Thursday, September 1, 2011

Panda Changes Everything!


Those of you who remember Cyndi Lauper's song from the '80s about money changing everything probably have that tune running through your head after reading that headline. (Well, okay, I have it running through mine.) But if you have a website and you want to get traffic to it, Panda is most definitely something you need to learn more about.

Do you write your own website copy? If so, and if you've been to any SEO seminars in the past few years (that's "search engine optimization" for the uninitiated), you've probably been given the advice to cram as many keywords as you could into your website copy. It didn't have to be particularly interesting or well-written, just as long as it contained bunches of the keywords people would search on to find whatever you were selling. You didn't even need to write any text yourself, or pay anybody to do it for you; you could just get it all from article banks where professional writers posted content you could pick up for free! How easy was that?

Well, all of that changed when Google rolled out its Panda update. While Google's always tweaking its algorithms that determine which sites get to the top in search results, Panda was a major change. Companies who had learned how to play the SEO game well enough to consistently rank at the top have been reeling from the penalties Google imposed on them and trying to figure out the new system ever since. You probably heard about the penalties imposed on J.C. Penney's site for using what Google deemed "black hat" techniques to game their search algorithms.

One of the big changes with Panda was that sites started getting penalized for using copy picked up from "content farms". This is great for good copywriters like me, because it means that now your site needs to have unique, fresh content. You can't just use the same article that countless other sites may have also picked up from the same article bank. And it can't just be a bunch of mediocre copy with keywords stuffed into it, either. The content needs to be interesting, relevant to your site's purpose, and "shareable". If it's something people would post a link to in their Facebook or Twitter update, you're golden (in Google's eyes, at least).

Sites that were making a lot of money from advertising, but had minimal original content, were penalized, too. An entire industry seemed to have sprung up in recent years of sites with not much to offer but a bunch of advertisements. Those sites aren't getting to the top of the search engines any more. Got to have that good content to get SEO mojo these days.

Also considered a black-hat technique was what some companies were selling as link-building services. They'd add links to your site from all sorts of unrelated sites, just to boost the number of other sites linking to your site and raise your profile in search results. Now, if you have a lot of inbound links from sites that aren't related to what your site's about, it subtracts from your Google ranking.

Next, Google rolled out its "+1" button. This is similar to the "Like" button on Facebook, but for search results. It enables people to have input into the search results they see. And, Google hopes, it will increase the popularity of "good" sites. But if people were gaming the system before, surely some will do the same with this. Companies will start selling the service of having a bunch of people hit the +1 button for your site (if they haven't already). So I'm not sure of the impact this will eventually have on search rankings.

The latest enhancement to search results is that now you see several sub-pages of the main domain ranking first in search results. If your site has up to 12 relevant pages other than your home page that are often visited by people, they'll show up in a two-column list underneath your main URL link when someone searches on a keyword where you rank #1-10. So it behooves you to create quality content that will draw traffic to several of your site's subpages, not just lump it all on your home page, so you'll have something to display in those "12-packs".

Panda includes many more changes than these, and since Google is pretty secretive about their algorithms, not all of the new factors are well known. But the game has definitely changed. Bottom line: you need new website copy. And it had better be well-written, interesting and relevant to your site's purpose. So, anybody need a good copywriter? ;-)

1 comment:

  1. Great article. Appreciate the info. Some sites do seem just all promotion and no meat. Thanks Lynn.

    ReplyDelete