Post-Panda, How Will You Succeed?

Well, I wanted to start by providing a little of my own observations on the current situation for internet marketers post-Panda. I have no inside information at all. All of this is simply my intuition. Take it for what it's worth.

Over the years, I have looked at many ways of getting better rankings for my site including all the stalwarts. However, before I decided to get involved in any of them, I would always ask myself the following question: if I were a search engine, how would I feel about this method? If I thought that Google would frown upon the method, whatever it happened to be, I stayed well away from it.

Like many people, I track a couple of sites against my own, just using Alexa. I understand the limitations of the service, but I don't manipulate the results and it provides me with a useful indication of how things are changing. There are two sites that I have been tracking against my own, in this way for years now.

One of these sites was always about double my traffic, the other was about five times my traffic. Since the Panda update, the traffic of the site that was double has fallen and my traffic has increased. I am not saying that Panda was the cause of this effect; just reporting an observation.

My thoughts are that every time there will be a major update in the Google algorithm in the future, my site will come out as one of the winners because my approach is to provide exactly what Google wants i.e. good quality, fresh, original, regularly updated content.

Think about this: if you were writing an algorithm update for Google, how would you beat internet marketers at their own game? Let's discuss why Google would want to beat internet marketers.

Here's what Google is trying to do when it updates its algorithm:

"Webspam is when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines." - Official Google Blog

So, if your tactics involve doing that i.e. what Google calls 'cheating' your way into higher positions, then that tactic, whatever it is, is ultimately doomed to failure because eventually, Google will figure out how to detect sites that are using the tactic.

Now seriously, try to put yourself into the shoes of a Google programmer – you don't have to know anything about programming, we can leave all of that to the techies. What we need to do is first, come up with ways of spotting sites that are 'cheating'.

If you have been around this game for a while, you should easily be able to come up with your own list. Google itself will tell you about some of these ways, but of course they won't tell you the whole picture. Why? It's obvious isn't it? Because they are trying to catch people and don't want to reveal their methods of detection.

So let's have a bit of fun together. Let's create a list of methods that Google might consider to be spam and then come up with ways that a search engine might be able to detect it. I think it might benefit a lot of people here. Of course, if you want to succeed in this game, post-Panda, you might pick up a lot of tips from this thread.

So, experienced marketers, are you up for that? OK, off you go; ask yourself ...

If I Were a Search Engine

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