Who’s afraid of the big bad penguin?

If you’re around the search engine optimisation industry (or in any way connected it to it) then you will hear the words ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’ being mentioned more and more in hushed tones these days.

Fear not… these are not some frightening polar animals we are all cowering in fear of, but updates to the Google algorithm that can affect your site’s organic search rankings. Or to be more precise, they are actually a series of different updates to the algorithm to clean up the search engines results pages to display ‘better’ sites that Google thinks are a more relevant match for our query Panda updates started happening in early 2011 and were aimed at reducing the impact of low quality websites in Google’s results. Penguin updates started happening a little later in April 2012 and targeted sites that used ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. Both have had updates by the clever people at the world’s most popular search engine since their launch and are now key events that the digital marketing community gets excited about…. trust me, we do!

However, Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts has recently stated that there will be a large Penguin update in 2013. One that will have a big impact that could affect a lot of sites. Sites who have so far used search engine optimisation approaches that sit in that grey-ish area between entirely ethical SEO and the darker world of dodgier techniques. The original Penguin release had a big effect on organic rankings for a number of sites (and not just the black hat technique ones). However the forthcoming update is due to be deeper and have a bigger effect than those before.

What effect? Well that's anyone's guess, however anyone who has used less-than-legitimate to get their site up the organic rankings may soon find out that this new penguin makes search engine optimisation a lot more black and white.

Why has your SEO stopped working?

Have you started noticing that a lot of your efforts to push your site up the search engine results pages (SERPs) are now not having as much of an effect as they used to?

If so, then there is a good chance that your website has been penalised by Google’s algorithm updates.

Google's Panda and Penguin updates over the last 9 months have heavily targeted content and link spam.
Therefore these "less than white hat" tactics which used to work in the past (e.g. content farming, link networks, etc.) aren’t so effective anymore and in fact are much riskier now. This effect on your site could well be because Google has significantly changed it's ranking algorithm to penalise websites that breach their best practice guidelines. In fact, Google is known for making around 300 changes a year to this algorithm, which has over 200 factors (or 'signals') that affect it.

The Panda updates were meant to affect sites that depended on poor or duplicate content. It therefore hit sites that pulled or 'scraped' content from others.The Penguin updates that came a little later then affected sites that purchased links from other sites, rather than building them up correctly over time.

Now, the very work that has previously made your website rank well, may be having the opposite effect.

Note: I've been told by a few people recently things such as "we like your blog, but sometimes it gets too technical. Can't you write something a little less complex?". This posting is in response to that feedback and therefore I'd appreciate any further comments about its content.

Content Farms and SEO – part 2

This is a follow-up posting to my earlier one on Content Farms*

What are search engines doing about content farms?
Search engines fully understand that visitors will only use them if they can provide highly relevant search results. In fact Google has recently very publicly stated its aim to crack down on content farms (and therefore by consequence retain market share of the lucrative search advertising market). One approach has been in the releasing of a ‘plug in’ to its Chrome browser; this creates a personal ‘blocklist’ that gives users the ability to block certain sites from Google’s search results (but only for that person using their browser).
Other initiatives include a number of changes to the Google search algorithm that noticeably improves the quality of search results. The recent 'Panda' update by Google in April was one such change that was inteded to down-grade the visibility of more obvious content farm sites.

It is also my belief that the Google +1 button I covered in an earlier post is an aim to combat sites such as content farms. But rather than using the negative technique of blocking those that it thinks are less relevant to the search user, it is now encouraging users to reward the more relevant pages and sites.

Isn’t there a fine line between some content sites and content farms?
Oh yes indeed, in fact there is considerable overlap and it is becoming increasingly hard for the search engines such as Bing and Google to tell them apart. For example, news sites such as those from the popular newspapers (obviously except those behind a pay wall) are increasingly aware that they need to encourage search traffic. In fact the Washington Post earlier this year was caught with a posting on its website stating “SEO headline here”, obviously highlighting where some reporter had failed to add the keyword-focused headline to the article before it was published online.

Cases such as this show that even the big boys are trying to capture search traffic in anyway legitimate way they can… but in doing so are further blurring the line between news source and content farms.

So how do I stop my site being recognised as a content farm?
In a reversal of my earlier post on creating a content farm, the most important advice I give on this topic is to write for your visitors not for the search terms…quality content will be well read, forwarded and linked to. Search engine algorithms are increasingly able to cleverly tell which sites are official and which sites are created just for the purpose of targeting them… and in the end it is in everyone’s interest to ensure that we get quality search results.

In a nutshell, content quality is not something you should forget when writing for your website, especially if you produce a lot of it!

*this article was not written just because I was getting a lot of keyword-related traffic on this subject from search engines, honest!