We just returned from SMX West, a search conference in San Jose, CA and came back with some breaking news from Google. The biggest news came from Matt Cutts of Google, who stated that there is a new generation Panda algorithm update in the works that will help small businesses. Matt didn’t give an exact date of when this update would be released, but he did say it will be a bigger update and also described it as “softer”. As a small business you can prepare yourself by creating great content and setting up your Google+ Authorship. If you noticed a dip in traffic during the first Panda update, you might be in for some traffic recovery.

The next big news is that Google took manual action (read: penalized) against a well known guest blogging “network” called MyBlogGuest. Guest blogging has been in the Google crosshairs for a while which has caused a heated debate between SEOs and Google. Google took action against MyBlogGuest and several of its members, both guest bloggers and publishers. There was a very interesting and detailed discussion on Inbound.org, if you want to read more.  Our advice is if you have done guest blogging and/or published any guest post, add the rel=”nofollow” to any outbound links in the guest blogger’s post. If you wanted to be extra safe, we would recommend submitting any domains you wrote guest blog posts for to the Google Disavow Tool, please note this tool is dangerous, so please use responsibly.

To learn more, check out Chipper’s newest episode of What’s New with Google below:

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