surviving google's "panda" updates

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Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved. Surviving Google's “Panda” Updates Search Engine Strategies Theater Presentation March 21, 2012 Clay Cazier Senior Director Search Strategy http://www.pmdigital.com/ New York, NY

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Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Surviving Google's “Panda” UpdatesSearch Engine Strategies Theater Presentation

March 21, 2012

Clay Cazier

Senior Director Search Strategy

http://www.pmdigital.com/ New York, NY

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Agenda

2

� Introduction

� Major Concepts

� What You Should Do

� How to Keep Up

� Q & A

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

PM Digital Quick Facts

4

� Full-Service, Direct Response Online Marketing Agency� PM Digital (“PMD”) is a division of Paradysz, Inc., a 20+ year organization with a full time

staff of 250

� 70+ employees in PM Digital’s New York, San Francisco, Scottsdale & Columbia, SC offices.

� Internet Retailer #2 Top Search Engine Marketing Vendor 2011

PM Digital Service Offerings

Natural Search (“SEO”) Paid Search (“PPC”)

Social Media Display Advertising

Mobile Shopping Feeds

Analytics Affiliate Management

eCRM Remarketing

Creative Services

Clay Cazier is Senior Director, Search Strategy for PM Digital. His resume includes more than 12 years of web development and search engine optimization experience, including successful ventures in the healthcare, travel and legal verticals. Clay’s role at PMD is to provide the strategic foundation, best practices and business support needed to craft campaigns that win for PMD’s clients.

Loves: WordPress, PHP, aircooled VWs, daschunds, metal, a good cat video, my wife, kids & family.

Clay Cazier is Senior Director, Search Strategy for PM Digital. His resume includes more than 12 years of web development and search engine optimization experience, including successful ventures in the healthcare, travel and legal verticals. Clay’s role at PMD is to provide the strategic foundation, best practices and business support needed to craft campaigns that win for PMD’s clients.

Loves: WordPress, PHP, aircooled VWs, daschunds, metal, a good cat video, my wife, kids & family.

Clay Cazier is Senior Director, Search Strategy for PM Digital. His resume includes more than 12 years of web development and search engine optimization experience, including successful ventures in the healthcare, travel and legal verticals. Clay’s role at PMD is to provide the strategic foundation, best practices and business support needed to craft campaigns that win for PMD’s clients.

Loves: WordPress, PHP, aircooled VWs, daschunds, metal, a good cat video, my wife, kids & family.

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Who We Serve

5

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Major Concepts

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Google Panda – Major Concepts

� On February 24, 2011, Google released the first in a series of updates aimed at filtering low quality content out of its search results � Since February 2011, Panda updates have been released in three to eight week intervals

� April – July 2011: Panda versions 2.0 - 2.5 were released

� October 2011 – present: Panda versions 3.0 - 3.3 were released

� Nicknamed “Panda”, these updates are just one among many ranking factors Google is releasing with increasing frequency� Panda starts with humans judging the quality of groups of sites. For that reason, approach Panda from a user experience point of view.

� Panda is arguably a series of ranking updates rather than algorithm updates because the filter runs periodically.

� Panda penalties are site-wide, not page-specific. If you trip the Panda threshold with enough low quality pages, the entire site will be penalized.

� Panda can “forgive” sites for low quality content once it has been removed or improved.

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Google Panda – Major Concepts

� What factors increase a site’s chance of penalization?

1. Duplicate articles or product pages within your site

2. Articles, products or descriptions shared with many other sites (eg “thin” affiliate sites)

3. Sites with complex, repetitive templates with little content (a high template-to-body-content ratio)

4. Sites with a high ratio of ads to content above the fold

5. Authority-less content (poor linkages, misspellings, short, one sided, anonymous, etc.)

Types of Authority:

� Personal authority – author

� Institutional authority – publisher

� Textual authority – document

� Intrinsic plausibility authority – text

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Google Panda – The Future?

� We know the ultimate, best advice is make sure your site features unique content that real visitors would find useful.

� Further, canonicalization is a good strategy to clean up URL-based duplicate content

� Are there any signals as to what may be in the next “Panda” update?

� In May 2011, Amit Singhal posted 23 questions to use to assess site content quality. These are editorial in nature. (Panda is about quality, not just duplication.)

� In a March 2012 SXSW session, Matt Cutts hinted, “What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO… All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO… like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links...”

� A March 2012 article in the WSJ points to interviews that translate to Google’s increasing use of markup language to understand relationships between entities.

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

What You Should Do

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Google Panda – What You Should Do

� If your US-based, Google organic traffic dropped more than ~20% (particularly in late February or April-June 2011), you were likely penalized.

1. Canonicalize, add value to or remove duplicate content

2. Review your site template. If the pages’ headers, left nav, right nav or footers look “crowded”:

i. Remove excessive advertising

ii. Consider “siloing” your navigation

iii. Review your footer’s links/content and their necessity

3. If you have “thin” content pages that largely function as indices: <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, follow">

4. Increase unique content generation

5. Increase user engagement (social icons, comments, etc.)

6. If available, inspect pages’ bounce rate – this will highlight content visitors have perceived to be low quality

7. Wait for the next update

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

How to Keep Up

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

How to Keep Up

13

� Generally

� http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/

� http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

� Industry pundits

� Matt Cutts - http://mattcutts.com/blog/

� seoMOZ - http://www.seomoz.org/blog

� Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/

� Strategically

� Google Labs (http://code.google.com/labs/)

� Mashable (http://mashable.com/) & Techcrunch (http://techcrunch.com/)

� LinkedIn groups, Forbes, WSJ, NYT, etc.

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

References for this Presentation

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� http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

� http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda

� http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421

� http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-112805

� http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-panda-update-link-

evaluation-local-search-rankings-113078

� http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-

building-high-quality.html

� http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP11742

� http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142405270230445980457728

1842851136290-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNDExNDQyWj.html

� http://www.beussery.com/blog/index.php/2012/01/quality-content/

Copyright 2012 PM Digital. All rights reserved.

Thank You

5 Hanover Square

New York, NY 10004

1.800.254.0330

www.pmdigital.com

Clay Cazier

Senior Director, Search Strategy

[email protected]