Rich Snippet Guidelines and Tumblr Analytics

Your weekly SEO update from the team at Strategy. This week; Tumblr gets analytical, rich snippets get a “how to” and a stealthy Panda update from Google keeps webmasters on their toes…

Tumblr Caves

Tumblr is an effective tool in internet marketing, allowing businesses to create great content on a shareable platform. Yet, it’s always been difficult to track exactly how these campaigns work, except by recording how many times your submissions has been reblogged. Now, however, Tumblr have bowed to pressure from marketers and released access to their analytics. Licensed through Gnip, you can now check your top contributors, top posts and see shiny graphs on your topics’ performance. While it’s still unclear if Tumblr will share this licence with other providers or if they’ll even develop their own analytics, it’s a step in the right direction for fans of this great social platform.

Rich Snippet Guidelines… Finally

Following the pattern of long overdue announcements in this newsletter, Google have finally released official guidelines on what they expect from your rich snippets. Their usefulness is something we’ve covered in detail in previous blogs, but it’s always been difficult to know how and why some snippets appeared and others didn’t. Yet now there is everything from a one page summary guide to a full, in-depth information source featuring everything you could ever want to know about rich snippets. Gone then are the days of trawling through Schema.org, bashing your head against the desk in frustration and contemplating a Matt Cutts voodoo doll. All the answers are here.

Stealth Update behind Panda

At the beginning of October the Google Panda algorithm enjoyed its largest update for a few months, affecting around 2.4% of search queries. The major focus of this update was looking at exact match domains (EMD), penalising those that use domains unnecessarily utilising multiple keywords in order to rank on the first page. But what many people didn’t realise is that there was another update released around the same time. It’s no secret that Google release countless updates a year, not all of them as big as zoo animals. But this one, it seemed, was big enough for to Matt Cutts to wade in on. After being queried that many of the ranking fluctuations businesses and marketers had experienced were not down to EMDs at all, but something else, he responded that he knew of one other algorithm that had been rolled out over the same time frame. It’s not clear what this targeted but it caused waves, and it’s worth checking to see if you’ve been affected by an update not tied to EMDs.

Fancy Yourself as an SEO Wizard?

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Written by Dave Langdale