In a post on Google+ Pierre Far a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google announced that Google has started a slow rollout of an improved Panda algorithm which is due to be complete by sometime next week. He went on to say,
In June, Google announced the $500 million acquisition of Skybox Imaging, a California-based satellite imaging company that specialises in the development of software which can interpret satellite images and extract the data contained within (currently 1 terabyte per day per satellite.)
At the end of July, Google released a new version of their local search algorithm. Known as 'Pigeon', it is Google's latest attempt to improve the listings for local search both in the traditional search results and in Google Map search.
In their post on Google+, Introducing Bot and Spider Filtering, Google announced that they have added an option in Google Analytics which allows webmasters to exclude all traffic from known bots and spiders.
After conquering China, Baidu - China's biggest search provider - plans to expand into other countries. Baidu's Brazilian office opened in 2012 and they began providing search and web services in 2013. They now plan to expand into other countries including Egypt, Indonesia and Thailand.
In recent years, the technical team at Born have often had to pick our way through the difficult issues of websites wanting to target customers from multiple countries and in multiple languages. There are still a whole host of methods which can help you achieve the desired outcome, but the introduction of hreflang links and the support Google has given, make the whole process so much simpler.