by Cheryl Tieken

Panda hit. And it punished. And if you were one of those who felt it’s wrath, your website may have dove deep into the rankings. Many SEOs took to the blogosphere protesting the bold move by Google. Many small websites suddenly lost their only way to get noticed… or so they thought.

Even at Jacob Tyler, we were a a bit stumped. But as I had mentioned before, Google needed to do something because search results were beyond polluted with spammy results.

If you’re new to the ever-changing world of SEO and the word Panda only revokes images of cute, fuzzy, black and white bears chomping on bamboo, then make sure to check out this blog post on the Panda update and then click back because you will want to read the following few paragraphs. If you are already clued in, keep reading…

Ok, here we are. The online world post Panda. Yes, the Panda update was undoubtedly frustrating if article marketing was your gig. But don’t get mad, get innovative. Get social. Get helpful. Get user-friendly.

I think it’s safe to say that pretty much everyone is aware that social media marketing is used by nearly 3/4 of businesses nowadays. Your local pet shop is on Facebook. Farmer’s Markets. Heck, even your dentist probably has a Twitter account. Well yeah, that’s great and all but what does this mean for SEO?

What’s happened is that major search engines like Google and Bing have taken note. In fact, they started to take note awhile ago. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team released a statement that Google does in fact take social signals into account for ranking. But this doesn’t just mean having a bunch of Twitter followers is going to get you better rankings on Google. They do take into account who these followers are, how reputable they are and how they behave on social networks. If you have fans and followers that are reputable, trustworthy, actual human beings as opposed to robots, and are active online, it will do you some good. In fact, SEO-wise, it will do you a lot of good.

SEO efforts post Panda should be focused nearly 90% on being actively social both on and offline. Google hit the content farms because it now longer trusted the authors. Google does trust the kind of word-of-mouth leveraging that social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and YouTube provide. So get involved, if you haven’t already. And do not merely create a Facebook page and let it sit there. Engage with the community online. Ask questions, talk to your fans, give them content and links that they might enjoy. Do not just blatantly advertise your business. Make your social profiles as beneficial to the user as possible.

While it has not being openly discussed by Google, there is quite a bit to go by to believe that Google ranks sites on how user friendly they are. If your site load time is slow, search engines and users won’t like the website. But even more, make sure that your links are not just going to other pages on your site, but also out to other sites as well. If you read a great article from the New York Times about shopping habits, and you are writing a blog post about it, link out to that article. It won’t affect your page rank – in fact it may help to improve it because Google likes that you are enhancing the user’s experience.

Think outside the box when it comes to helping better the user’s experience. Create a YouTube channel and post relevant videos. Then, link to and from your website.

Don’t forget about good ol’ PR. Join networks like HARO (Help A Reporter Out), to receive daily emails where you can send a pitch to a reporter on a story that may be related to your type of business. If they decide to use you. you get incredible exposure very quickly.

Invest in doing blogger outreach as often as possible. Look out into the blogosphere and find people who are talking about the same things you are talking about. Comment on their blog entries. And when you comment, make sure you don’t sound like a robot advertising your site. Ask questions, give feedback on the entry, give additional helpful info. Your goal should be to establish a healthy relationship with bloggers in your industry. You not only will stay in the loop about certain trends and topics, but you may also be asked to guest post on occasion, thus resulting in increased exposure.

There’s no need to feel lost from the Panda update. In fact, you should feel relieved. You can focus your time now on things that are more enjoyable. Things like conversing with followers in your industry, helping people, reaching out and connecting with others, bettering the web and bettering the user’s experience overall.

Long story short. The SEO world post Panda is social – both on and offline. Get talking. Start making relationships. And get going already…

Algorithm updated again- some prosper….some crumble.

The results are in and more than the handful of “low-quality sites” have been swept from Google’s search rankings. Many innocent sites that may have a few flaws — the ones a natural site would have if not worked over hard by an SEO — have fallen through the cracks.

The cries are coming from everywhere — industry insiders finding problems, small very niched sites whose content you would be hard to find in too many places, e-commerce sites with good unique content but copied by competitors or whose navigation takes up too much of the total content on a given page… the list grows every day as site owners start to feel the impact of lost revenue. Mahalo, one of the hardest hit, is reducing staff by 10 percent.

Obscure Niched Content

Take for example the literary review site Complete Review, which is two sites – one Literary Saloon and Complete Quarterly Review. The site reviews obscure literature that content farmers or other regular book review sites would not bother with (except maybe Amazon). But for whatever reason, Google dropped on them like a Kansas house on a witch.

As the site notes:

“I would figure that the complete review’s review-pages — providing not only original content (my reviews, however dubious their value …) but also links to and quotes from other reviews, as well as links to any and all other information about the books that I can find would be among the most useful pages for any given book-search. But I suppose that can also be interpreted as “low-value add for users”, as linking to and summarizing other reviews is algorithmically deemed a major negative. (Google’s page-rank system rewards sites that get lots of in-bound links; few complete review review get many (or, indeed, any), and now, apparently, are heavily penalized for aggregating links outward — go figure.) In any case, most complete review reviews now show up far, far down on even the most targeted Google-searches.

Obviously I’m not even remotely objective in judging where the complete review’s reviews should appear in search results, but I do note that in collecting links for forthcoming reviews Google’s new search results have proven considerably less useful than previously. Maybe this algorithm works for the big search-picture; for the small book-information picture it seems to have fallen pretty flat — frustrating all around (well, all around what I do, i.e. both in finding links, and then making it easy for interested readers to find the reviews of the books they’re looking for).”

Tech Space Not Safe

The Tech Developers Forums also took a beating. Dani Horowitz CEO and Publisher of DaniWeb – a leading programmers forum with a wealth of specific unique content – true User Generated Content in many cases – but the information is detailed and valuable sources for education.

Dani saw a loss of 50% of their daily US traffic from Google. Does the site have a long tail? Yes, but of endless problems with solutions and tutorials – unique and valuable. She said one of the other sites in the developer area had hundreds of tutorials dropped from the results – tutorials that were unique and the best in the space and whose replacements are poor imitations.

So curious, Horowitz started to reach out to the numerous people at Google she had worked with — AdSense, where their partnership with Google had made both companies a good deal of money — their niched specific site has a great online audience; to Google Search Appliance contacts from the days when she used the $15,000 a year search box to organize her content for search; to Matt Cutts himself, the Google Spam Czar, who’s department integrated the change to the algorithm.

And then went on a conference tour — stepping away from Twitter and other forms of communication both social and otherwise. You need to be at the events to be able to get a response and then he doesn’t have to answer. Am monitoring the tweets to see what transpires.

“The problem is that the algorithm update has only been rolled out to the US so far, hence my drops only in the US,” Horowitz explained. “However, Matt Cutts has already said that the algorithm update will be applied to the rest of the world very soon. I’m afraid that the clock is ticking before ALL my traffic gets hit as much as US has been.”

“If that happens, I’ll end up with all my traffic cut by more than half,” Horowitz stated. “The other problem is that AdSense is a small fraction of my total revenue these days. I do a lot of in-house agency sales which are US geotargeted only. THAT is what hurts.”

At first Horowitz thought there may be a tie to some of the bad English some of here overseas members contribute. There are a lot of people from India who enjoy the community and get to use their second language – but could be seen as machine writing or poor content. But the content that was dropped included well written reviews.

Prior to the changes, DaniWeb ranked number one for “Android tablets” with this page of very persoanlized insights in to the Google products. If you look at the page it is filled with “personal experiences with each of the products, not just spitting out manufacturing specs”.

And there are thousands of such examples of DaniWeb pages dropped in the SERPs. That search term had 6500 SERP impressions/day resulting in 500 clicks/day for her site, Horowitz explained. “Now we are on page 2 of the SERPS and lucky to get a few clicks.”

Davey Winder, who wrote the review for DaniWeb followed it up with some interesting points about what he sees happening. “DaniWeb is about as far away from a content farm as you could imagine. We are a community discussion and support forum stuffed full of original, in-depth, helpful advice and editorial. DaniWeb itself employs no underhand black hat SEO techniques, it doesn’t even meddle in the grey hat stuff. A team of volunteer moderators across continents works around the clock to ensure that any spam, and all forums and websites which allow user contributed content will attract spam, is deleted as soon as it is spotted. The same hard line applies to duplicate content for which we have a zero-tolerance policy. The trouble is that DaniWeb cannot stop others from copying our answers, editorial and claim that content as its own – yet as the original source of this material we would appear to be getting punished as hard as those who steal our words.

One thing cannot be denied, and that is with this algorithm update Google is seriously hurting genuine producers of useful original content while at the same time giving third party content publishers a ranking boost. How that is meant to improve the quality of search is, frankly, beyond me. So, Matt Cutts and Google, if you are reading this maybe you would like to comment as to why innocent providers of high quality original content are being treated so badly? Maybe you could let us know why sites that copy original content are now ranking higher than the sites from which they stole those posts?”

E-commerce Sites Get Product Pages Dropped

Alan Bleiweiss in his post over at Search Engine Journal saw a major drop in a serious e-commerce site.

“Verisign trusted site, SSL encrypted check-out, Shipping policies, privacy policies, return policies… So all around, they’re just store owners who found a very popular niche, in a fairly competitive landscape. They set up the site, and took the job of SEO serious enough that they’ve been doing it in house from the beginning. Well, they’ve been doing SEO according to what they THOUGHT was the right thing to do.

Unlike most of their competitors, they don’t buy links, though at one point they had a few “questionable” links on their own site that they got rid of when they found them to potentially be problematic last year. Since they offer some great products, over the years, they slowly built up over 43,000 inbound links. The hard way. And through community outreach and social media engagement,” Alan reported.

Other Websites Victimized by Algorithm Change

Chris Knight, CEO EzineArticles.com, also discussed the algorithm changes. He’s instituted several changes to get back in Google’s graces, such as rejecting more articles, reducing the number of ads per page, and raising the minimum word count.

“Traffic was down 11.5% on Thursday and over 35% on Friday,” Knight wrote. “In our life-to-date, this is the single most significant reduction in market trust we’ve experienced from Google.”

Cult of Mac also reported they had “become a civilian casualty in the war against content farms.” Leander Kahney didn’t hide his frustration after losing about half of the site’s usual traffic.

“I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget. We were just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After two years of uncertainty, the site finally looks like it will be able to stand on its two feet. But this is a major setback,” Kahney wrote.

Kahney, speaking to Wired, said Cult of Mac may have been downgraded because lots of sites scrape and republish his content or because his site has published “how-to” content.

“You’re not on the web if you’re not on Google,” Kahney said. “Google is the web — who uses anything else to find stuff?”

Wired also spoke with Willy Franzen, who runs onedayonejob.com and onedayoneinternship.com (”The jobs site got hit hard, and the internships site is untouched. It’s really inconsistent, and it’s a big problem for my business.”) and Chuck Criss, the editor of Olive Drab, a military-focused site (”Prior to the recent Google algorithm change, I had a consistent 25 to 28,000 page views per day, quite good for a site with no marketing budget. On Feb 25, the number was under 20,000 for the first time in a
long time. The next few days were very weak as well and today looks like the worst yet. The revenue hit was even greater than the loss of traffic, around 40-50% of prior levels.).

Is Google Listening To Users?

Matt I hope there is someone in the office keeping track of the cries. This is not a banning of smoking in businesses and people will get used to it. Many small and midsized online businesses are being destroyed. Google has a track record of killing off some innocents for the greater good. But they have also rolled a few changes back, when the change has impacted the results in the wrong way.

Even the comments on Matt’s travel announcement page ask for help and reasons for their sites disappearance. Comments abound on many of the editorials about the impact of the algorithm. OK, there needs to be some tweaks and you will announce them at one of these conferences perhaps?

There needs to be some redress — or is Google telling us “hey there will be another site there to replace those that are gone” and to move along. No sense hanging around the dead bodies.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal told Wired “no algorithm is 100 percent accurate. Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent. That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is.”

Update: Cult of Mac has been “reinstated” in Google’s results, and Kahney said “Matt Cutts, tweeted me yesterday, saying Google had likely seen my post and would get it resolved. …the changes were already in place early this morning, which makes me think Google is slowly tweaking its algorithm to get better results.”

READ THE FULL STORY ON SEARCH ENGINE WATCH

Yes, I do believe I saw this coming… What am I talking about, you ask? Google, who changes its search ranking algorithms all the time, has recently announced a pretty large change that will show some significant improvement in results. Unfortunately, for white-hat SEOs who use article marketing as a way to improve sites’ rankings, this means methods will need to change in the months ahead.

Last Thursday evening, Google officially announced the change, responding to criticism of its inability to provide relevant search results. As I mentioned a week or two ago, the results have recently been crowded with article sites and content farms, like EzineArticles.com, Squidoo.com and eHow.com. These sites originally were supposed to provide useful and original content, like how-to’s and other forms of information. But throughout their existence, SEOs and online marketers have used them as ways to build links. And they have done this by publishing advertisements and articles basically copied from other places. I made the proclamation in my prior blog post, that as SEOs we need to only publish quality, useful content otherwise we are just polluting the web. Well, Google seems to agree and is supposedly starting to lower results for those overly used article sites and content farms.

For us at Jacob Tyler, we are not worried. We know that with online marketing, changes are constantly happening and we need to roll with the punches and stay on top of the trends. In the past few months we have begun to adapt our methods of helping clients. We have broadened our aim of SEO to encompass other forms of online marketing. We have noticed the extreme importance of social media and online interaction and are now helping our clients stay active and successful in digital communities. We are broadening our online marketing tactics even further by adding tactics like email marketing and social review sites to generate demand for our clients.

As online marketing experts we embrace the changes ahead and are looking forward to finding new and even more innovative ways to help our clients get noticed and succeed.

Check out the NY Times article about Google’s recent algorithm update here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/technology/internet/26google.html

By Nicole Fletcher

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1000 times…but lucky for you all, I’ll say it again: Black Hat SEO get’s you nowhere and it’s not a matter of IF you’ll get caught, it’s a matter of when. Two major companies, JC Penny and Overstock.com, have been discovered and buried by the search giant in the last week or so and boy is it going to take them a while to get back in the search game now. Remember, it’s better to strive to be the best than it is to cheat your way to the top and get thrown from your lofty pedestal. These companies are cheaters and as a result, I’ll forever look at them in a dimmer light. The Internet is a place for search. When I’m looking for something, I want to find it and when I can’t, I have no one else to blame than the witch hat wearing spammers out there who have junked up the beauty that is Google. Ranting aside, here’s an article on the situation:

Google Inc. is penalizing Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.

Overstock’s pages had recently ranked near the top of results for dozens of common searches, including “vacuum cleaners” and “laptop computers.” But links to Overstock on Tuesday dropped to the fifth or sixth pages of Google results for many of those categories, greatly reducing the chances that a user would click on its links.

The incident, according to Overstock, stemmed in part from its practice of encouraging websites of colleges and universities to post links to Overstock pages so that students and faculty could receive discounts on the shopping site. Overstock said it discontinued the program on Feb. 10, before hearing from Google, but said some university webmasters have been slow to remove the links.

Internet search experts say that sites associated with educational institutions, which come with “.edu” in their Web addresses, are often considered by Google’s search algorithm to be more authoritative than commercial sites. Experts say educational sites rarely link to commercial sites, so a shopping site can surge in Google rankings if an .edu page links to it.

“Google has made clear they believe these links should not factor into their search algorithm,” said Patrick Byrne, Overstock’s chief executive, in a statement. “We understand Google’s position and have made the appropriate changes to remain within Google’s guidelines.”

Google wouldn’t discuss details of the incident, citing a policy against discussing specific websites. A Google spokesman said its goal “is to deliver the most relevant information possible.” He added that “attempts to game Google’s ranking go on 24 hours a day, every single day.”

Many companies use a variety of techniques to try to enhance their positions in search results, a practice called search engine optimization, or SEO. Appearing higher on pages containing search results tends to attract greater attention among the many customers who hunt for goods or services through Google and other search engines. Some companies hire SEO services to help elevate their rankings.

The Overstock incident is the second move by Google in two weeks against a large retailer for allegedly violating guidelines. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that Google lowered the ranking of links to J.C. Penney Co. in response to tactics employed by an SEO consultant on its behalf.

The retailer has said that it wasn’t aware of the tactics and didn’t authorize them. A spokeswoman said J.C. Penney terminated its relationship with the SEO consultant. She said the retailer was disappointed Google has reduced its rankings and will work to regain its standings.

In Overstock’s case, the retailer offered discounts of 10% on some merchandise to students and faculty. In exchange, it asked college and university websites to embed links for certain keywords like “bunk beds” or “gift baskets” to Overstock product pages.

Until recently, links to Overstock pages were among the top three results for such words on Google search results. By Tuesday afternoon, links to Overstock for those same searches dropped to between No. 40 and No. 70 in the rankings.

The change followed a complaint by a competitor last week to Google about Overstock’s actions.

Overstock, which is based in Salt Lake City, was founded in 1999 and is known for discount merchandise. It had 10 million unique visitors last month, according to comScore.

Websites tend to rank well on Google results pages if lots of other sites post links to them. That’s a key principle behind PageRank, the original algorithm developed by Google co-founder Larry Page to help assign a ranking to websites. If many sites provide links to a particular Web page, the PageRank logic goes, that page must be important or useful.

Google’s guidelines ask websites not to participate in “schemes” that are “intended to manipulate PageRank,” and it forbids sites from paying other sites to embed certain links on their pages. Many schemes intended to trick Google’s search algorithm have included .edu links, search-engine experts say.

“There is big money in .edu links because they are ‘trusted sites’ in Google’s eyes,” said David Harry, president of Reliable SEO, a SEO specialist based in Canada.

Original Article from WSJ