10 ways to wrestle Google Panda
Google’s recent update to its search algorithm, called Panda, has left many sites scrambling to pick up lost traffic. Unfortunately it’s an uphill battle for most of these sites. As WordTracker’s Mark Nunney wrote earlier this week:
The problem with Panda is that it’s a hack to fix a broken algorithm.
Large content farm sites containing crap were appearing at the top of Google’s SERPs. The sites were not breaking any rules.
Google’s algorithm couldn’t stop them.
Specialist quality sites like those talked about in this article were getting top for populist searches they weren’t built for.
Google’s algo was not working well enough.
Searchers were finding inappropriate and poor sites and this is a threat to Google’s success.
Aaron Wall goes further than this and says that the content farm industry publicly made Google look stupid
Google had to act.
But it couldn’t fix the algo. So it bolted on Panda.
Panda is not part of the main algo. Panda is run every 4-7 weeks. Panda does not change the algo so that better results appear for every keyword search.
Instead any site that falls foul of Panda gets crudely wiped out by a site-wide, all-keyword handicap. That handicap can’t be lifted until the next time Panda has been run.
And it probably won’t be lifted then because very few sites have had a Panda slap lifted.
Yikes! All those years of hard work spent building back links, optimizing pages for the long tail, designing content silos and creating better internal site links, wiped away in an instant! It seems hardly fair and if you ask me, it’s not! But I’ve been around long enough to know Panda is just another thing Google does… because it can. Learn from it, do the best you can, and change your strategies if necessary.
Ok, how do you combat the negative effects of Panda? Here’s a condensed summary of Mark’s suggestions:
- Look at your pages with the thinnest content and use robot tags to noindex them.
- Don’t plaster your pages with ads.
- Are you pulling in content from feeds? Pare down on these. They’re merely duplicate content.
- Use your analytics know-how to find pages with high bounce rates. What keywords are driving traffic there? Maybe those keywords simply don’t match the content. De-prioritize them.
- The reverse of number 4: further optimize pages for keywords that ARE working on your site, as demonstrated by low bounce rates and high “average time on site.”
- Use images and videos to support your content, and place them above the fold.
- Use share buttons.
- Use comments to foster discussions.
- Build your brand—whatever that means to you.
- Refer to Mark Nunney’s Google Panda update survival guide. It’s a must have for SEOs and web product / site managers.
Got a Panda success story? Panda fail? Let me know!
Infographic! The Top 20 most expensive keywords in Google AdWords advertising via @takingpitches
Google Plus is the Social Backbone (and Facebook is not)
This is a very interesting article from O’Reilly’s Edd Dumbill on why Google is the only real candidate to deliver a universal social backbone.
Here are the 4 goliaths, but let’s not forget about the smaller, tightly focused niche sites that cater to moms, wine-lovers, GLBT, offices, mobile users, foodies, etc.
via @mashable
Will Google Offers use Google+ to shape the daily deals space?
It is rumored that Google’s new deals platform, called Google Offers, will be much more favorable to businesses concerned with not making any money on their daily deals. Instead of paying businesses just 50% of the revenue generated from their deal, Google will pay up to 80%, which should come as a relief to many businesses who either are too scared to give away most of their profit or haven’t figured out how to turn new customers into a repeat customers—the name of the game in my opinion.
But, before you go showering Google with all kinds of praise, look ahead for a minute. We heard Google Offers will likely evolve into a self-serve deal platform for businesses, and considering Google is the only player in town for Search, plus nearing the top on Display, I would expect to see Google create additional “exposure opportunities” for your business’s deal by allowing you to advertise it via PPC and Display ads.
Right there, they make a little more on their split.
I’m not saying Google won’t absorb most of the cost to advertise their own—they surely will if they want their offers to succeed. But it makes sense to allow businesses to dabble in their own advertising, if only to their own networks or Circles.
With Places, Maps, Google+, AdWords, Display, +1, and a famous self-serve approach to maintaining all those products, it is very interesting when I take stock of all the things Google has created and how they might all work together to connect consumers with businesses.
It has never been a better time to be an AdWords expert. But then again, I’m biased!
Facebook, Google, Four Square. Who will be the leader in checkins and why ?
It is going to be Foursquare for two reasons: a) they have a clear head start and b) they’re good people who seem to be quite transparent about their goals. As more developers partner with the Foursquare API, I think Foursquare will achieve critical mass. But one problem that stands in their way is the lack of available apps for local businesses to monetize checkins. App developers really have their work cut out for them, but when they get around to it I think they will be choosing Foursquare.
