At Yoast, we’ve been ridiculously busy getting ready for all the product launches we’ve got coming up, like our new eBook and our upcoming Basic SEO training course. Luckily, we also still have time to look at the news because Google has been rather busy and there was other stuff to tell too, regarding new Apple releases.

Google Panda & Penguin

So… Google Panda 4.2 is apparently “still rolling out“. This makes it harder for people like us to diagnose whether a site got hit by Panda, but luckily not undoable (the signs are usually relatively clear for the trained eye). You’d hope that more info would come with that, but there was nothing else.

Google Penguin on the other hand seems to be truly becoming “real-time”. Gary Ilyes of Google said at SMX that he “hoped” it would be ready by the end of the year.

I have to say that it’s getting harder and harder to trust specifically Gary when he says things because it’s been kind of hit and miss. We’ll have to see what comes of it.

Google wants your app data

In other Google news, Google seems to understand that it’s slowly missing the boat. They now say that they’ll give a ranking boost if you use app indexing. They’re afraid that if they don’t get everyone to include app-indexing, which allows Google to index the contents of mobile phone apps, they won’t be a complete search engine anymore and platforms like Facebook might beat them at some point.

The problem with remarks like this from Google is knowing whether it’s actually true. It’s very easy for them to say that they’ll give you a ranking boost, it’s now up to the global SEO community to prove whether they did or not.

Rel=author making a comeback?

In what I’d clearly call the weirdest news of the week, Gary Ilyes also said you shouldn’t remove your rel=author markup. I was personally involved in getting that markup on millions of sites (by adding it to our plugins and to WordPress core). I took it out the day Google dropped the author highlight. I’d be happy to add it back in, but I’ll need some more info before we do, so I’ve reached out to an engineer at Google to see if he could comment.

Mac OS X 10.11: el Capitan

When a new OS X comes out, experienced Mac users will often go straight to Ars Technica for their review of the newest version of OS X to see what’s new. You should too. I read it and the pinned tab feature was the one that made me think “hah, I might need to do that”. So I added a pinned tab icon to Yoast.com this morning, and then wrote a quick tutorial on adding one of these so called mask-icons just now.

Not exactly SEO, but branding is incredibly important for your long term search rankings too.

That’s it, see you next week!