The SEO industry this autumn season was full of interesting, dramatic and influential updates and changes we should be thankful for and challenged about.

On September 25th, Google launched its regular Panda 4.1 Update; not as big as the previous one, but with new signals to detect low-quality content. Small and medium sites with high quality content were thankful to Google for being benefited with higher rankings in search results, while news, medical and download sites were bereft of their slices of cake.

At the end of September, Google unveiled a more sophisticated type of search result snippets parsed from the important meta data on your site. Internet users all over the world should be thankful for structured snippets, as they help to organize and enhance the search experience and provide users with relevant and accurate information at a glance.

On October 17th, Google continued to sanitize search results by cleaning out poor-quality sites. The Google Penguin 3.0 refresh had a smooth impact on search results and affected about 1% of US search queries. The websites that were hit by the latest update were Affiliates, Private Blog Networks and sites using grey hat 301 redirects. The long-running update continued to rollout up to the 27th of November and ended in a Thanksgiving recovery mercifully provided to the Penguin-hit websites that took safety measures with their backlink profiles. To many, it seems unnatural that both a hit and a recovery took place within one Google Penguin Update rollout.

On November 18th, the digital world was excited about the news on mobile search experience practices by Google. Google has added specific labels to mobile search results for the websites with mobile-friendly interfaces and content. It was followed with an announcement about using special ranking for mobile-friendly sites. Awesome news! Thanks a lot to you, Google for your attention, incentive and the helpful webmaster’s mobile guide that make it easier to optimize our sites for a better mobile experience and rank higher in mobile search! BTW, WebCEO predicted these significant enhancements of the mobile search experience on Google’s part. We launched mobile search results rank tracking in October.

On November 19th, the number 1 web browser Mozilla Firefox announced the replacement of its default search provider from Google to Yahoo for U.S. mobile and desktop users. Well, from now on, Google rankings within the U.S. search results may lose their former value in favor of Yahoo positions.

We are done with the news. Now be prepared for our post about the best SEO strategies for 2015 year that will be published next week.

Have a Merry Marketing and a Happy New SEO Year!