SEO Considerations in a Post-Panda & Post-Penguin World
- ARTICLES |
Since early 2011, Google has implemented new algorithms intended to clean up search results. Although they sound like a day at the zoo, Panda and Penguin represent a cutting edge use of artificial intelligence, in an attempt to improve the visibility of sites with higher quality content in search results, while lowering the search rankings of "low quality sites."
For the average High Traffic Academy user, this sounds great - less time spent sifting through junk means an easier path to the good stuff - but as Internet marketers, we all need to be very aware of what these changes mean for our marketing efforts. As I mentioned in the video for this module, SEO is simply not as easy as it was five years ago, so we need to consider how Panda and Penguin are viewing our content and adjust our SEO strategies accordingly.
Panda
Named for the engineer responsible for its conception, the Google Panda algorithm began rolling out in February 2011, with updates being implemented about every month or two.
While its intended purpose - to drop low quality web content in search results - is a seemingly benevolent and appreciable one, Panda did some damage to rankings for quite a few well known and generally reputable sites. Forbes was penalized hard by a Panda update toward the end of 2011, evidently for some of its linking practices. Merchants JCPenney and Overstock.com were likewise dinged.
Forbes' linking practices got them dinged by Google Panda.
In what has become perhaps the most notorious example of a notable site plummeting because of Panda, eHow - a Demand Media site - saw its appearance in top ten search results drop by about 32% just a day after a Panda update rolled out in in April 2011. At one point, eHow's traffic dropped by about 70% as a result of Panda updates.
What kind of impact does this have on a site? One estimate says that since about 25% of Demand Media's revenue was generated by eHow, and about 65% of eHow's traffic comes from Google search results, this loss in traffic alone could have costs Demand Media about $16.4 million in revenue.
Tutorial site eHow has been one of the most famous victims of Panda.
The bottom line: it pays to assuage Panda. In order to avoid a similar fate for your site and use Panda to your advantage, let's look at what Panda likes and doesn't like when indexing sites.
What Panda Dislikes
Sad panda is sad.
Before we start getting into the right way to impress Panda and shoot your site up the Google rankings, first I would like to tell you what not to do. Although Panda has turned a lot about what we used to know and trust about SEO on its head, you shouldn't view that as a bad thing. Yes, it makes formulating and implementing an SEO strategy more difficult on the whole, but who does that really harm the most?
It used to be that individuals or companies could set up shop online and just carpet bomb their way up the search result ranks by posting massive amounts of content overloaded with keywords. This favored those site owners who had the resources, technology and time to devote to this kind of quantity over quality strategy. That made it more difficult for people like you to break onto the scene and get their site noticed, and it made for a lot of bad, highly visible content.
Now, sites like auto blogs that scrape the site for content and re-post it automatically are at a disadvantage. That means that with a little effort on your part to learn the ins and outs of modern SEO, you can give yourself a distinct disadvantage. Score one for the little guy!
With that said, let's talk about some of Panda's pet peeves.
1. Low Value, High Volume Content
First and foremost, Panda is intended to weed out sites with low value, low quality sites from the top of search results. Specifically, Panda's targets are so-called "content farms" - massive sites filled with pages and pages of keyword-spammed content that has no real value to a reader. The idea is to bomb the space with keywords in order to force the whole site up the Google ranks. This is one of those old school SEO tricks, which, as I mentioned above and in the accompanying video, no longer works.
2. Duplicate Content
Similarly, Panda does not smile upon duplicate content that is designed to get multiple entries on a single topic into search results. Again, multiple pages of the same content have no value to an actual human reader, so Panda dings them. Sometimes duplicate content can be an honest mistake or oversight, which is a correctable problem that we will address in a bit.
3. Spammy Backlinks
Lots of backlinks to your site are good - that's part of effective offsite SEO. And lots of outbound links from your site are also good, because Google likes that branching out. What is bad, though, is when these links are spam. If your site has a forum or a blog that allows comments, be aware of spam links and backlinks. It may seem like a good idea to allow them in order to give the appearance of traffic and get your site out there more, but in fact these will hurt you in search results.
We'll get into plenty more detail on this topic in the backlinking module.
4. Ad-Heavy Sites
You can feel free to host some ad space on your site, if that's part of your revenue model. A few AdWords here or there won't affect search results one way or the other, even with Panda. But when sites become saturated with ad links, banners and unnecessarily large chunks of advertising, that can hurt. This is especially true when there is relatively little content quality to go with it.
What Panda Likes
Make Panda happy.
So then, what does Panda like? What kind s of things can you do to get this Google algorithm to smile upon your site and reward you with more visibility and a higher rank in search results? I won't get into depth on these portions of your SEO strategy right now, but some things that influence Panda to view your site postively include:
Given the intended purpose of Panda - to punish sites with low-quality content - as well as everything we have discussed about SEO so far, none of these factors should surprise you. Here are they are summarized in one place, and we will get into detail on how you can harness these things in the onsite SEO and content sections below.
Penguin
While Panda had been around since the beginning of 2011, Google's Penguin algorithm started rolling out in April 2012. That means that the community has had less time to learn about how Penguin works - and therefore how to optimize for it - than Panda. It also means Google has had less opportunity to update, refine and fine tune the algorithm, so it may not yet fully do what it is intended to do.
The main question that people have when Penguin comes up is how it differs from Panda. Is it just a a full update of the same code, doing more of the same but to a greater extent?
Simply put: no. Penguin is an entirely different animal than Panda (pun intended), but since it still influences search engine results, you need to know about it when putting together an SEO strategy.
How is Penguin Different from Panda?
The difference between Panda and Penguin is simply in the type web behavior they are intended to target. Penguin's purpose is to target and downgrade sites that use black hat SEO tactics to boost their ranking. While Panda is aimed at improving user experience by rewarding good content, Penguin is designed to reduce spam.
The name "Penguin" comes from the animal's keen and discretionary sense of smell, which has been related to the way that the Google algorithm "sniffs" out web spam. Some of the black hat techniques that Penguin is designed to punish include:
You can see there's some overlap between Penguin's and Panda's targets, which stands to reason.
Keyword stuffing, for example, not only makes for a poor user experience because of low quality content, but it is also a spammy black hat tactic. Therefore, it gets dinged by both Panda and Penguin.
So, if you have been relying on black hat SEO to boost your site's visibility, the bad news you are probably noticing a big drop in your rankings and traffic. The good news is that you are reading this module, which will give you the tools to put together an effective white hat SEO strategy.
As with Panda, we have just discussed what not to do in order to make nice with Penguin. Now that we know what to avoid, let's talk about what you can implement - what you can do - to put your site in Penguin's favor even more.
What Penguin Likes
Penguins can be your friends!
In contrast to Panda, it's easier to avoid Penguin's wrath by simply avoiding propagating web spam on your site. While use of these strategies is generally intentional, there are some things you may be doing on your site that are unintentionally drawing Penguin's ire, and therefore hurting your traffic. Take note of two things to boost your standing in Penguin's eyes: keyword density of anchor text in inbound links and origin of inbound links.
1. Low Keyword Density in Anchor Text
For those who don't know, anchor text is the text that contains a link.
When Penguin looks at the anchor text of incoming links - that is, links to your site from elsewhere - it doesn't like it when they are overly dense with keywords. Sites that had over 70% keyword density on inbound links tend to be penalized by Penguin, while those with less than 60% are not.
What does this mean for you? Well, when linking back to your site from new sites, blog posts or forum posts, the percantage of links that have a keyword - say, "financial tips ebook" - should be less than 60%. The rest of your links can be anchored by "call to action" text, like "Click here for more info!"
2. Inbound Links From Websites in the Same Niche
Penguin also prefers it when inbound links to a site are from a site in the same niche. Or rather, sites tend to be punished by Penguin when the reverse happens.
This makes sense when you think about it. Spam bots work by casting a wide net, putting up links anywhere they can to attract an audience. Actual people, however, are more likely to pust links where they will be seen by an audience that has an interest in the content. So, Penguin penalizes sites that have a lot of inbound links from sites that are on unrelated topics.
What does this mean for your SEO strategy? As above, when you are linking back to your content in forums and in the comments of other blogs, do it on sites where the existing content is within your niche. People who frequent a Halo 4 forum aren't likely to be very interested in your financial tips eBook anyway, and it could hurt your search results.
Now that we know what Panda and Penguin are, what they do and what considerations to make for them, it's time to get into the meat and potatoes of SEO strategy: onsite SEO and content.
First, we'll start with onsite SEO considerations other than content, and then move into the content side of things.
Ready to get started in High Traffic Academy? Here we go!
For the average High Traffic Academy user, this sounds great - less time spent sifting through junk means an easier path to the good stuff - but as Internet marketers, we all need to be very aware of what these changes mean for our marketing efforts. As I mentioned in the video for this module, SEO is simply not as easy as it was five years ago, so we need to consider how Panda and Penguin are viewing our content and adjust our SEO strategies accordingly.
Panda
Named for the engineer responsible for its conception, the Google Panda algorithm began rolling out in February 2011, with updates being implemented about every month or two.
While its intended purpose - to drop low quality web content in search results - is a seemingly benevolent and appreciable one, Panda did some damage to rankings for quite a few well known and generally reputable sites. Forbes was penalized hard by a Panda update toward the end of 2011, evidently for some of its linking practices. Merchants JCPenney and Overstock.com were likewise dinged.
Forbes' linking practices got them dinged by Google Panda.
In what has become perhaps the most notorious example of a notable site plummeting because of Panda, eHow - a Demand Media site - saw its appearance in top ten search results drop by about 32% just a day after a Panda update rolled out in in April 2011. At one point, eHow's traffic dropped by about 70% as a result of Panda updates.
What kind of impact does this have on a site? One estimate says that since about 25% of Demand Media's revenue was generated by eHow, and about 65% of eHow's traffic comes from Google search results, this loss in traffic alone could have costs Demand Media about $16.4 million in revenue.
Tutorial site eHow has been one of the most famous victims of Panda.
The bottom line: it pays to assuage Panda. In order to avoid a similar fate for your site and use Panda to your advantage, let's look at what Panda likes and doesn't like when indexing sites.
What Panda Dislikes
Sad panda is sad.
Before we start getting into the right way to impress Panda and shoot your site up the Google rankings, first I would like to tell you what not to do. Although Panda has turned a lot about what we used to know and trust about SEO on its head, you shouldn't view that as a bad thing. Yes, it makes formulating and implementing an SEO strategy more difficult on the whole, but who does that really harm the most?
It used to be that individuals or companies could set up shop online and just carpet bomb their way up the search result ranks by posting massive amounts of content overloaded with keywords. This favored those site owners who had the resources, technology and time to devote to this kind of quantity over quality strategy. That made it more difficult for people like you to break onto the scene and get their site noticed, and it made for a lot of bad, highly visible content.
Now, sites like auto blogs that scrape the site for content and re-post it automatically are at a disadvantage. That means that with a little effort on your part to learn the ins and outs of modern SEO, you can give yourself a distinct disadvantage. Score one for the little guy!
With that said, let's talk about some of Panda's pet peeves.
1. Low Value, High Volume Content
First and foremost, Panda is intended to weed out sites with low value, low quality sites from the top of search results. Specifically, Panda's targets are so-called "content farms" - massive sites filled with pages and pages of keyword-spammed content that has no real value to a reader. The idea is to bomb the space with keywords in order to force the whole site up the Google ranks. This is one of those old school SEO tricks, which, as I mentioned above and in the accompanying video, no longer works.
2. Duplicate Content
Similarly, Panda does not smile upon duplicate content that is designed to get multiple entries on a single topic into search results. Again, multiple pages of the same content have no value to an actual human reader, so Panda dings them. Sometimes duplicate content can be an honest mistake or oversight, which is a correctable problem that we will address in a bit.
3. Spammy Backlinks
Lots of backlinks to your site are good - that's part of effective offsite SEO. And lots of outbound links from your site are also good, because Google likes that branching out. What is bad, though, is when these links are spam. If your site has a forum or a blog that allows comments, be aware of spam links and backlinks. It may seem like a good idea to allow them in order to give the appearance of traffic and get your site out there more, but in fact these will hurt you in search results.
We'll get into plenty more detail on this topic in the backlinking module.
4. Ad-Heavy Sites
You can feel free to host some ad space on your site, if that's part of your revenue model. A few AdWords here or there won't affect search results one way or the other, even with Panda. But when sites become saturated with ad links, banners and unnecessarily large chunks of advertising, that can hurt. This is especially true when there is relatively little content quality to go with it.
What Panda Likes
Make Panda happy.
So then, what does Panda like? What kind s of things can you do to get this Google algorithm to smile upon your site and reward you with more visibility and a higher rank in search results? I won't get into depth on these portions of your SEO strategy right now, but some things that influence Panda to view your site postively include:
- Unique, relevant content
- Targeted, keyword-dense pages
- Authority over quantity
- High quality backlinks & backlinks from social sites (Twitter, Google+, Facebook, YouTube)
- Ease of navigation
Given the intended purpose of Panda - to punish sites with low-quality content - as well as everything we have discussed about SEO so far, none of these factors should surprise you. Here are they are summarized in one place, and we will get into detail on how you can harness these things in the onsite SEO and content sections below.
Penguin
While Panda had been around since the beginning of 2011, Google's Penguin algorithm started rolling out in April 2012. That means that the community has had less time to learn about how Penguin works - and therefore how to optimize for it - than Panda. It also means Google has had less opportunity to update, refine and fine tune the algorithm, so it may not yet fully do what it is intended to do.
The main question that people have when Penguin comes up is how it differs from Panda. Is it just a a full update of the same code, doing more of the same but to a greater extent?
Simply put: no. Penguin is an entirely different animal than Panda (pun intended), but since it still influences search engine results, you need to know about it when putting together an SEO strategy.
How is Penguin Different from Panda?
The difference between Panda and Penguin is simply in the type web behavior they are intended to target. Penguin's purpose is to target and downgrade sites that use black hat SEO tactics to boost their ranking. While Panda is aimed at improving user experience by rewarding good content, Penguin is designed to reduce spam.
The name "Penguin" comes from the animal's keen and discretionary sense of smell, which has been related to the way that the Google algorithm "sniffs" out web spam. Some of the black hat techniques that Penguin is designed to punish include:
- Cloaking
- Link schemes
- Keyword stuffing
- Duplicate content
You can see there's some overlap between Penguin's and Panda's targets, which stands to reason.
Keyword stuffing, for example, not only makes for a poor user experience because of low quality content, but it is also a spammy black hat tactic. Therefore, it gets dinged by both Panda and Penguin.
So, if you have been relying on black hat SEO to boost your site's visibility, the bad news you are probably noticing a big drop in your rankings and traffic. The good news is that you are reading this module, which will give you the tools to put together an effective white hat SEO strategy.
As with Panda, we have just discussed what not to do in order to make nice with Penguin. Now that we know what to avoid, let's talk about what you can implement - what you can do - to put your site in Penguin's favor even more.
What Penguin Likes
Penguins can be your friends!
In contrast to Panda, it's easier to avoid Penguin's wrath by simply avoiding propagating web spam on your site. While use of these strategies is generally intentional, there are some things you may be doing on your site that are unintentionally drawing Penguin's ire, and therefore hurting your traffic. Take note of two things to boost your standing in Penguin's eyes: keyword density of anchor text in inbound links and origin of inbound links.
1. Low Keyword Density in Anchor Text
For those who don't know, anchor text is the text that contains a link.
When Penguin looks at the anchor text of incoming links - that is, links to your site from elsewhere - it doesn't like it when they are overly dense with keywords. Sites that had over 70% keyword density on inbound links tend to be penalized by Penguin, while those with less than 60% are not.
What does this mean for you? Well, when linking back to your site from new sites, blog posts or forum posts, the percantage of links that have a keyword - say, "financial tips ebook" - should be less than 60%. The rest of your links can be anchored by "call to action" text, like "Click here for more info!"
2. Inbound Links From Websites in the Same Niche
Penguin also prefers it when inbound links to a site are from a site in the same niche. Or rather, sites tend to be punished by Penguin when the reverse happens.
This makes sense when you think about it. Spam bots work by casting a wide net, putting up links anywhere they can to attract an audience. Actual people, however, are more likely to pust links where they will be seen by an audience that has an interest in the content. So, Penguin penalizes sites that have a lot of inbound links from sites that are on unrelated topics.
What does this mean for your SEO strategy? As above, when you are linking back to your content in forums and in the comments of other blogs, do it on sites where the existing content is within your niche. People who frequent a Halo 4 forum aren't likely to be very interested in your financial tips eBook anyway, and it could hurt your search results.
Now that we know what Panda and Penguin are, what they do and what considerations to make for them, it's time to get into the meat and potatoes of SEO strategy: onsite SEO and content.
First, we'll start with onsite SEO considerations other than content, and then move into the content side of things.
Ready to get started in High Traffic Academy? Here we go!