Happy 2016 my friends, and welcome to another Smattering of SEO News! I was off for a couple of weeks, which is why there’s not been much of late… but we’re back now! Right out of the gate we have some fun stuff, like a possible algo update and a continual Penguin delay! Yay! Check out all this and more below!

Google News

• Did A Google Update Drop This Week? – According to a post on SEO Roundtable, author Barry Schwartz denotes that several SERP volatility tools are showing a spike in volatility this week, denoting that there very well might have been some algorithm update this week. We’re all unsure of it as of yet, and we’re pretty sure it’s not Penguin, as we’ll talk about in the next story, but we’ll keep you apprised if any further information comes down the pike.
• Penguin Not Updated Yet, But Soon – According to a tweet from Google’s Gary Illyes when asked about Penguin’s next update, he said, “The penguins are getting closer to freedom,” but then declined to give any date. A lot of folks are eagerly awaiting the next Penguin update in the hopes their sites will return to good standing. Hopefully we’ll see it hit soon.
• Matt Cutts Posts Raw PageRank Notes – Matt Cutts posted via Twitter several documents and notes he took many years ago, some before he even started at Google, covering his thoughts on PageRank, link quality, and so on. They’re, as one would expect, pretty technical, but if you can grok them, they’re also very enlightening.
• App Indexing Crawl Errors Report In Search Console Gets Updated, Reset – After months of not working properly, Google has not only updated its App Indexing Crawl Errors report in their SearchConsole, but reset its data as well. The data now only goes back to 12/15/15, but the report now has three types of errors, such as “Package not found,” “URI unsupported,” and “Removed from index.” It’ll be useful to have access to this data again.

Other News

• Bing Now Powering AOL Search – Apparently, Bing is now officially powering AOL’s search on mobile, web, and tablet. It’s also providing paid search ads across all of AOL’s properties. While the amount of searches via AOL is pretty small, this does help Bing crawl a slightly larger percentage of the overall organic search market share (of which it now owns around a third between AOL and Yahoo).