Archive for Panda
Panda and Penguin – The Double-Whammy
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While some of the experts are saying that the Penguin update is affecting about 3% of searches done in English, there are still a lot of people who seemed to be negatively impacted. And, for many of those, they just don’t know what hit them.
As it turns out, Google also released another one of the Panda updates on April 19, 2012, Panda 3.5. If you’re not up to speed on Panda, you can review earlier posts on this blog about the Panda update.
So, it’s possible that some of the people who noticed negative changes in their rankings were hit by Panda 3.5, Penguin, or both. The tricky thing with Penguin is that it’s tougher to recover from. According to Google, the Penguin update was strictly automated. There was no human judgement involved. So, they are not going to act on a Reconsideration Request for people who think Penguin penalized them unfairly.
They have published a new “Penguin Feedback Form“. They’re not promising that they’ll make a manual adjustment, but it’s the only game in town right now. If you think you’ve been hit by Penguin, first go through your site and change anything that could even remotely be considered spammy. Then, complete the feedback form an keep your fingers crossed!
If you want more detailed information about Penguin recovery, visit this post at SearchEngineLand.com. It’s a great post and contains links to other posts on the same site that provide a lot of insight.
Have you seen your rankings change? Did they go up? down? Let us know what your experience has been!
Google’s Penguin update was launched on April 24, 2012. If you’ve seen a change in your search engine rankings, you need to understand the new update. And, if nothing happened to your rankings, you still need to keep up with Google’s changes to make sure you don’t fall into a trap in the future, either.
In case you’re curious, the Penguin update got its name from the Batman comic book series. The update was aimed at spammers, and Google draws an analogy between the short, fat, mean and miserable Penguin and people who are spammers. I must say I agree.
Penguin was intended to address what Google has been warning about: over-optimized websites.
What Is Over-Optimization?
As usual, Google didn’t get into specifics, but Rand Fishkin at SEO Moz identified what he thinks over optimization means. Here’s a discussion of the points he presents, but you can watch a video at the link just identified.
- Page Titles – Don’t think that you can stuff a page title with keywords and expect that Google won’t notice. The title is meant to be descriptive and it needs to make sense. Don’t forget that you need to have unique page titles for each page.
- Internal Linking – Internal linking can be very helpful to a website visitor. The rule I follow is that any time I refer a visitor to another location, there ought to be a link to it. So, if you write: “Check out our latest listings for some excellent deals.”, something in that sentence needs to link to where your latest listings can be found. But, you’ve probably seen bad internal linking, too. For example, links to the page you’re on using the keyword phrase for that page. Or, links on several pages, such as closing each page with: “Check out our Atlanta listings to find your perfect home”. You can link to your listings page, but don’t do it where it isn’t even in the context of the page, or always use the keyword phrase as the anchor text.
- Footers Full of Links – You know who you are. There’s everything in the footer that you think you can fit in there without getting caught. Well, you are going to get caught with Penguin.
- Content Just For Links – I’ve often seen big paragraphs at the bottom of every page, often disguised by a title like “Serving the following areas: Atlanta real estate, Chicago homes for sale…and on an on.”
- Incoming Links from Shady Sources – Now, you not only need to make sure you’re not getting links from gambling websites, but you need to review any site linking to you to make sure they’re not going to bring you down along with their site. Comment spam can be a problem if the person commenting on your blog has hired someone with a software program to place illogical comments on lots of your blog posts. I’ve noticed that there are also a ton of folks who must be doing the spam by hand, and they’re getting through my spam blockers. Get rid of those comments as soon as they hit.
- Pages That Target Similar Keywords – If you have pages about: Atlanta real estate, Atlanta homes for sale, Atlanta condos for sale and homes for sale in Atlanta, you’re not fooling anyone.
If you’ve been hit by Penguin, it is too late to an extent, but you’ll never recover without changing things that are perhaps the likely culprits.
Are the Ranking Changes from Panda Complete?
· CommentsSee all the posts related to the Panda Update,
or click on the Panda tag at the bottom of each post.
Corrine Guest, who specializes in Barrington real estate, asked when everyone will see the changes Panda is making. Note: People who ask questions get a nice link!
The first Panda release was done in February of 2011. Almost immediately, there were changes in the result pages.
For example, article sites saw their rankings go down, such as AssociatedContent.com, FindArticles.com and EZineArticles.com. Interestingly, EZine was hit less, which some are attributing to the higher standards they set for articles on their website.
According to statistics published by SearchMetrics.com, some websites just got better. For example, YouTube increased its visibility. So, if you are doing videos and hosting them on YouTube, this should help you, also. Other winners include Zappos.com and WashingtonPost.com.
Zappos surprised me until I went and really looked at their website. For their type of site, they do a pretty good job of including interesting information on the product pages. From what I saw, there is a section devoted to product information, then much lower down on the page, you’ll find an “About” section.
That section includes more background and information about the product and/or the manufacturer, along with lots of links to other pages on the site. Their internal linking structure is pretty great. I also saw duplication on product pages. If the manufacturer was described, for example, that description is the same for all the products sold by that company. But, that must not be a big issue for Google.
Some of the more recent losers were PRNewsWire.com and Technorati.com.
Unfortunately, the answer to Corinne’s question is: nobody knows. There have been a number of updates since February. Will there be more? Possibly.
If you’ve put a lot of work into your website, and you’re fighting for position with a website that has no content or anything else to offer a visitor, and that website is winning, I don’t know what to tell you.
According to the objectives of Panda, that dull site should have dropped out of the rankings. Has Google adjusted every search term ever used? Just an opinion, but it seems like that might be happening over time since it’s such a huge task.
Are there factors about a website that could totally outweigh Panda rules? It doesn’t seem like there should be, but I’m not sure about that, either.
My advice to anyone in that situation is to just keep on building your website. Maybe you’ll never rank above that dull site, but the odds are you’ll rank higher than a lot of other folks.
P.S. Got questions about Panda or another real estate marketing issue? Leave a comment and I’ll try to answer them in an upcoming post. You, too, could get a nice link to your website like Dave’s on this post!
See all the posts related to the Panda Update,
or click on the Panda tag at the bottom of each post.
That’s an excellent question asked by Dave Kinkade who specializes in Tampa Leasing and Property Management. Hope you like the link here, Dave.
There were several mentions of the Panda rules leading us toward better looking sites in the other Panda posts on this blog. So, I thought I’d explain a bit more about what I was saying.
As you may recall, the Panda update was based on the feedback from quality raters – people who cruised the web and let Google folks know what they liked and didn’t like. The engineers at Google then created a set of metrics to describe that feedback.
So, Metrics Recognize Pretty Websites?
No, not really. A metric is a standard measure used to assess something. The question, then, is how can a metric measure beauty?
I think the key is that the metric isn’t assessing and probably couldn’t assess beauty. I know that very well because a design that one client loves, another client looks at and hates. So, that is a great illustration of the fact that it would be impossible for Google to judge beauty. Even people can’t agree on what’s beautiful!
What Kind of Ugly Can Google Assess?
When I said that ugly had to go, I wasn’t referring to the layout of the header or the color scheme. To me, an ugly site is one that has bad design, including these types of things:
- The fonts used are huge so it looks like the site is yelling at me.
- The color scheme makes the site hard to read. I mean not just a blue and green that I think look horrible together. I mean red lettering on a blue background that makes your eyes vibrate – and I’ve seen a site with that color scheme.
- There are 42 colors used on the site, so I can’t tell what is a link, what is important, etc.
- There are 4 areas of navigation. I need a roadmap to get back to a page I saw earlier.
- There are so many ads I can’t figure out what is content and which links will take me to a shady website I didn’t plan to visit.
- The website is so wide that I have to scroll sideways to see the whole thing.
- There is just writing on the page – no graphics to break it up so it becomes a chore to read.
- The line lengths are longer than they should be on a website and it is a chore to read.
Now, I don’t know if Goggle’s quality raters came up with any of those 8 things as they reviewed a bunch of websites. But, what if they had? Could Google interpret the code as it crawled a site and find those problems? Sure could.
All of those things are clearly set out in the code that Google is reading anyway. Ever heard that Google will penalize a site that has lettering (usually keywords) that can’t be seen by the human eye? Something like white letters on a white background? If Google can figure that out, it can surely look for the 8 things listed above.
And, I do believe that while you are fixing all of those problems, you need a professional look to your site. I have proof that it matters. More than one client has had an increase in the number of leads a site produced after a facelift. No additional SEO, it was just that the people who were already landing on the site were more likely to fill out a form.
So, don’t worry about coming up with the most ornate, expensive and beautiful design known to man. Just make sure that your site looks professional and provides a quality user experience!
P.S. Got questions about Panda or another real estate marketing issue? Leave a comment and I’ll try to answer them in an upcoming post. You, too, could get a nice link to your website like Dave’s on this post!
See all the posts related to the Panda Update,
or click on the Panda tag at the bottom of each post.
As you know if you’ve been following this series of posts, Google is trying to reduce rankings for low-quality sites with the Panda update, using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence.
Some of the selection criteria Google may use with the Panda update were discussed previously, including design and content. The last part of the puzzle relates to the other criteria that we may not have been too concerned with in the past, but that deserve more attention now.
Pay Attention to the Visitors!
If your site visitors are happy, Google will be happy, too. So, how does Google figure out if your visitors are happy? There are a number of ways:
- Do visitors stay on your site? Look at your statistics for length of a visit. Google is doing the same thing. If your visitors are staying on your site for 5 seconds, Google may assume that your site isn’t attractive to your visitors so they don’t engage with the site.
- Do visitors engage with the site by visiting various pages? Look at your statistics for depth of visit, showing how many pages an average visitor views. If your visitors are looking at one page, then leaving, Google may assume that your site isn’t attractive to your visitors so they don’t engage with the site.
- Do visitors go back to search results to find another site? If a visitor hits your site, then returns to their previous search to find a better site, Google may assume your site has problems.
- Do visitors return to your site? Look at your loyalty statistics or reports that show new vs. returning visitors. If 99% of your visitors are on your site for the first time, Google may assume the site has a problem.
If Google thinks your site has a problem, the site may not fit into the new algorithm Panda uses to identify “good” websites. How can Google come up with all these statistics? In an example of perfect timing, Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz recently published a great graphic to explain how this works. The graphic is shown below and used with his permission.
A Panda Summary
- Google is using a type of new artificial intelligence to rank websites according to somewhat different criteria than before.
- Your real estate website now has to do more things right. Panda doesn’t mean that existing SEO efforts such as good content and incoming links are no longer important.
- Google has added criteria for ranking success such as:
- A professional, modern looking website
- No tolerance for low quality pages
- Content must not only be plentiful and original, it also must be interesting
- A visitor’s experience, as measured by statistics such as those discussed above, must be managed
All of the Panda changes lead to one conclusion: Webmasters and those of us who assist webmasters must think strategically, not tactically.
Plan Your Strategy
Luckily, we’ve always worked with clients from a strategic planning perspective. We don’t insist that a website needs a $5000 design to be successful, but we encourage clients to have a professional-looking site. Actually, in the past, it has been my experience that some very ugly websites have been very successful. I don’t think that will hold true in the future.
We have helped clients by writing interesting original content, not just paragraphs with strategically positioned keyword phrases. We’ve worked with them to add calls to action and to find compelling propositions that will keep visitors on the site and raising their hands for help.
The great thing now is that those things are no longer “nice to haves”. Google will demand that we all get on board. I think it will be a challenge, but I think it will move all of us in the right direction. We’ll be forced to create websites that aren’t set up just to get Google rankings – we’ll actually have to satisfy the visitor to be successful!
