Updating our Calendar

A couple of weeks ago we launched our Google Update Calendar. We built it to become a resource for ourselves, our clients and anyone else that happens to find it so that they can keep up with any updates Google makes to its search algorithm.

It also helps users go back through time and match a specific update to a time where they began to lose traffic and rankings. This provides SEO’s or clients alike a starting point in discovering what issues their site might have and how to rectify them.

So we launched our Google Update Calendar and saw that it was good. But after resting on that 7th day (yup, some good old bible references for you) we started working on a few enhancements…

Hat Tips

At Bronco we like to think we’ve got our ear to the ground and discover quickly any confirmed or rumoured updates. But on occasion it can be other helpful souls in the community that point us in the direction of a new update.

We wanted to be able to recognise these people as well as open our calendar up to allow others to come to us and fill in any blanks. Essentially we’re crowd sourcing this, not so we don’t have to do any of the work, but so we can ensure the calendar is as accurate as possible. We know if we’ve got any glaring omissions in our calendar that the value and trust placed in it goes down.

To recognise those that help keep the calendar up to date we’ve added just a small hat tip with a link back to their personal website or twitter profile.

Direct links

When the new HTTPS update was announced last week Dave, our glorious leader, used the calendar page as a way to tweet about this news. But many people clicking the link would visit the page, possibly see the default calendar view and not be sure exactly what Dave is trying to communicate.

The issue is that the update Dave wanted to show people isn’t obvious on the calendar view and is only a little more obvious on the timeline view as it’s the latest update.

We needed a way to allow not only ourselves but others to share specific updates and for those links to navigate a new user directly to that update in the timeline view. And that’s exactly what we did.

So if an update happens to have a description or links to more reading then we also provide links to share on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Once these links are clicked the user will be taken directly to the update with the content already in view.

Anything else?

Over time we might find ourselves looking to enhance this resource further, but at the moment we’ve not got anything specific planned.

But if you have an idea for a feature that would make using our update calendar easier then leave a comment below. We can’t promise to implement every new idea we get but your suggestion might just be too awesome to ignore.