Happy Thanksgiving to all those of you, who regularly check your sites for issues and fix them, keep your backlinks clear and make customers happy. Here’s a brief recap of the latest SEO news so you can get back to enjoying family and friends.

Google News

Google has confirmed that a new Penguin Update 4.0 will go live by the end of 2015. Luckily for many webmasters, the upcoming Penguin iteration will process all the toxic and low quality links that you removed or disavowed after the previous manual penalty in real time. Do you remember that it took months to recover from the manual penalties of the previous Penguin updates? If you have not yet refined your backlink profile for the upcoming Google Penguin 4.0, be sure to check your backlinks for domains with a low trust level (0.30 or less) and then submit them in a list to the Google Disavow tool through the Web CEO Backlink Quality Check tool.

Google has officially rolled out its new artificial intelligence algorithm RankBrain. This new machine learning system is a part of the Google Hummingbird algorithm and the third-most important Google search ranking signal that helps to interpret and better understand non-exact match search queries on the level of an individual searcher’s intent. This means that SEO will see a shift from keywords to topic-focused research and optimization.

Google+ just recently updated its design with a heavy focus on Communities of Interests and Collections. Now the “ugly duckling” of the social media family strongly resembles the look of Reddit and Pinterest. With the new design, folks were saying that Google+ local pages forgot to add business reviews. Google then officially confirmed that business reviews will no longer be displayed on Google+ local pages, but they will be accessible when doing search via Google and Maps.

Yet again G+ received an enthusiastic response from users, but maybe not the response they had hoped for:

Google+ redesign

twitter google+ redesign

Yandex News

Yandex has announced that they will start to crawl CSS and JavaScript content, as a test in order to better understand the content of web pages. They are now informing webmasters to stop blocking their CSS and JavaScript files and resources. In the long-run, this will have an effect on Yandex SEO processes. Yandex has also added a mobile-friendly label to mobile search results and released a supporting mobile-friendly diagnostic tool for webmasters to make sure that their website pages meet mobile-friendly guidelines.

Facebook news

Facebook has launched lead ads! Yes, you heard right. Facebook now allows running lead generation ads (similar to Twitter lead generation cards) which collect user information, share lead capture content and make prospects complete a desired action without actual leaving Facebook. Read more on how to configure your lead generation program on Facebook here>> .

Now local businesses can promote their products on Facebook more effectively with local awareness ads. The new ad feature allows you to target groups of people who reside near your business neighborhoods.  Furthermore, Facebook has made the Instagram Ad Platform available to all marketers around the world. Now you can launch a photo or video ad campaign right from your Facebook ad management tools (Power Editor).

Twitter news

Twitter has suffered a lot of quality changes recently. One of the major updates of Twitter has been the change of the shape of its Favorite icon from a star to a heart.

Not long after this redesign trick, Twitter officially shut down its API that provides data on Tweet Share Count. Now you can’t see the number of your article Twitter shares in your social share button bar. This may have a negative impact on user interaction and social proof factors for your content.

For those of you who want to drive more user engagement and learn what followers think on this or that topic, you can now create polls on Twitter!