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Taming the Panda

Google didn’t just change an algorithm – they changed the web

Duncan Morris, 2011

SEOs are problem solvers at heart.

We should be so proud! We can get any old shit to rank

Matt Cutts: It was like, “What’s the bare minimum that I can do that’s not spam?”

Whole businesses relied on advertising revenue from low value content

Quality Content Evidence that content is important

Google Webmaster Central - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349

Give visitors the information they’re looking for: Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do

Google Webmaster Central - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361

Little or no original content One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information

What’s been done

Google May day ripped out many pages with little value. Mainly by removing pages with no unique content such as category pages.

May day – Matt Cutts “this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries”

http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054

Panda relies on data captured as a result off engineering breakthroughs.

Caffeine “...Caffeine revamped the entire indexing system to make it even easier for engineers to add signals.”

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/all/1

I’d wager good money ‘algorithm chasing’ SEO’s are behind most of these

Blekko wages a PR war

The day of the Panda February 24th 2011

The day of the Panda February 24th 2011

Biggest algorithm change in years that targeted site quality

We asked our raters questions like: •Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card •Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids

Takeaway point: Google cares about ‘how users interact with” a site

The algorithm addressed 84% of the top sites reported from the Chrome extension

Also see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html

Only for the LOLs

Google are still trying to find a way for users to tell them the sites they like

The Panda strikes again: April 11th

If Google gets this right, this should be a big win for genuine businesses

This isn’t so much an algorithm change as it is a mindset change

Manipulating the signals may become harder than earning them.

Quality content: the 3rd ranking signal

Quality content doesn’t go far enough

Valuable content: the 3rd ranking signal

Can you recover from a Panda attack

Based on our testing, we’ve found the algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality. If you believe your site is high-quality and has been impacted by this change, we encourage you to evaluate the different aspects of your site extensively

Paraphrased: We are super confident we are right.

Paraphrased: The quality of a site doesn’t change overnight, so we don’t need to run the algorithms that often

But first, a word of warning

“Google has said:”

“Yes we do compute and use author authority”

“So you should look at how you can earn more followers on twitter”

Hmm, Duncan says I need to get more twitter followers

I didn’t mean it like that..

Don’t optimise for the metric. Earn the metric

How to avoid being erroneously hit

‘how to build up a history of quality’

Do you have pages of low value?

Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content. “Wysz” http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en&start=360

Do you have pages with no results (reviews / products / coupons)

... prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines – via www.mattcutts.com/blog/empty-review-sites

If your site is predominantly low value pages, be careful with UGC.

UGC... User Generated Crap? Create an internal metric for quality and be rigorous in removing anything that doesn’t surpass it.

The Panda algorithm is attempting to match a human intuition when it comes to judging the quality of a site.

Action: Speed up your site

A 5 second speed up (to ~2 seconds) resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-fast.html

Action: No really, Speed up your site

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/07/27/wikia-fast-pages-retain-users/

Page Load Time

Page Load

Time

http://www.google.com/support/analyticshelp/bin/answer.py?answer=1205784

Action: JFDI already..

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/optimizing-page-speed-actionable-tips-for-seos-and-web-developers

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ninejjcohidippngpapiilnmkgllmakh

Do you have excessive advertising?

Do you have excessive advertising?

According to the adwords policy. A landing page is not considered arbitrage if...

30% of the browser display area consists of unique and relevant content

The browser display area used for ads doesn’t exceed the browser display area used for unique and relevant content.

http://andrewhansen.name/affiliate-marketing/google-checkmates-me-but-reveals-internal-secrets/

What does your site look like at various screen sizes?

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine or book?

Getting it right long term

Building your social brand

Action: Ensure your employees have the authority to become famous

http://twitter.zappos.com/employees

They get scraped to hell

They are quoted all the time

Look what happens when you are an expert in a niche

Action: Use social media as a company notice board.

Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are all trying to create a social graph

http://www.6smarketing.com/facebook-edgerank-algorithm/

http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findyours.html

Well Look at that. Google knows this Rand Fishkin is the same as that Rand Fishkin.

This relies on rel=“me”

Tie your profiles together

Tip: If you can, ensure your accounts use the same email address and username

Getting it right long term

Some more tips

Tip: Use CRO to encourage people to interact with you and your site.

http://www.abtests.com/ , http://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons

Tip: Look at what content has engaged users so far and replicate

https://connect.postrank.com/

Tip: Content doesn’t always mean text. Videos are awesome too.

@duncanmorris

duncan.morris@distilled.co.uk

www.distilled.net

Videos are now available of our #linklove

conference in London and New Orleans:

www.distilled.net/store

You’re doing it wrong.