Panda, Penguin, Penalties and More!

Jordan Koene

Chief Evangelist Searchmetrics

What are Search Engine Changes

Search Structure Changes Hummingbird

Core platform changes

Search Ranking Changes Panda and Penguin

Search index changes and refreshes

Penalties Notice from Google GWMT

Negative impact on a website's rankings

Panda: What Panda really looks like?

Is a change to Google's search results rankings that was first released in February 2011. This change is intended to stop sites with poor quality content. Panda is an update that occurs multiple times a year and sometimes considered a “refresh”.

Not (necessarily) an overnight drop

Impacts targeted content sections

Latest Change “Panda 4.1”

“Slow” rollout of Panda started at the end of September.

- Depending on the region, the update affects about 3%-5% of search queries.

Panda Winner and Losers

WINNERS

-News and Media

- Entertainment

- Travel

LOSERS

- Communities

- Banking

WINNERS

- Business Insider: +20%

-Netflix: +15%

-Cox.com: +10%

-Disney: +181%

LOSERS

- Answers.com: -60%

-Hubpages.com: -25%

- JPMorganChase: -18%

Panda Effect

Retailmenot.com

eBay

Panda and Competition

Targeted Ranking Changes “Pigeon, Pirate”

- Update to combat software and digital media piracy.

- Changes targeting relevant and accurate local search results. A clear statement to focus on local results.

Visible impact to subset of website

Pigeon and Pirate Winner/Losers

Pirate WINNERS

-xfinitytv.comcast.net: +28%

-Vudu.com: +25%

-Youtube.com: +11%

Pirate LOSERS

- thepiratebay: -50%

-movie4k.to: -91%

Pigeon WINNERS

-Tripadvisor.com : +20%

-Zillow: +18%

-NYTimes.com: +15%

Pigeon LOSERS

-Indeed.com: -30%

-Farmers.com: -10%

Pirate Winner

Pigeon Winner

Penguin, the king of the arctic

Google’s search results changed by cleaning up spam in Google. Spam, is when webmasters or marketers do things like “buying links” or “cloaking” that violate Google’s guidelines

Penguin 2.0 May 22, 2013 impacting 2.3% of queries

Penguin 2.1 October 4, 2013 impacting around 1% of queries

Penguin 3.0: October 17, 2014 Rollout In Process, Impacting 1% of queries

Difficult to Isolate with slow rollout

Black hat affiliate sites

Content syndication websites

Some winners include news and media websites

Testing for Pirate update occurred at the same time

New world of manual penalties

For eCommerce:

Relevance (Utility) The purpose of this page

is to provide information about, and allow users to buy, a specific type of product.

The page provides helpful product information, for example reviews.

Manufacture vs. reseller vs. affiliate (expert on the product)

Product quality and popularity of product

Quality A satisfying or

comprehensive amount of very high quality main content

Very high level of expertise, highly authoritative/ highly trustworthy for the purpose of the page

Very positive reputation

Penalties are painful!

Competition can win

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THANK YOU QUESTIONS

Panda, Penguin, Penalties and More!

Searchmetrics &

3Q Digital

How to Thrive in the Age of

Algorithm Changes

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Reading the tea

leaves

Algorithm Updates

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Building Up Your Knowledge

Due Diligence :: Reading

• Nobody truly knows when an algorithm change is

coming

• However, you can set yourself up for success…

– Panda has been around since 2011 and

Penguin has been around since 2012

• If you’re just beginning with SEO, do

you know what these are?

• Are you aware of the other past

algorithm updates that you should

avoid?

– Understanding the historical trends can

help predict future changes

• http://moz.com/google-algorithm-

change

• http://searchengineland.com/library/go

ogle/google-algorithm-updates

• https://www.seroundtable.com/categor

y/google-updates

• http://www.springboardseo.com/resour

ces/google-algorithm-updates/

Sources

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Identification Of Changes

Visual Graphs Sources

- Updated daily

- Highly trusted industry

resource

- Visuals only

- Updated each month

- Visual volatility & article

write-up in one place

• http://mozcast.com/

• https://www.rankranger.com/google-algorithm-updates

• https://serps.com/tools/volatility

• http://searchengineland.com/18-days-later-google-

penguin-3-0-continues-slowly-roll-worldwide-207339

- Updated daily

- Highly trusted industry

resource

- In-depth articles

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In The Crosshairs

Gray Hat Tactics

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Social Automation

• Social promotion is growing both in usage and effectiveness

• Due to the popularity and high engagement metrics, brands

are trying to find ways to scale their efforts

– Offerings exist for brands to gain more followers, likes,

shares, +1’s, tweets, etc.

• Old Domain Purchasing

– Offerings exist where companies will

sell you domains that have built up

strength in the past

– The idea is to redirect these domains

and their strength to your actual website

Domain Recycling

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Link Building

• Link-based penalties are the most common penalty at the

moment

– Because of this, strategies are being leveraged to still

scale links but in ways that hopefully won’t look

inorganic

• Strategy 1

– Link Building (anchor text spreading)

• Strategy 2

• Also manufactured link building, sending links to pages

outside of homepage with the notion of ‘you can always

cut the arm off’

• If this results in a Partial Match link penalty, removing

the page should get you out of the penalty

• Article Spinning

– Could be done through the CMS

– Typically an automated approach of rewriting parts of

existing articles or replacing words

• Through an automated approach, this can leave

articles human unreadable

Article Spinning

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Article Spinning Example

Original Paragraph Spin-ready Syntax

Spun Paragraph

#1

#2

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5 Evergreen

Techniques

For Working Now and into the

Future

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It’s All About The User

Designing For End Users

• User experience is becoming more of a weighted priority for

Google when ranking websites

• Historically, UX and SEO were run separately

– Over the past several years, not only have they

intersected but they are now married

• Think about what users want to do when arriving at your page,

not what you want them to do

– AdSense overuse for example

• User experience testing tools are great ways to determine if

your landing pages have been properly designed

– https://www.optimizely.com/

– http://www.crazyegg.com/

– https://qualaroo.com/

*Next ranking factor?

(Mobile User Experience)

• Users are your most precious commodity, as

it’s them who either will (or won’t):

– Convert

– Spread your branded message

– Become repeat purchasers/users

• Engagement

– Social media is a two-way street

– If you want a fruitful social presence,

stop marketing and start engaging

• If your social community feels that all you want

is something from them, what’s their incentive

for returning & promoting?

Engagement & Outreach

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Effort vs. Benefit

Outlinking

• Outlinking To Authoritative Sites

– Creates topical association and authority

– Allows your site to function as a hub of information

– Should still be kept contextually relevant

• If you’re a company who sells shoes, linking out

to a government website on national parks will

have little return

– Try thinking as if you’re doing a link audit

• You’ve identified a domain who links a lot to

your competitor

• You’d like links from them

• You write a great content piece and then link out

to that domain so they’ll notice you

• Placing Efforts On Pages 2 & 3

– If you’re not on the first page, you’re not getting

traffic

– With mobile…

• This is even more pronounced, as many

believe if you’re not #1, then you’re nowhere

– Pages 2 & 3 present the fastest opportunities for

current content to increase the traffic it drives

• Your pages are already being ranked well on

queries; refining them and furthering their

strength to rank them on Page 1 will increase

their visibility in front of users

Page 2 & Page 3

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Tactical

• The tool definitely has its

limitations

– You will receive close

variants of your seed

keyword(s), but most of the

creative work is on you

• Wikipedia to the rescue

– One of, if not the largest

online information hubs

– Example seed keyword:

• Wine

*If you’d like to see the search volume for

these, then you can go back to the

Keyword Planner

Keyword Research

• Keyword research is one of those strategies

that will never go away

• The depth of it involves:

– Listening to social media

– Identifying dying and emerging trends

(for query usage)

– Staying on top of competitor

content/offering strategies

– Running focus groups

*Keyword Research = Content Creation

*Poor Content Creation = Panda

Google Keyword Planner is great, but…

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Bonus

• Previously, research was highly manual

• Then it became more streamlined

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_with_dea

d_external_links

• Then it became scalable…

Dead Wikipedia Links

• Expanding your reach and digital footprint

• Birds of a feather flock together

– You want to be associated with high-

authority domains

– Being able to place your resources on a

highly trafficked information hub allows

this

Questions &

Comments?

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