Panda, possum and penguin

You could be forgiven for thinking that I have lost the plot completely by titling this blog ‘Panda, Possum and Penguin‘ – no I am not planning to give it all up and go trekking across the world in search of bears, marsupials and flightless birds (although the thought some days is very tempting!). For those who don’t know panda, possum and penguin are Google algorithms, i.e. the maths and logic behind search engines.

Panda

Google Panda has been around for some time now, so what’s newsworthy about it now? Well, according to http://www.forbes.com Google has just updated its Panda algorithm and the main impact that it will have is that those sites that update regularly will move higher up the search rankings. So, please keep your site up to date and write regular blogs……Google will reward you for it……

Possum

Google Possum relates to localised searches. With the internet expanding constantly (and thus the information available), it is getting very hard to swim in this huge ocean and not be outshone by the big boys. To combat this Google has Possum. Localised information for search results means that Google can intelligently say “We don’t have a result in that specific area, however there is one near” How amazing is that! To read more about this click through to https://yoast.com.

Penguin

It should be mentioned here too that Google also favours Southern birds – that isn’t a euphemism by the way! Another of Google’s recent updates is to the Penguin algorithm. Again it has been around for a couple of years, but Google has now updated it to make it more real time and apparently it will “make significant changes to the results that people get when they perform a Google search” according to http://www.huffingtonpost.com. The purpose of the algorithm is to capture the websites that spam the search rankings.

Your website is your shop window

In other news https://www.businessworld.ie reports on the importance of a good on-line presence. Your website is your shop window and as such you want it to be up to date, accurate, but most of all it should appeal to your potential customers.

Adobe Flash

Adobe was, relatively recently, ‘sent to Coventry’ by a lot of browsers, especially Firefox as I recall, for the security issues in Flash. Firefox blocked any Adobe Flash videos from playing. http://neurogadget.net/ reports that Adobe has now fixed a lot of the vulnerabilities. However, if you are going to use Flash, always ensure that you regularly install updates for security purposes and only ever from Adobe’s official website.