. Here are the recent updates:

Google Panda 3.1 This minor update affected less than 1% of all Google search queries and was aimed at the problem of duplicate content.

Google Panda 3.2 Like 3.1, this was a minor update that Google termed a data refresh. There were no additional signal or algorithm changes.

Google Panda 3.3 This update made data in the Panda system more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

Cookieless domains have NO direct SEO effect

In response to a thread, Google has said that there is no direct SEO impact on cookieless domains. However, site speed may be seen as a ranking factor. Since cookieless domains take longer to load, this may reduce their ranking in search engines.