Lot’s of hype about negative SEO and saw this on Twitter earlier – some guy offering $10k to find the person responsible for the negative SEO attack on his site that caused ranking drops for the phrase “logo design”.  OK.

1. http://www.oldchildrensbooks.com/collectors-corner/what-are-collectible-childrens-books – blog comment spam – Nov 2011.
2. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-products-retail-latest-news/logogarden-closes-2-million-financing-from-fca-venture-partners-135876898.html – link spam on a press release.
3. http://www.joomlart.com/forums/showthread.php?61775-Joomlart-missing-it&p=283377 - forum spam account (targeting multiple websites, so probably an agency doing it for clients) – Oct / Nov 2011.

So either the person carrying out the negative SEO which resulted in his loss in rankings had enough foresight to pre-empt Google’s 2012 updates and started a negative SEO campaign over 6 months ago (which BTW looks to be partly automated, partly manually and certainly the press releases would have been paid for to allow links, so significant investment), knowing all too well their efforts could have a positive effect (but might act as a negative signal in the future), or…

…their SEO agency took to doing a number of dodgy link building techniques which have now caused the site to drop in rankings and are claiming “it’s not us, it’s negative SEO!!”.

Do I win $10k?

UPDATE: looks like Logo Garden have updated their post with some information on their previous SEO work.  You can read the rest yourself, but here’s the part that’s interesting;

b) We did not have a SEO firm from June through November 2011. From November, 2011 through February 2012, we engaged the services of SlingShotSEO.com. SlingShot assured me that they did not buy any links. In fact, in February when we lost our google rankings, SlingShot verified that there were links being bought that they had no idea where they were coming from.

My emphasis BTW.

So, let’s look at the paper trail started out by our negative SEO / SEO agency.

From the forum profile link above (http://www.joomlart.com/forums/showthread.php?61775-Joomlart-missing-it&p=283377), we can see the user has spammed the forums for several companies, one of which is Compendium.com (from this thread: http://www.joomlart.com/forums/showthread.php?63498-JD-purity-Drupal&p=281423#post281423).  A quick Google search for “http://www.compendium.com/ slingshot seo” and we find this article on Slingshot SEO with the bio (and keyword link!):

This is a guest post by ecommerce expert and former Slingshot SEO external consultant, James Paden. James is currently Vice President of Product for Compendium, an Indianapolis-based provider of enterprise content marketing SaaS solutions.

Sooo;

• The spam links were created Oct / Nov 2011.
• Logo Garden hired Slingshot SEO during the same period.
• The spammer also spammed for Compendium…
• …who’s Vice President of Product is a guest poster on the Slingshot SEO blog.

I’m not a huge fan of outing spam as such (well, not recently anyway) and I’m not suggesting that Slingshot SEO are deceiving their client.

However making a connection between the two firms after a fairly shallow analysis of a couple of backlinks does suggest there’s more to this than just a random negative SEO attack by a disgruntled competitor as assumed by John at Logo Garden.

First of all, the fact that an SEO agency “doesn’t buy links” doesn’t mean they haven’t “acquired” them through other means.

Secondly, Logo Design’s previous SEO was SEO legend Eric Enge.  I wouldn’t presume to second guess what work Eric does for his clients, but I think it’s safe to assume he pretty much had all the on page covered at least.  So when Slingshot came on, surely the off site stuff was the main priority?

So, what to do if you want to rank a nearly new website (launched July 2011) for a phase (logo design) with 1.3 billion competing results and you aren’t buying links?

Thirdly, why the connection?  Is the negative SEO targeting Compendium in the same manner as Logo Garden (and just decided to get a bit lazy at this point and same both links from same forum account)?

Fourthly (and worth dwelling on), the drop in rankings in Feb 2012, pre-dates the Google Penguin Update (targeting links) which opened the door for “negative SEO”.  More likely was part of the Panda Updates which targets low quality content / partially duplicated / slightly spammy content.  Like dozens of pages listing every possibly logo variation in order to target different search phrases perhaps?

Fifthly, 0 to top 10 for phrase with 1.3 billion results in less than 6 months.  Think about it.  Hat tip to whoever is responsible for that, but there is no chance they did it without stepping on Google’s toes once or twice.

Sixthly, maybe this is just all bullshit link bait?  Maybe Logo Garden knew they were getting spammy links and they got slapped sooner than anticipated.  Gathering a whole bunch of natural links as a remedy seems like a good approach.

Seventhly, maybe this is negative SEO.  Maybe someone with a grudge went to all the time, effort and expense and very cleverly spiked John’s rankings, while implicating his existing SEO provider?

What do you think?

LogoGarden – Negative SEO “Victim” was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

I posted on WMW earlier about this so I thought it was worth reposting here.  Just a quick overview of recovering a Panda hit site.

It’s early days still, but it looks like my April 2011 hit site has made a full recovery. It was a hobby site, so didn’t really pay much attention until recently, but decided to take a swing at fixing it at the start of January.

I just checked the top 50 keywords for 2010 – resulting in 300k visits / 1.2 million. 40/50 are back in the top 30 on Google.com, of which 30 are top 10 – aka pre-Panda rankings (some improved).

So here’s what I did;

Overview

There were two sites involved;

• Site 1 – 10 years old, high traffic (150-250k per month), poor design, blog (200 pages) / forum combo (40k pages), forum reasonably active, some thin content on the blog.
• Site 2 – 3 years old, same subject area, 17k per month, custom WP theme (looks pretty good), 50 or so posts

Both hit on April 2011 with 80% traffic loss, etc.

Tested the ad ratio theory earlier last year on the second site – didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. It’s all about the content (although I should point out that although the sites run 3 Adsense blocks, they were never too “in your face”).

The Plan

Decided to forget about Panda for a bit and think more from a business point of view. I came to the conclusion;

• Merge the sites – easier to maintain and realistically there was no point having two (other than the original plan to rank for similar phrases, which wasn’t that well thought out!).
• Ditch the forums – they weren’t Panda hit (takeaway = Panda is folder specific, or at least can be), but tough to maintain and no real return.
• Redesign the main site – it was static HTML pages. Shifted it to a custom WP site.
• Embrace social media – setup Twitter accounts and Facebook page for the site and integrated social share buttons on the site. More of an alterative solution to Google than a Panda remedy.
• Improve ad positioning, etc.

Implementation

• End of Dec – transfered content to new WP install. Decided on a case by case basis which articles to remove or rewrite. Ended up removing about 10 articles (out of 200) and rewriting a handful more (a couple were merged together.
• 301′d ALL old URLs to new versions. Even for stuff that was removed (or old cases of duplication, but there wasn’t much of that). Site had just been hacked a couple of weeks previous (changed host as a result) – also 301′d the subfolder of spammy links that was installed (WMT showed 30k+ inbound links to those pages from spammy sites).
• Removed forums – 301′d all forum URLs to site homepage.
• Added content from site 2 and 301′d all URLs. Implemented site address changed via WMT.
• January – tested various changes to the site to improve ad CTR, time on site and social shares.
• Social shares – bigger buttons at the end of posts worked better.
• Adsense – well blended ad below the post performs well – revenue at 40% of what it was pre-Panda, but with much less traffic.
• Stickyness – tested positioning for related posts, popular posts, random article snippets, etc. Dropped bounce rate by 15% and increase time on site by 30%.
• Google+ – created authorship for my posts. Kicked in a week ago.

That’s the core changes implemented – the rest was really down to developing a content strategy for the site, which has been going well. Since launch I’ve added regular content each week and been active on Twitter.

Some notes & observations

• There’s been some speculation about how to manage old content – I 301′d everything to an appropriate page. Seemed to be just fine.
• Not particularly convinced bounce rate or time on site is a factor.
• There were some fluctuations in rankings throughout January – old rankings returning and then dropping. Think this might have been minor Google fluxes, etc but could potentially be down to the scale of 301 redirects being factored.
• There were a LOT of visits from Googleplex a few days before the Google+ authorship kicked in. wink
• The Panda refresh mid-January didn’t have any impact on the site – although much of the old content (40k+ pages) was still in the index. Down to 2.5k today, but that’s still a bit high.
• Had a floating social share bar on the left hand side of the site. Removed it at end of Jan – no impact on the amount of social shares.
• Site 2 only became “unverified” in WMT in the past week (meaning the rankings transfered to the new site). I can’t comment on whether or not this impacted the recovery of site 1 though, but the rankings did improve with the recovery.
• I don’t think removing the forum had any impact on this at all – it was just a business decision.
• While social shares have increased during the 2 months the new site has been live, I don’t think these have any particular impact on Panda.

If pressed to theorise, I’d say the combination of some thin content (which was ranking well) and poor design let the site down. Looking at the site then and you wouldn’t think much of it. But now, it looks clean, some guest authors on board, there’s regular content being produced and growing social profiles.

It’s a weird test though – did lots of different things (mass 301′s, authorship, merged sites, cleaned up content, redesigned sites, more active social presence) so it’s difficult to pin down what the solution was, but if you take a step back from looking at Panda in those terms, then realistically all those things make good business sense too.

The interesting one is the authorship kicking in a week before Panda recovery. I’m absolutely not saying their connected – it’s just coincidental timing. But if I was a search engine that developed a qualitative aspect to my ranking algorithm, I might want to counterbalance that with positive signals of quality (WMT, authorship, social, etc).

Panda Recovery – What I Did was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

Ah, all those years of a free ride on the GoogleBus finally coming to an end are they?  The big G finally stuck it to the SEO world last year with the rollout of the much talked about Panda update – a move which has resulted in much discussion in the industry.  And by discussion, I of course mean outrage and wild speculation, with theories ranging from URL structure changes to ad to content ratio (not to be confused with the recent “above the fold” update, although this is most like part of the same, larger process) being considered as factors.

So what’s the score here?  Is it game over for SEO, or just a game-changer?  This article takes a peek at Google Panda and offers some speculation on the logic behind it and some insights into how to depandify your site.

Let’s start with what we know

SER is a good place to start if you’re looking for some credible information on what’s happened with Panda – Barry has done a great job on reporting the facts, updates and discussions on the subject.  Check out the Panda category.  Here’s an overview of the updates so far:

• Panda 3.2 on January 2012 17/18th <—this is probably the last Panda update
• Panda 3.1 on November 18th
• Panda 2.5.3 on October 19/20th
• Panda 2.5.2 on October 13th
• Panda 2.5.1 on October 9th
• Panda 2.5 on September 28th
• Panda 2.4 in August
• Panda 2.3 on around July 22nd
• Panda 2.2 on June 18th or so
• Panda 2.1 on May 9th or so
• Panda 2.0 on April 11th or so <— this was the first international rollout
• Panda 1.0 on February 24th 2011

Google confirmed this week that they have improved how Panda integrates with their overall ranking system, which basically will mean we probably won’t see any major Panda updates again.

Shortly after this first iteration of Panda, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal were interviewed by Wired and the resulting article was just about the only information any has from Google on the subject.  The takeaways from the article were a number of self help questions for webmasters;

• Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card?
• Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?
• Do you consider this site to be authoritative?
• Would it be okay if this was in a magazine?
• Does this site have excessive ads?

Search Quality Rating Guidelines

But, the article did make mention of quality raters, Google’s team of external minions who review search results and provide feedback to the almighty one.  Back in October, a manual for raters was leaked. Not sure if the document still is available, but it was an interesting read.

What I took from this more than anything was how Google is training their raters to categorise documents (web pages).  How many of you (I’m assuming mostly SEO’s will be reading this) have thought about content largely in the context of original vs duplicate?  Quite a few I imagine – that’s how I approached the subject for a long time (albeit to varying degrees at both sides of the coin).  But looking at the guidelines, it seems Google has set out, probably for a long time, to categorise web pages based in the context of the search query (which makes sense).  These terms are used:

• Vital – is this result vital to the search query?
• Useful – helpful for most users.
• Relevant – helpful for many or some users.
• Slightly relevant – not very helpful for most users, but somewhat related to the query.
• Off-topic or useless – helpful for very few or no users.

A lot of people assumed that these ratings (despite Google saying they don’t have a direct impact on rankings) are a means for the average Joe Bloggs quality rater to randomly slap their site with a penalty.  They aren’t.  Think bigger.  Think automated.  Think like Google.

Google is all about the automation of search – which is not only one of their core business values, but a reality of the market, given the logistics involved.  So having random people, randomly rank random websites is never going to work.  But they aren’t rating websites, are they?  They are rating search results.  But what use is this, other than for some internal quality control exercise?

Machine Learning

One approach to machine learning, is clustering.  Wikipedia defines it as:

Cluster analysis or clustering is the assignment of a set of observations into subsets (called clusters) so that observations in the same cluster are similar in some sense.

Makes no sense to you?  In marketing speak, this would be akin to defining customer personas for your market.  I.e. “John Smith – 30-45 – AB1 professional – likes golf, theatre and pies”.  And no, this doesn’t mean Google is assigning your website to a specific persona or cluster.  What I believe is happening with the Panda updates, and something Google is getting gradually better at, is Google is using the data from the quality raters to determine a profile / persona / cluster of different search queries and using that data to map out what each query should look like.  Panda (I theorise) is simply the addition of this data into the algorithm to varying degrees.

For example, the average top 10 for these queries “should” contain;

• Cluster 1 (brand query – “Virgin”) – 1 vital result (the brand), 6 useful results (brand pages or references), 3 relevant results (lesser known references to brand)
• Cluster 2 (service query – “SEO Services”) – 0 vital results, 10 useful results (SEO providers)
• Cluster 3 (information – “IT careers”) – 0 vital results, 5 useful results (IT recruiters), 5 relevant results (career advice)

Now, what does Google do if (for example), their data shows that results for a brand query actually has only 1 vital result but 9 slightly relevant results (in an extreme, fictional example)?  Time to take a look at those sites.

Think about it.  How many sites with pretty poor content are propelled to the top of competitive terms entirely due to SEO magic?  Google needs to counterbalance this and Panda could be the mechanism by which this is accomplished.

How many sites have content ranking for terms via bland articles?  I.e. ranking for a service term when you don’t actually offer the service (but you want the traffic to drive to ad clicks, related services, etc)?  We’ve all done it – shot for money terms to pull in the mass traffic.

Time to rethink your content strategy

Content?  I thought Panda was about design, trust, ad to copy ratio, etc?

Well, it’s likely that this is a misconception based on a variety of theories that have floated around.  Some of these factors can be included into an automated algorithm, but not them all.

Panda is about relevance.  Not how relevant YOU think your website is for any particular theory, but how relevant RATERS think it is, and how GOOGLE filters this perception into the larger algorithm.

A practical example;

I have a hobby site (10 years old) that was hit by Panda (the first international roll out).  Only the root content was hit – not the discussion forum subdirectory.  Didn’t touch it until January 2012 (yeh, I slack).  It’s only been 5 weeks and the rankings have almost fully recovered.

The process I followed was the same as everyone else;

• Sort out the design (it was hideous).
• Ditched the crap content (10% of the articles were thin SEO copy).
• Ditched the forum and all 40,000 URLs (yes, I removed the part of the site that was affected by Panda – I’m so rock and roll!  It was a business decision…).
• Integrated ads better (didn’t think of this as a Panda solution – just messed around with positioning and format until I was happy with how it looked).
• Began adding more content (the site hadn’t been updated since 2006).
• 301 all redundant URLs to a close match page or the homepage if there was none.

The results;

• Content keyword rankings (i.e. not the homepage stuff), recovered within days (I believe the new content was ranked initially without Panda penalty added), then dropped, before recovering well.
• Certain keywords still not ranking.  They are service related keywords (i.e. like “free WordPress themes”), but my ranking page was just an article on “why not to use free WordPress themes” – i.e. “slightly relevant”.  Ranked for a few days, dropped again, came back again (Google is still picking up 301 so I think it’s just being recalculated – possibly reviewed to see if it’s still the same content that was pandised), and finally dropped back out again.
• Homepage keywords are beginning to rank top 10 again.  4th actually – was 5th-10th for 6-7 years.

My takeaway from this is that a percentage of my content was low relevance (it was rubbish) and it appeared in enough search results for enough quality raters to mark it as low relevance that Google applied the Panda filter on that portion of the site.  My redesign (URL changes and 301′s) circumvented the filter temporarily, but there’s no getting away from it – same content that caused the filter = you’re still in the doghouse.

My next step is to revise the low relevance pages that aren’t ranking and start offering content on them that I think more accurately matches the queries they used to rank for.  I fully believe the site and page retains its former ranking weight – so rethinking the content strategy will essentially unlock this unused potential.

So don’t abandon your pandised sites just yet!

Not following?

Think about the process like this;

1. Google sends out a set of keywords to raters to do their thing.
2. Google uses the data to create clusters / templates of different types of search results.
3. Google applies the Panda filter to downgrade those who are using SEO magic to shoot above their weight.

When you make changes to your site to a certain degree – perhaps significant content or structure changes – it’s enough to trigger an evaluation where your site gets to go back to quality raters and re-sit the relevance exam.  If you pass, you’re in, if not, then it’s back to the drawing board.

There could be varying flavours of this;

• Your content sucked and still sucks.
• Part of your content sucked and you haven’t removed or improved it yet.
• Your content was OK, but your design sucked and the low paid student types didn’t take the time to read your content properly.
• Your content is good (well written) but still low relevance for the target query.

On the subject of design…

Raters are low paid student types and their attention to detail isn’t quite that of the Borg that have been assimilated by the ‘plex.  This isn’t good.  What’s the problem here?  The geeks in the quality control department at Google have looked at the data and say that (for example) 10% of the documents marked as “relevant”, are in fact “useful”.

How did this happen?   Both groups use the same set of guidelines.  The only difference is that one lot is just a bunch of random people and the other lot is a group of internally trained search geeks.  But, we can’t go live with this much dirty data, so let’s look into it further.  Let’s check the comments from the raters.

What do you think the top reasons were for people rating the content of websites lower than it should be? I would guess…

• I don’t feel comfortable giving this site my credit card details.
• I wouldn’t be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to my kids.
• I don’t consider this site to be authoritative.
• I wouldn’t read this article if it was in a magazine.
• This site has excessive ads.

Just because Google says one of their engineers compiled this master list of questions, doesn’t mean he didn’t get it from feedback sent via the quality raters!  The SEOmoz whiteboard Friday article from June has a really great explanation of how this process works;

The sites that people like more, they put in one group. The sites that people like less, they put in another group. Then they look at tons of metrics. All these different metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that many SEOs suspect come from user and usage data metrics, which Google has not historically used as heavily. But they think that they use those in a machine learning process to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. Find the ones that people like more and the ones that people like less. Downgrade the ones they like less. Upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update.

However, I don’t believe it’s simply a case that Google is differentiating between good and bad sites in those very black and white terms (there are loads of reasons why – it would be a huge misuse of their monopoly for example and would probably land them in trouble) – it’s a very subjective concept which I don’t believe Google has either the right or the ability to judge.

Their own search results however, are a different story.  Google entirely has the right to judge what is relevant and what isn’t for any given query – that is their end product, after all.

Gradually diminishing updates

If you think about how this process is working – Google is gradually refining how results should be categorised.  They have the template, they just need to tweak their algorithm to perfect it.  That’s why we’ve seen a lot of updates this year – data goes back to the raters and they mark it accordingly.  Then it comes back to Google who have to essentially a) fix their mistakes and b) reinclude any sites that were filtered – updates are just data refreshes with perhaps minor algo tweaks thrown in.

Each update is essentially the result of a few weeks or months rating work to perfect the process until it moves to the point that the error margins are low enough to reassess on an ongoing basis – which is roughly where we are now.  It probably won’t mean quicker turnaround for sites in terms of recovery, but it will probably mean it might happen on a keyword by keyword basis rather than a site wide or folder wide basis as it is just now.

Of course, there are elements of the feedback from quality raters that Google can effectively automate in some way – for example the above the fold algorithm update.

That is unless you want to put your tin foil hat on and believe that there is no actual above the fold algorithm!  Perhaps Google just had a set of results they knew they were going to blitz in the next update (because raters commented that they were too ad heavy)?  Maybe they just decided to go live with that change and simply call it an “above the fold” update, when in fact it was just a data push and a bit of PR spin to encourage people to clean up their sites?  I guess we’ll never really know, but the effect is the same – somehow, either via automated means or via human intervention, Google is moving to a far more qualitative approach to serving search results.

SEO has become (and for many has always been) about returning relevant results for your targeted search terms.  Not just copy that chats about your targeted search term.  Not just an ecom that looks OK and offers the same basic services as your competitors.  But content as a product – content that will set you apart from your competitors – content that deserves to be number one.

That’s the real difference between what constitutes “content” and “thin content”.  The latter is probably what caused your Panda penalty in the first place.

Panda recovery – what to do?

Almost as loaded a question as “how do I build a successful website?”.  I’ll outline the basic process I followed – it may or may not work for you, but at least some options worth exporing.

1. Be realistic about the quality of the content you want to rank for specific terms.  Seriously, check out the competition – is there anything they are doing that you aren’t?  I assume that my site will fall under some kind of qualitative review – even if it doesn’t, then it’s still a good approach to take.
1. And try to think about this in the context of the clusternig concept I discussed above.  While you might have a “fairly relevant” piece of content, does that level relevance have a place in searches for the term it used to rank for?  In real terms, this might mean your 300 word article on using Google Adwords will never rank for “Google Adwords”, regardless of the SEO techniques you use.  Think bigger.  Think better.
2. Don’t abandon previously strong pages.  A lot of people have been removing old content as part of a Panda solution (including me).  I don’t think this is necessary.  What is necessary is bringing this content up to a reasonable quality – if you can’t do that, then ditch it.  But if you can, then do so and you could reasonably expect to retrieve old rankings.
3. Does your design suck?  It’s surprisingly common.  Take the time to design a good looking site that works for your visitors.  Even if my wild theory of quality raters and machine learning is completely off, real people still visit your site – what more can you be doing to improve their experience?
4. On the subject of conversions…how can you improve them?  Are you using In-Page Analytics to see where people are ending up on your site?  Do you have a solid call to action on all of your pages?  What about additional marketing channels – social, e-campaigns, user generated content?  What actions do you want people to be taking?  Are you providing enough information for your customers?  What stage of their decision making journey do they arrive on your site at?  What feedback have you had from your existing customers?  Can you provide testimonials on your site?
5. Go social. Build up your network and take the burden off your reliance on SEO.  Use social as a metric to measure your performance in terms of the new design.  Google Analytics tracks social actions – are these increasing?  Why not?  If you don’t have at least some content that is social worthy (in that people actively share it), then why do you think it deserves to rank for competitive terms?
6. Be real.  Not in the 80′s sense!  How does your site appear to first time visitors?  Are your products up to date?  Has your blog been posted to recently?  Is your Twitter feed active?  Have you updated your copyright year?  Does your site appear stale and dated, or modern and vibrant?  First impressions are key – here’s some things I did to my blog;
1. Recent posts widget (always good to have)
2. Popular posts widget (chances are a lot of people want to read these)
3. Random posts (in the footer – keeps the page fresh)
4. Related posts (after the article – increases the time on site)
5. Large social buttons (convert to action much better than small ones)
6. Regular tweeting & feed widget (the appearance of dates gives the impression of freshness)
7. Regular & guest posting (lots of reasons to come back)
8. Engage with Twitter followers (shows activity and results in more readers, guest authors and retweets)
9. These aren’t Panda recovery tools – it’s just good content marketing.
7. Research, review and plan.  What’s the next phase of your business?  How can you target more customers?  How can you engage more customers?  How can you sell more to existing customers?  The nature of SEO means that sometimes it’s easy to become lazy with other areas of business (if SEO is bringing in big traffic levels at a low cost) – time to revise your strategy on that front.

Getting over the technical barrier that is Panda will be relatively easy.  Convincing Google that your site once again deserves to be number one will be decidely more difficult.  Regardless of what the truth about Panda is, the main change for the SEO world is that the industry has finally begun to shift from a process that targets the algorithm to a process that needs to target the end user.  Many people have been doing this successfully for a long time now, and I know many are happy the market is evolving this way.  The question is can you adapt to these changes?

Of course you can – adaptation is what SEOs do best!  Well, adaption and link whoring.

The Panda Challenge

Panda Blues getting you down?  Worry not!  For the next couple of weeks, I’ll open this post up to a Panda Q&A.  If you’d like to put your Panda hit site forward for review and don’t mind discussing it publicly, I (and anyone else who’d like to chime in) would be happy to offer up some specific advice on how to recover.

Post your details and some background below and we’ll take it from there.

Also, if anyone has any comments on the stuff I’ve talked about on this article, I’d love to hear them.  Most of this is just theoretical based on some superficial research with limited resources – by no means am I suggesting this is a definitive overview of what Panda actually is – no one knows that.  But, SEO tends to be lots of theory which each individual contextualises in their own mind in order to develop strategy – this is the approach I’ve taken here – a solid theory that leads to a sensible strategy.  Make of it what you will!

Scott

Google Panda Getting You(r rankings) Down? was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

We do like our jargon, don’t we?  I thought the marketing game was bad for excessive overuse of jargon, but damn, the SEO industry gives the marketing world a run for its money, ranging from completely obscure terms to attaching our own meanings to a range of otherwise innocuous phrases.  Here’s my run down of the phrases that have annoyed me this year (in no particular order):

Authority

In the context of “an authoritive site”.  There was a point when people would refer to authority sites and mean the likes of the BBC, DMOZ (back in the day), Yahoo and other mainstream web properties.  Now it really just refers to “any site that doesn’t have hidden text on it”.

I’m really not sure what people think “authority” means, but the term is batted around so often (usually as part of a “why did Google penalise my site – I’m an authority in my niche” type posts) that it has lost all meaning.  Think it through – will anyone outside the SEO industry have any clue what you are talking about when you refer to authoritative sites (because, let’s face it, you really mean “high PR” sites but are just too embarrassed to mention PageRank).

Ethical SEO

I raised this one years ago – it’s still with us.  Why won’t it just die?  Ethics have absolutely nothing to do with SEO – we’re not powering websites with baby tears and puppy dog tails…

Again, another BS term that has no meaning outside the SEO world.

Panda

Just.  Fuck.  Off.

I really hate Google for 2011.  The Panda updates have really sparked up a wealth of paranoid theories, particularly amongst those who have just got into SEO in the past 4 or 5 years or so.  Those going back longer than that remember more frequent (and brutal) updates so 2011 is really just business as usual.

Now we have a host of SEOs – wait, no – scratch that – not even just SEOs – anyone in the digital industry who thinks they know a bit about SEO – anyone with a vague knowledge about SEO has decided to regurgitate the speculation posted on forums and blogs as “advice”.  It has gotten to the point that people are taking vague offhand statements from Google employees and turning them into SEO advice.  I read a news article (yes, on a proper industry news site) where the writer actually suggested that going through a website and correcting spelling errors would be (part of) a solution to combat the Panda update.  PUUUUUUUUKE!

Matt Cutts says

Poor Matt.  Probably the best and the worst thing to happen to the SEO industry.  I get the distinct impression that he is regularly torn between his normal geeky nature to do things properly and internal corporate chains that keep him from doing so.  I think his biggest mistake was making the effort with the SEO world early on (but in retrospect that was an entirely profitable exercise for Google), but unable, politically, to be as transparent as we want him to be (and he probably would like to be as well).

The guy can’t catch a break really.  Ever minor statement he makes is analysed, quoted and misquoted with abandon.   The worst of it – and the reason it really irritates me – is that the quotes tend to be thrown into a discussion as a definitive answer to whatever vague question was asked.  They’re not the definitive answer – they may be useful titbits of information from time to time, but in no way definitive.  Even if Matt was able and willing to provide clear information, it’s still just tech advice coming from a company with a commercial interest in YOU doing things in a certain way.   Their way.  And that shouldn’t be what your entire business strategy gravitates around.

Google +

It sucks.  SUCKS.  Nothing to do with this post, but though I’d just throw it in there.  Google did search reasonably well, and Adwords / Adsense were a good idea at the time, but since then…

(I really hate Adsense.  It could be done so much better for everyone involved….don’t get me started…)

Thin Content

Forgot to add this one earlier.  Most of us know what thin content is, but there seems to be an odd confusion in the industry as to whether or not your content is actually “thin” or not.  The problem stems from the SEO perception that the content they churn out en mass is even halfway as good as professionally written copy.  It isn’t.  And I’m not just talking about the old school, keyword density era which gave us such hits as:

Come to Bob’s big red widget shop for the best big red widgets in town.  We have such a wide selection of big red widgets, you won’t need to go anywhere else for your big red widgets.

I think the perception is that because you’ve taken the time to write more than 50 words before moving onto the next page that your content isn’t “thin”.  Let’s put into context.  There was a time where many web designers would just skip the whole “let’s get a proper graphic designer to design this” part of the process and go ahead and design it themselves.  Guess what SEOs have been doing with copy?

“Thin content” is a vague term.  It means any rubbish content.  That can mean 10 words of rubbish or an entire essay.  I’ve been guilty of this in the past, and I’m sure many other SEOs have too.  It can also refer to duplicate, semi duplicate or repurposed content.  The only real question you need to ask yourself is, “would this page still be ranking highly if it wasn’t for my l33t SEO skillz?”.  If not, then there’s a good chance your content sucks.

So, anything you’d like to add to the list?

Scott

The Most Overused SEO Phrases of 2011 was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

Do you think at any point, the good people at the ‘plex considered that the simplicity of Google was the main reason so many people use it (and subsequent reason why so many G products don’t really get off the ground)?  And by “integrating” all these products and prioritising the much hyped (and spectacularly crap) Google+, they will in fact begin to push people away to competing search engines.  Which, IMO, is no bad thing (for everyone but Google).

For those not entirely in the loop of Google’s frantic attempt at world domination, here’s the short version.  Search dominance.  Created crap ad program.  Shafted the competition (affiliates).  Bought out a bunch of companies.  Shafted the competition in more markets.  Kept quiet about the fact that they were harvesting data from all their free products.  Laughed while Bing poured money down the drain trying to compete.  Sucker punched the webmaster community who had been providing aforementioned free data for all those years.  Cried when Facebook wouldn’t share their toys.  Currently pouring money away trying to compete in the social media market.  Clearly not seeing the comparisons between Bing trying to compete in search and Google trying to compete in social.  Now trying to leverage mammoth traffic levels to hook people into sharing their personal data like they did to webmasters (before shafting them).

Did I miss anything?

You’ll never be Facebook

People like Facebook (pardon the pun).  I mean, real people. Not companies or marketing professionals who have had the carrot dangled in front of their mouths, salivating at the prospect of even an imperceptible boost to the holy grail of Google rankings.  You know how Google has played their cards quite close to their chest for all these years – no transparency when it comes to rankings and penalties – webmaster community climbing over each other to try and appease the mighty Google.

In many ways, the webmaster community were both the reason for Google’s success and a victim of it.  Perhaps that’s why Google thinks these early adopters will help kick off their social media domination.

But I don’t think things will work out that way.  Look at how Facebook started out – students – groups of friends – a network that built up naturally.  Now look at how Google+ started out – businesses & marketing professionals – SEOs (who make a living from gaming Google), many of whom have fairly negative opinions of Google.  That’s a somewhat “poisoned” starting group of users – how will that ever grow organically like Facebook did?  It may become something big, but I don’t think it’ll ever become the social network Facebook is.

How much spam did other social media channels have within months of launch?

There are already loads of “buy Google plus one” services out there, but I guess those were previously established networks geared up for Digg, Facebook and Twitter spamming – so a G+ service offering isn’t that hard to do.  But there are still quite a lot of people shooting at G+ for such a new product and although Google have faced that particular issue for years with their search product, will it be too much for a social network to handle?

People can deal with poor quality search results – in fact, most normal (non SEO geeks) are none the wiser.  People tend to notice when spam makes their way into their social circle.  I haven’t used G+ much except for a bit of a play around when it was launched – I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it so I didn’t stick with it.  But I do see loads of people on Twitter complain about it because their business orientated social circle is suddenly poisoned with spam and irrelevant crap like photos of kittens and random jokes.

And there’s the stumbling block for Google.  They’ve taken a step forward on the basis that business users will drive their product to the next stage, but the reality is that it isn’t a particularly good social network for business users and it’s a pale competitor to Facebook for regular users.  That’s the flaw in the strategy.  Look at new navigation bar – I use search (I have a toolbar for that).  I used maps (I have an app for that).  I use Youtube (I have an app for that).  I use Adwords, Adsense and Analytics (those haven’t even made it to the primary – or secondary navigation).

The whole move reeks of geek logic applied to business.  Bland designs and high ambitions with no real substance.

The All-New Google Desperation Bar was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

Google are reporting today an update to their freshness algo – the part of the ranking algorithm that handles new content insertion into SERPs.  This will affect a whopping 35% of search queries – Google’s Panda update only impacted 12%.  This is big!

In some situations this isn’t a bad thing – searching for an event was always badly handled by Google who have historically favoured older content over new which means last year’s events would commonly turn up at the top of the results.  So this change can be good in that respect, as with a number of other possible searches such as news results – searching for “cricketers fixing scam” results in a load of new pages – most of which were published in the past 24 hours (and not just embedded news results).  Good times!

But the post from the Google blog always mentions product reviews as a potential target for this fresh tweak!  This is a big one.  News and events are easy – very time based pieces of content.  But how does a search engine differentiate between different types of static content such as a product review?  Importantly, how does it tell the difference between a product review and a bog standard static page?  Rich snippet markup perhaps may be a good source here, but not every website has adopted this approach.  This reeks of an update that is going to have a lot of causalities!

How would you react?

SEO has always been quite a mid to long term strategy (well, back in the day you could rank overnight for any term quite easily, but things have slowed down since then) – only small pockets of the industry can have fun with instant rankings – news optimisation, blogsearch, PPC, etc.   But if Google is rolling out a new jazzy instant rank algorithm, how much of a red rag to a bull is that for the SEO community?

Seriously, how much of the industry will shift from creating good content to churning out low quality “fresh” content in whatever form that may entail – rubbish comments, reviews, slight editorial changes, republishing reviews, etc  – all to maintain “temporary” rankings over a longer period of time?  Strangely, I think this change will benefit the more technically minded “black hat” community (I used the term loosely, but you know who I mean) who can autogenerate “fresh” content in much larger scales, compared to the content generation community.

From the Google Blog:

Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Well, yes and no.  I want the best, most informative reviews and those aren’t necessarily the most recent ones.  In cases they will be, but is Google good enough to work out which is which?  Or am I going to get the most recent reviews regardless?  This could really hurt review sites that have taken a lot of time to push users to write decent reviews.

The Panda update really riled a lot of SEOs – many of whom spent a lot of time following Google’s guidelines reasonably well (OK a lot pushed the boat out, but not all the way into spam territory).  Are we looking at a scenario where those who are legitimately making an effort to produce a decent web business lose out and those who like to game the system have more tools in their arsenal to do so?

Perhaps not, although it’s fun to wear the conspiracy theory hat for a while!

Perhaps this is a logical progression from the Panda updates which, in one way or another, did force a purge of borderline low quality sites from the index?  Maybe Panda was a prelude to a bigger quality / freshness push in which this is the next stage?  Could Google have even attempted this a year ago pre-Panda or was there too much SEO-heavy content (and you know what I mean by that!) to drown out the reputable content sources?  Caffeine implements the infrastructure, Panda flushes the system and (insert freshilicious name) brings us closer to pure real time search that is has the potential to be fairly spam free?

Maybe Google is certain that they have it right this time – or maybe it’s going to go tits up and really annoy a lot of SEOs (and frankly annoying the one group of people who have the skills and knowledge to poison your core product is kinda stupid)?  What do you think?  Should be interesting all the same – will be keeping an eye on analytics over the next few days!

Related articles

• Google Panda Update Rolls Out Worldwide (fusednation.com)
• Google Rich Snippets Tool (fusednation.com)
• Announcing: The Complete Google Algo History (seomoz.org)

Google updating “freshness algo” was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

Throwing this one out for the pros – do you think Google will ban an average website for buying links?  I’m not so sure – in fact I think the whole link buying idea is more of a fantastic PR campaign on Google’s behalf than reality.  Let me explain my chain of thought;

• Does Google like link buying?  No, of course not it’s manipulation of their link based algo.
• Can Google implement a penalty?  Yes, of course they do it for loads of sites.
• Can Google ban a website?  Sure, see above.
• Will Google ban a website for buying links?  I’m not so sure.

Yeh, I hear people talking about it all the time.  Usually newbie bloggers and SEOs that decide to lecture people on SEO and spout out some regurgitated BS that is basically what Google says publicly.  But has anyone ever actually come across a solid black and white example of where a website got banned for buying links?  I’ve been looking for one and as someone who has worked in search for over 10 years, I’m struggling to find a solid example.

Let’s break down the link buying debate

Some SEOs say buying links is fine and others say it can hurt you.  But these arguments generally boil down to one core point – can an external factor (that could be controlled by my competitor) hurt my rankings?   In general the answer is no.  Not because it’s impossible – if you have a big enough network or enough money you can screw someone up royally.  But because it’s impractical.  So much so that the average business is unlikely to be the victim of an intentional link attack.

But that’s kind of the point I’m leaning towards here – if link buying was so brutal for you SEO campaign, then wouldn’t more websites be affected?  Wouldn’t there be more people moaning on the SEO and business forums about their loss of rankings?  The only people I see complaining these days are thin content websites who frankly should have seen that one coming…

Where does Google stand?

Well, obviously Google doesn’t like us buying or selling links.   So every piece of carefully crafted doctrine that escapes from Googleplex tells us that buying links is bad.  And every mindless zombie that laps up everything that Google poops down their neck will nod in unison while they chant, “buying links is bad”…

But other than the chat (which as you can tell, I’ve taken with a pinch of salt for a very long time now), what hard facts are there?  I Googled it a bit earlier and only could find DP forum thread from 2008 where a guy got banned because he bought 30,000 backlinks in one month (lol) and some Google Groups discussions with paranoid webmasters.  Maybe a couple of high profile cases where Google had to act but other than that…

And how would Google manage link buying on a large scale?  I’m not talking about brokerage services which have a notable footprint that can be algorithmically filtered, but the individual actions of millions of website owners and SEOs?

The reality is that Google can’t start throwing around penalties for every Joe Bloggs who buys a link.  The fact that they only just updated their spam report form should tell a story in itself.  Link manipulation, regardless of the technique used, has to be the main concern for the folk at Google – anyone else get the impression they are beginning to accept the fact that they can’t cope with problem “algorithmically”?  Case by case reviews of link buying examples may be on the cards, but realistically, can even a human tell if I bought the link or my competitor did?

We all buy links

I don’t care what your favoured link building technique is – we all buy links.  Any client paying for link building services buys links.  Any blogger submitting a guest post to a news site (or even a crap blog) is buying links.  Any forum signature or directory submission is buying links (time spent producing content for other websites = money for the other websites).  Linkbait is buying links – hell, it’s the ultimate achievement of a link monkey – free, natural links (in exchange for loads of research, hard work, etc).  In fact a lot of what SEO’s do is just link buying.  Google calls it link popularity.  The business world calls it marketing.

Like I said before, I’m split on this topic.  I have no fear that Google will ban a website for buying a handful of links mixed in with other link building tactics.  I believe they can ban websites for doing that if they want, I’m just not sure if they have the scalable means to implement that without human intervention.  I also believe that quite a lot of what Google says is idealist BS and taken far too literally by far too many people.  I believe it’s possible for a competitor to poison your rankings via links, I’d say 99% of the websites out there are insignificant enough not to need to worry about this, anymore than they need to worry about being slapped by Google.  I believe that anyone that pushes to far may be brought back down to Earth with a bang, but for most of us – the vast majority who play it safe and don’t rock the boat too much – there is no real danger…

So I’d like to ask for some feedback on this one.  What are your opinions on link buying?  A legitimate business move with little or no risk, or something stupid that should be restricted to throw away websites?  Is it just a necessary evil for the casino/viagra/etc people?

Can anyone put up an example of a legitimate (non spammy) website that was banned for buying links?  Added – clarification (for the old and gray), I’m not expecting anyone to post specific examples of their own or client sites that were banned – just looking for discussion on the subject one way or another.  The point being there aren’t many examples that aren’t either high profile examples or full time spam efforts.

Can Buying Links Get You Banned From Google? was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

In quite a nice move by Foursquare, the company is now including popular events on the website, as discussed on their blog.  I like this step – it’s a clever move and actually quite a challenging one for them.

Managing events like this has always been difficult and no one has really got it right.  The issue when managing data on that scale is it that is a big job with many facets – date, location, type of event.  Date is easy to do.  Location is tougher but if you are talking about doing it on a national scale then with the right technical setup it can be simple (given the scope of the project) – just a matter of buying the venue data and feeding it into your system.

Events are tougher.  No one really does it – largely because there’s no money in it and you have to expend resources gathering data from multiple sources.  Even at a town level this can be tricky – how many cinemas, theatres, sports stadia, pubs, clubs or whatever are there and how many different types of events may they hold in the next 12 months?  The numbers quickly spiral out of control.  Foursquare are managing this situation by partnering with vertical information providers (ESPN, SongKick, MovieTickets.com) – a sensible approach (in the UK it used to be the case that you’d need to go to each individual cinema and pay them to be provided with movie times data – not certain, but I think the print media still do that…).

Events are a natural evolution of Foursquare and I’m sure many of their users will embrace the new features as they have with the rest of the site’s bells and whistles.  But more than that, the company is displaying a characteristic almost unheard of in the social media / dotcom start up world…flirting with a business model that might actually be viable from the start!

Events are great.  I like doing stuff.  You like doing stuff.  We like doing stuff.  I occasionally like organising stuff.  Having a cost effective local tool to promote my stuff is nice.  Real nice.

It’s almost like near virtual classifieds prospect – a few quid (or bucks if you’re across the pond) to promote your gig / fundraising activity / play / demonstration / brand launch / etc.  Quite well targeted events for a reasonably price?  That would be pretty cool and probably a good, sustainable revenue stream for the company.

Foursquare are limiting events to those provided by their partners right now, but plan to include user generated events at some point in the future.  Whether or not they are paid or free is unknown.

I read some survey results this week that noted only 5% of the respondents (UK small business owners) knew what Foursquare is.  It’s one to watch, that’s what it is and has the potential to be a more potent social marketing tool for businesses in certain verticals than Twitter or Facebook.

Foursquare Now Listing Events was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

Bingdude (Duane Forrester) offers some good tips on link building and what it means for your rankings in Bing.  It’s an interesting move by Bing, most likely led by Duane (who is a SEO himself, or at least was).

The article itself is good, but doesn’t really tell those in the business anything they didn’t already know.  But that’s kind of the point.  For years Google has dominated the search market and that has been influenced in no small way by the SEO community focusing on Google rankings.  During the early years of SEO, business adoption of SEO was low and general knowledge about Google wasn’t huge outside academic and tech communities.

The SEO take up on Google optimisation led to the SEO take up of Adsense, Adwords, Gmail, Analytics and so on.  That’s a solid market of early adopters that Google has been feeding off for many years now – and frankly not offering that much in return (Adsense revenues aren’t great and the program hasn’t really changed much over the years).

In recent years, Bing has dumped loads of cash into developing it’s search wing and has made some good moves – and I think making a move for the SEO industry is the latest feather in their cap.  Check out the raves about Bingdude over on Webmasterworld (keeping in mind Googleguy has remained faceless and anonymous for many years).  A minor coup for Bing but I think a start on the right road.

You see, Google’s model for growth has basically been get the information by offering stuff for free and then monetise the information.  Competitors have tried to compete on this basis over the years but realistically, Google has too far a head start for another competitor to take a decent share of the search market (Bing has made some efforts, but still limited market share).  But, tackling the problem in the same way Google grew is in fact a good strategy for any business and that seems like the route Bing is taking now;

• Webmaster center for webmasters to grab info about their sites (now includes Yahoo! data).
• Active and open blog about SEO – grabs the SEO interest and realistically – they’re not giving anything away.  It’s stuff pro SEOs already know.  BUT – it engages everyone else – bloggers, newbie SEOs, business owners – awesome content!

Taking the market, one demographic at a time is a solid long term approach and I think it will be good for the market.  Search aside (I do like using Google), the industry needs some competitors for Adsense at least – and certainly a more transparency and communication between search engines and website owners, because frankly that is an area that Google’s academic background and business naivety has let them down.  Perhaps Bing or someone else can pick up the slack on that front?

Scott

Is Bing Beating Google At Their Own Game? was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.

….of all places, really!  I understand mass mailing emails to sites asking for links – it’s a low conversion rate so best to get as many out there as possible.  And I understand leaving a blog comment if you are unable to find a contact – perfectly fine up until this point.  But leaving a comment asking to buy text links on a blog that’s sitting in subfolder of a DIRECTORY (which also has a contact form btw)…..dude, I sell links – just fill out the form and do what you got to!

I mean seriously – you could have saved me time.  You could have saved yourself time (getting what you want in the process).  But no, you decided to spam with a thinly veiled compliments about my site.   Check it;

I’ve taken the time to read around it and explore your site, for which I’ve been impressed with and was wandering if I could add a text-link or article on your homepage? I thank you in advance for your time and look forward to discuss this with you in more details.

Well, if you’re wandering then I best get you a link so you don’t get lost, eh?  And I am also looking forward to discuss the plural details…

(Yeh, I know – me having a go at someone’s spelling and grammar – pot vs kettle time!)

I’ll avoid my usual game of outing the client (big brand job board), but will take a swing at the agency!   VCCP search, who say on their about us page;

We’re not another big agency. Our vision is to be better, not bigger. So we find talented people and put their expertise together with the most advanced technology. We keep our team small and lean, and we don’t compromise on the quality of our people.

Publicly spamming random blogs with badly written paid link requests is hardly “better” now is it?  I love the small team / big tech approach though – spammers must be like Gods to you guys – the epitome of low manpower and high-tec wizardry working in unison!

Don’t take this all too seriously guys – just a bit of fun!   Maybe review your link building strategy a little though!

Link Request Spam Left On My Directory’s Comments… was originally published on Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog. This is the RSS feed.