The Land of the Penguin, Everything is Black and White

• Has anchor text that is an exact match to the anchor text in the majority of your incoming links, particularly if the content that is linking is low-quality content.
• The link comes from an auto-approve, non-moderated blog — again, particularly if the content on that blog is of lower-than-average quality.
• OR, the link comes from a web site that has a significant number of outgoing links and no real traffic to speak of. (BuildMyRank, anyone? BuildMyRank deindexed)

These things seem relatively banal and minor, but if you’re a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) wonk, you’re already wincing. You can see between the lines that most links that may have been the SEO-baseline before Penguin are now out:

• Autoblogs? Nope.
• Site directories that few people use (i.e. a lot of them)?  Useless.
• Even ubiquitous SEO toolbox items like optimizing for a specific keyword on each page got hit
  • now you must spread your keywords around on every page or you’re flirting with the Google sandbox.

Paradigm Shift

The result of the Panda / Penguin double-punch has been profound across the field of SEO. It’s no longer about ranking as high as you can, as quickly as you can. It’s not even about deep research into your competitor’s backlink structure so that you can out-backlink them in an Olympic-style speed-back-linking event.  (If you did SEO a year or more ago, you know exactly what we’re talking about.)

With black-and-white in play, the… Read the rest

SEO wasn’t easy, per se, but it was easier.

The rules were more simple:

• Post decent content.
• Optimize your content for high-traffic, low-competition keywords with selling connotations.
• Don’t use obvious black-hat techniques like link-bombing.
• Build backlinks to your website. The more the better.
• Pack your keywords as dense as Google will let you (about 2% for most niches).

There were obviously details for each of these rules, but by and large, you could become an ‘SEO expert’ in a matter of weeks if you dedicated yourself to learning them. It might take a while to actually optimize a website, but it could actually be done by a single person working just a little overtime full time for a few weeks.

The most difficult parts of ‘old style’ SEO were producing content, some folks even outsourcing to writers off shore, like in India and the Philippines that spoke (or rather wrote) English just well enough to get Google to understand what they intended their topic to be.  You could outsource an article overseas, and while with most of this content any English-speaking human that read it would laugh and click away, the search engine spiders didn’t mind the off syntax, so it worked.

Link-building was largely a matter of using automated systems that could mass-produce backlinks for you and hiring more outsourced link-builders to create those links that couldn’t be automated. SEO companies in the US often did the ‘hard’ work of producing quality content – the pieces that you expected people to read and that you put your company logo on – while they outsourced other content.

Then along came Penguin and before that its older brother Panda, and everything changed.  Since we’re going to focus specifically on the Penguin update next week, let’s do a little bit of ‘in-between’; the time after the mammal but before the bird.

Panda-monium

Google’s Panda update was almost entirely content-centric. The idea was… Read the rest

from http://www.google.com/logos/logos11-2.html, July 2011

The Panda version 2.2 updates are thought to be the source behind the recent fluctuation in search listings and PageRank. Whether you experienced this change back in February or the new update is finally catching up with you, Google Panda seems to be impacting a tremendous number of websites and site owners across the Internet.

Although it is commonly called the Panda Algorithm, Google Panda is more of an individual Ranking factor rather than an entire new algorithm.  Google uses a number of different factors when assigning a rank to a website.  These factors  are continually tweaked in order to provide the best user experience and return the most relevant search results. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on these evolving factors in an effort to increase site traffic and conversion rates. Although Google makes these adjustments to its ranking algorithm on a regular basis they usually go unnoticed or cause minor changes for most websites.  However there have been a few major exceptions similar to the Google Panda update such as the Mayday Update of last year and the Vince Update in 2009.

How does Google Panda work? Google Panda acts as a filter to identify low quality pages. According to Matt Cutts the Panda Filter is not running all the time. Instead Panda performs periodic scans that occur during each of the new releases for Panda. So far there have been four Panda releases meaning that websites listed on Google have be subject… Read the rest