It's here! Google has released Panda update 2.2, just as Matt Cutts said they would at SMX Advanced here in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This time around, Google has - among other things - improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs. Of course, the Panda updates are changes to Google's algorithm and are not merely manual reviews of sites in the index, so there is room for error (causing devastation for many legitimate webmasters and SEOs).
A lot of people ask what parts of their existing SEO practice they can modify and emphasize to recover from the blow, but alas, it's not that simple. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses how the Panda updates work and, more importantly, how Panda has fundamentally changed the best practices for SEO. Have you been Panda-abused? Do you have any tips for recuperating? Let us know in the comments!
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're talking about the very exciting, very interesting, very controversial Google Panda update.Panda, also known as Farmer, was this update that Google came out with in March of this year, of 2011, that rejiggered a bunch of search results and pushed a lot of websites down in the rankings, pushed some websites up in the rankings, and people have been concerned about it ever since. It has actually had several updates and new versions of that implementation and algorithm come out. A lot of people have all these questions like, "Ah, what's going on around Panda?" There have been some great blog posts on SEOmoz talking about some of the technical aspects. But I want to discuss in this Whiteboard Friday some of the philosophical and theoretical aspects and how Google Panda really changes the way a lot of us need to approach SEO.
So let's start with a little bit of Panda history. Google employs an engineer named Navneet Panda. The guy has done some awesome work. In fact, he was part of a patent application that Bill Slawski looked into where he found a great way to scale some machine learning algorithms. Now, machine learning algorithms, as you might be aware, are very computationally expensive and they take a long time to run, particularly if you have extremely large data sets, both of inputs and of outputs. If you want, you can research machine learning. It is an interesting fun tactic that computer scientists use and programmers use to find solutions to problems. But basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y. So that was quite nice. Thanks to Navneet, right now they can scale up this machine learning.
What Google can do based on that is take a bunch of sites that people like more and a bunch of sites that people like less, and when I say like, what I mean is essentially what the quality raters, Google's quality raters, tell them this site is very enjoyable. This is a good site. I'd like to see this high in the search results. Versus things where the quality raters say, "I don't like to see this." Google can say, "Hey, you know what? We can take the intelligence of this quality rating panel and scale it using this machine learning process."
Here's how it works. Basically, the idea is that the quality raters tell Googlers what they like. They answer all these questions, and you can see Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts were interviewed by Wired Magazine. They talked about some of the things that were asked of these quality raters, like, "Would you trust this site with your credit card? Would you trust the medical information that this site gives you with your children? Do you think the design of this site is good?" All sorts of questions around the site's trustworthiness, credibility, quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the difference.
The sites that people like more, they put in one group. The sites that people like less, they put in another group. Then they look at tons of metrics. All these different metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that many SEOs suspect come from user and usage data metrics, which Google has not historically used as heavily. But they think that they use those in a machine learning process to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. Find the ones that people like more and the ones that people like less. Downgrade the ones they like less. Upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update.
So, Panda kind of means something new and different for SEO. As SEOs, for a long time you've been doing the same kind of classic things. You've been building good content, making it accessible to search engines, doing good keyword research, putting those keywords in there, and then trying to get some links to it. But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, "What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?" Now we kind of have to think about that.
It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda. The things that they are measuring is not, oh, these sites have better links than these sites. Some of these sites, in fact, have much better links than these sites. Some of these sites have what you and I might regard, as SEOs, as better content, more unique, robust, quality content, and yet, people, quality raters in particular, like them less or the things, the signals that predict that quality raters like those sites less are present in those types of sites.
Let's talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.
First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect. Now, it has a first order effect impact, a primary impact. If you can make your design absolutely beautiful, versus something like this where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot. The content isn't all in one page. You cannot view it in that single page format. Boy, the content blocks themselves aren't that fun to read, even if it is not advertising that's surrounding them, even if it is just internal messaging or the graphics don't look very good. The site design feels like it was way back in the 1990s. All that stuff will impact the ability of this page, this site to perform. And don't forget, Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site. So you should try and block those for us or take them down. Wow. Crazy, right? That's what a machine learning algorithm, like Panda, will do. It will predicatively say, "Hey, you know what? We're seeing these features here, these elements, push this guy down."
Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, "Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content." Not enough. Sorry. It's just not enough. There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough when it comes to content. If you say, "Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is." You think to yourself, "Hey, I have good unique content." No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?
If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I am like, "God, not only is this well written, it's kind of funny. It's humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It's got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don't care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I'd be tweeting about this, I'd share it. I'd send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page." That's what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.
Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that's decent. That's pretty good. If they're browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, "Ew, I don't know if I want to get myself involved in that. They've got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I'm not going to get involved." Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.
They are going to be looking at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. Do lots of people from all around the world or all around your local region, your country, visit your website directly? They can measure this through Chrome. They can measure it through Android. They can measure it through the Google toolbar. They have all this user and usage metrics. They know where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on those pages. They know about what happens from the search results too. Do people click from a result and then go right back to the search results and perform another search? Clearly, they were unhappy with that. They can take all these metrics and put them into the machine learning algorithm and then have Panda essentially recalculate. This why you see essentially Google doesn't issue updates every day or every week. It is about every 30 or 40 days that a new Panda update will come out because they are rejiggering all this stuff.
One of the things that people who get hit by Panda come up to me and say, "God, how are we ever going to get out of Panda? We've made all these changes. We haven't gotten out yet." I'm like, "Well, first off, you're not going to get out of it until they rejigger the results, and then there is no way that you are going to get out of it unless you change the metrics around your site." So if you go into your Analytics and you see that people are not spending longer on your pages, they are not enjoying them more, they are not sharing them more, they are not naturally linking to them more, your branded search traffic is not up, your direct type in traffic is not up, you see that none of these metrics are going up and yet you think you have somehow fixed the problems that Panda tries to solve for, you probably haven't.
I know this is frustrating. I know it's a tough issue. In fact, I think that there are sites that have been really unfairly hit. That sucks and they shouldn't be and Google needs to work on this. But I also know that I don't think Google is going to be making many changes. I think they are very happy with the way that Panda has gone from a search quality perspective and from a user happiness perspective. Their searchers are happier, and they are not seeing as much junk in the results. Google likes the way this is going. I think we are going to see more and more of this over time. It could even get more aggressive. I would urge you to work on this stuff, to optimize around these things, and to be ready for this new form of SEO.
Thanks everyone for watching. Look forward to some great comments, questions, feedback in the post. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
It would be quiet interesting to hear from Panda-hit websites (well from their webmasters) if and how they could "escape" from it.
In fact I am a big fan of the Panda update to help the "making the internet a better place" - regarding less spam, more great content, better search results and so on. Reaching this goals is getting more and more complex and extensive though.
Definitely. It seems to me that what we SEOs have considered a best practice (building a community aruond your brand)..... is now becoming mandatory.
Great video indeed.
I agree with you to learn webmasters experiece from Panda-hit webmasters. Once day "SEO Consultant" title will be replaced by "Web Stategists".
Agreed, I've often though that 'SEO' is too narrow a title for all the work our jobs encompass.
I've been trying to use the title Finding Strategist - it encompasses much more tha Head of Search or Search Marketer and most business people I work with nowadays have had a bad experience with an SEO
Perhaps we are all looking in the wrong tunnel? The fundamental flaw in search engines is that we (the SEO community) look to find leaks we can use to our advantage. Forever and a day, people trying to get their site(s) recognised before someone elses will engage in what I call probing.
I use several sacrificial domains to probe for not quite white and never black hat techniques. Panda if it exists with any substancial alterations to how we work, is not going to change anything. All it will do is cause the end site owner to pay more for SEO because we now have to learn new ways to probe for flaws. Someone has to pay for that time.
I'm not sure if Panda is actually functional in Australia. I have noticed several of my sites that usually rank between 3 and 10 have moved down a place or two but not enough to measure because the same sites have moved positive in Bing and Yahoo.
One question I can't find the answer to is how intelligent are on-line shoppers? Are they smart enough to know how to change Win 7's defaults to use Google or are they happy to use Bing? I have some evidence (Not enough for clear decission) that at least one of my sites is more productive in Bing than Google. Bothe engines return the site on the same page.
Are there any statistics anywhere outside MS and Google that can be used to target a particular consumer using a different search engine?
Ryadia.
"Web Strategist". I think I like that
I don't mind Web Strategist however it's a bit all encompassing and I have to work with Designers and Developers who seem to be of the opinion that they should be classed as Web Strategists as well - that's why I've stuck with Finding Strategist it might never catch on, that in itself might put me in a better position.
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First: Thanks a lot Rand for this amazing presentation and explanation about Panda.
Second: I agree with you petra, i'd like to have some feedback from the people who've been penalized by GG after the launch of Panda.
I know that content farms are the first targets of Panda, but is there a way to counter it even if you have a content farm/aggregator website?
How did content farm webmasters and SEOs deal with Panda after they were hit?
Basically: are content farm websites all doomed or is there a search engine optimization strategy/remedy/best practice to 'please' the Panda?
Many of our sites hit by Panda.
After the update one scraper site rank well above one of our sites. I changed the feed to excerpt only, still Google thinks the scraper one with 150 words excerpt is good enough while our 600 words post is bad.
We can try to find reasons why Google thinks like that? But if the algorithm cannot detect this simple obvious things how good is it?
In my observation it seems like some domains are penalized based on some signals. This penalty is severe enough a scraper with few SEO tweaks can out rank the original post.
Since then. I'm using Duckduckgo.com more often than Google.
Ya, i agree with you. I am also i panda user and it give me lots of traffic within a very short while. Thanks Aaron Wheeler for this update news and nice video.
Rand, a great explanation of the theory behind Panda, what the updates are looking for, and how to "panda-proof" a website. I've got to disagree with you on one point though - that keyword usage in title tags or headings or in the body is dead.
On-page relevance still plays a part in the SEO algorithms - although pLDA has changed how that is computed - and making sure a keyword or variations on it appear every so often is a good way to make sure the whole page is on topic. This is especially true for agency-side work where the client provides the content themselves. More than this, we know that SERP listings that contain the search query in their title tag have better CTRs than those that don't so having your keyword in the title tag affects CTR. Having it in your heading creates continuity for the visitor, tying your page instantly to what was promised in the SERPs: this makes people want to read your content, so using the keyword in your heading improves time on site metrics which improve rankings.
The upshot: if you don't use the keyword you want people to find your page for in the title tag they're less likely to click. If you don't use it in the heading, they're less likely to read. If you don't use it in your body copy, your text may wander off topic, boring visitors and reducing relevancy for the search engines. This all means that your CTR will be low, your bounce rate high, and your time on site - not to mention your pLDA rating poor - will be low. In short, the Panda will rampage all over you like an anteater on a termite mound. Oh, and you're much less likely to get people converting as well.
I agree 100% you need to get the user from the SERP page to the website, the first step is a catchy ad copy. Hence why you need to test variations on descriptions and tweet titles to suite your audience.
But then aggain I have seen people doing some weird things with titles recently like removing brand terms, removing catchy Ad copy and then putting things like follow us on Twitter lol...I would stick with the catchy ad copy =)
Good Point! Relevance should always be important. So headings and keywords must still play a role. This is one of the Cardinal rules of Googles Cash Machine : Adwords. Relevance that is......
Great analysis, this post and video and to some extent Panda can be sumurised with your statement:
"Is almost as if the job of SEO has been upgraded to Web Strategist".
I couldn't agree more, or else would be like buiding a multicolour puzzle with only the blue pieces.
Your comment could lead to a never ending side discussion: is SEO as a title still able to express what really a SEO is as a discipline?
That is something that seriously I'm reflecting about, because - yes, I am an SEO - but somehow I'm not a classic SEO.
Note: SEO is well and alive, simply SEO as definition is getting to "small" for what SEO now really is.
I'm thinking about a new job description myself, may have to come up with a new one altogether.
One of my mottos is: search is the new literacy. One of the things that attracted me to SEO was the fact that it was "organic". Panda seems (read I hope) to be working hard to re-establish that.
I think the comment, post and Panda reflect the need to view SEO as part of the bigger picture and not stay restricted in a traditional silo definition. Rand just upgraded us all for free, thanks.
Note to SEOmoz >> Would be great to have spellcheck and subscribe to comment updates functionality :)
Yes... and that is something Rand, I and many others are talking about since few months... but it implies "philosophy", and philosophy necessarily means a change of mindset, that is the hardest thing to ask people to do.
And the fact that SEO sounds so freaking cool ;).
Long live ;)
Just to clarify I meant subscribe to a single comment updates in additon to subscribe to the posts comments.
But I have been seeing this trend for a very long time moving towards been more a specilist in generating traffic, I mean working in a global agency you don't find yourself doing 100% SEO you do domain name strategy, hosting strategy, Analysis on landing pages, link building strategy and the list is endless.
I agree 100% you need to be accross every thing online marketing, this is where people who are SEO's who have built networks of sites will be even more sucessful imo.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the mention in this week's whiteboard Friday.
I had to post just in case someone watched or read the transcript,and wanted to try to learn more about the "panda" mentioned in the Wired interview of Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal.
There are at least five people with the last name "Panda" working at Google, and it's quite possible that there are some other people with similar names who might have been given Panda as a nickname. The five I found are Nirmal Panda, Navneet Panda, Pranabesh Panda, Antara Panda, and Biswanath Panda.
I know that some people pointed out Navneet Panda as a likely candidate, and Navneet's background in large data sets and machine learning makes him a possibilty. But, after reading a white paper from Biswanath Panda on how MapReduce could be used to examine features in sponsored ads and landing pages to predict bounce rates, he seemed to be an even better candidate.
It was a paper rather than a patent that I pointed out in association with Biswanath Panda.
PLANET: Massively Parallel Learning of Tree Ensembles with MapReduce (Video) (Presentation)
The paper describes the sponsored search result experiment (which is written up in much more detail in Predicting bounce rates in sponsored search advertisements), and tells us:
We are currently applying PLANET to problems within the sponsored search domain. Our experience is that the system scales well and performs reliably in this context, and we expect results would be similar in a variety of other domains involving large scale learning problems.
Biswanath or Navneet? I've been leaning towards Biswanath.
Thanks.
Curious history, and interesting citation...
But one thing is clear: the lovely black and white plantigrade is a little bit less loved by many people now :)
Still like the big black and white Pandas, and the little Red Firefox Pandas, and I've been meaning to go to the Washington Zoo and see some of both. :)
The decision tree ensemble approach described in the Planet paper does seem to mesh well with Amit Singhal's questions that could associated with possible measurable features from the Panda upgrade.
In the interest of keeping this as short as possible, I would like to start out by saying that I completely understand the conversation and the direction that Google is taking, so I don't want to get off on the debate that I am in complete disagreement because I'm not.
But I would like to take my "SEO hat" offer just a moment and think about just where all of this is headed... or could be headed.
From strictly a user perspective and when I say user perspective I guess I should say the user perspective when I am the user... is Google heavy handedly forcing the world of SEO to simply compete in an arena where all the sights essentially look feel and function the same way?
I understand the battle against spam a sites and I couldn't agree more so I'm not headed down that philosophical path.
But having said that, I don't want the world of search results to become what (just for an example purpose) Wal-Mart has done to smaller businesses in hometowns everywhere.
Have any of you been looking online for something or more information on something and after you type in your search results rather than starting on page 1 you go down to the bottom and click on that little number that says 4, 5, or even higher because you know the first several results are either 1-spammy or 2-not tremendously relevant to what you are looking for. I know that I have... and I continue to do so... but maybe that's just me.
Again, spammy building is not good and I think we're all in the same boat on that. But, for example what about the smaller business... using the classic example of a plumber... who has a great video for you or article on how you can easily fix your drip yourself and if you can't or not comfortable doing so there's great information on how and what you'll need to purchase without completely overspending or being up-sold on something that yes will fix your drip, but will also drain your bank account.
Will gone be the days of these types of very useful sites and posts being readily visible because the general search public as a whole does not and will not click past the first page of the results... so the web begins to set sail on a course of a marketing battle for top ratings (aka TV & Radio) rather than a vast source of information.
Have we not ever come across a completely out-of-the-way restaurant that we have heard very little about but decided to stop by only to discover that it soon became one of our favorite little places to go? And yes this brings up the how this restaurant should be Tweeting, Facebooking, and... well... marketing... but that is again another great discussion.
With all of us SEO folks doing our level best to create and form and otherwise consult businesses into creating the perfect Google Frankenstein clones, are we not just going down the path of search engine Wal-Mart results where the vast majority of sites clawing their way to the top of the search results are nothing more than "Stepford Wives" (sorry showing my age a bit there) being cranked out using a Google approved blueprint?
Of course this brings out a myriad of discussion and philosophy regarding smaller budget folks and businesses that have tremendous experience in the topic or the niche that they bring to the table yet don't have the budget, time, or understanding to engage and produce such sites.
Anyway, just a thought. A moment of reflection as to the direction all of this could be headed....??? Do we never come up for air, take a step back and say.... huh???... really???
Again, I don't disagree in principle and this isn't a debate against anything that's been presented here or has been moving forward with Panda. I will do, and consult, with the direction that I've always done for my clients and that's what's best for them in terms of getting results on the playing field.
But just from a perspective (and for the interest of discussion) from someone who has always loved the vast flavors of the Internet and websites, at a personal level I would not like to see, and as a user be subjected to nothing but the "perfectly crafted" websites. So, I guess for me and a few of us still out there (as purely a user), many will be the time I will start my search results on page 5 or maybe higher ;-)
Okay... I've rambled long enough and certainly between the lines this brings about a whole bunch of other round table discussions... but back to work and the reality of getting results.
In the interest of keeping this as short as possible
Wondering when you let yourself write without restrinction? ;)
Jokes apart, if you feel you have a lot to say, consider the option of writing a YouMoz post.
sorry... momentarily lost my head
Don't feel sorry, I'm the first in understanding you as I loose my mind a lot while commenting here :D
I think a lot of you pro SEO types are missing the point here. I run my own small biz sites and others for friends. I don't have the time or money to write 500+ "funny, link-worthy" pages on microscope lenses. I don't have the $$ to outsource it, or the time to explain to someone outside the industry why this particular lens is useful.
But huge catalog houses that spend $1000s per month on adwords and content writers do.
My friend who installs sprinkler systems is awesome at what he does - but knows bupkiss @ websites or promotion - His competition is a nat'l franchise and they are gaming the local results. His biz is dwindling.
Here's is the elephant that nobody wants to admit is in the room: Every single update, whatever the stated objective, results in a greater advantage for larger, better funded companies. You can do OK for a while - but once someone with some real cash gets into your niche he can buy the home page with multiple "unconnected" sites and businesses. Then each biz takes some of the Adwords space.
We have a roofing company here that has a "local office" at every small town post office in a 50 mile radius. They are all over the SERPS in every way. BUT I know the guy doing this. He contracts out everything and takes a cut. He doen't know how to fix a roof - but he knows how to game the SERPS and hire writers.
More and more the SERPS will become a list of large companies and big Adwords advertisers, combined with gray hat marketers.
It is about money. Money for G and money for the larger companies that make up a huge chuck of their revenue.
Perspective well put... and much more consise than mine.
Hi Dave.
I totally understand what you're saying and the SERPs will never be perfect. Neither will anything else in this life where money is involved and people are willing to spend it to gain advantage, even if unfair.
At the same time though, while I understand your friend who installs sprinklers may be great at it he can't realistically expect to compete online if he doesn't either put time and effort into it, or pay someone to put forth that effort on his behalf. If another company (site) is putting more into a certain space, you have to expect they are going to get more out of that space than you regardless of whose product/service is better.
But, that's not to say he can't do well in other spaces online. If he's fantastic at what he does he could probably do really well in his local market through word-of-mouth and testimonial sites like Yelp and Angie's list for instance. Even if he doesn't have a site, it wouldn't take much effort to talk to his customers each time and ask them to write a review (maybe provide a little incentive to do so). For many small businesses, especially in the service field you can get more business than you can probably handle by doing well in those smaller verticals.
I would never use the SERPs as my first choice to find a plumber for instance. Aside from asking frieds, my first choices online would be to go to Yelp, Angie's list, or some other local site that provided real reviews (and yes the fake reviews are pretty easy to spot). Even if I found a plumber in the SERPs, I wouldn't just trust their site for it I would still go to one of those other sites to find some info on them.
So there are options. It's just important to decide what you're good at and where you can afford to put time, effort and money. If maintaining a site with fresh content and promoting that content isn't something you can do that's ok, but you also can't then expect your site will get much traction.
Everything you say is true. My issue is with the pollanna-like attitude and the silly notion that anything a gigantic company like G does is not about revenue. "better results" really means results that generate more revenue.
Inevitably, the SERPS will become less and less useful for anything except commercial searches. Mom & Pop internet bizzes will disappear or exist only inside eBay or some other platform.
I am also seeing more and more a sort of cavalier, "oh well" attitude, esp from younger people towards the idea that everything is swallowed up and run by corporations. Well of course it is, right? And if the local pet store can't compete with PetSmart, too bad.
What never seems to enter any discussion is the weird idea that maybe they (Google, Wal-mart, etc) shouldn't be able to do whatever they want. Maybe there should be restrictions.
Let's not forget that G, all us online store owners, SEOs - we all make out living off of a taxpayer funded government project that was given freely to the world. But somehow it is OK for the most powerful and richest among us to manipulate it to their advantage?
Better results for G is definitely about generating revenue, but that doesn't mean they aren't actually pushing for better results.
For them to continue to make money off Adwords, they need people to continue to use G as their engine of choice. That being said, it's in their best interest from a bottom line perspective to provide the best results possible because that's the incentive for searchers to continue to use Google to find what they're looking for on the web.
I don't know that any sane person would argue that Google's efforts to provide the best possible result is for some altruistic endeavour for the good of the web. While I would bet that they really want to do that (I don't know too many successful entrepreneurs who started a sucessfull company by not believing in what they were doing), regardless it's in their best economic interest to find the best result possible for them to keep generating revenue.
Adwords is a good example of this. You can't just outbid everyone and get the top spot. You have to have a good landing page and get good CTRs to get up there because Google knows if it serves up crap sites for ads then people will stop clicking on those ads and Google will stop making money.
Given the extra weight Google now gives user metrics, aren't sites that offer web-based products now at a clear advantage? When folks repeatedly visit a site like SEOmoz to log in and use (awesome) tools, the return visitor rate skyrockets. The bounce rate is also diluted since new visitors and returning visitors (read: customers) are measured together.
I wonder if Panda accounts for this by grouping togeter similar industries with web-based tools? In other words, is the update smart enough to compare apples to apples?
Dear Rand,
Do you think that if I put some Bamboo on my site it would distract the hungry panda and give me better search results?
rejigged
Speaking as an e-commerce shopper, what annoys me is that when I search for a product, I'm not in the least bit interested in how zingy the website is. I don't give a rat's nadger about "community" or how wonderful the "experience" was. Nor am I interested in passing it on to friends. They can do their own searching and use their own commonsense. If they want my opinion they can ask me for it.
On an e-commerce website I just want straight forward accurate info about the product. I want the company to comply with the relavent laws on supplying postal address, email, telephone number etc., and comply with distance selling regulations. All else is irrelevant.
Afraid the geeks behind Panda are too far distant from what the ordinary shopper is looking for. As a result the companies that throw the most money at their websites, but manufacture cheap trash in China, will win out against the small companies who sell more expensively produced ethically sourced goods and have far less to money to spend on overheads.
Unless Google starts thinking about this, a lot of small internet companies will go under leaving the market to the mass produced Chinese crap - is this what they want?
I completely agree with Cat broughton. Mongi sites involved in the sale of goods or provision of services on the Internet must wrestle with a problem, how can they improve their website yet, which is already so full of goods, rather than to deal with optimization problems in sales and finding new and interesting and necessary goods for client initially and expand the market.
I agree at least with the first part of Cat's statement. If I am looking for that motorcycle part, I want to hunt it, kill it, drag it home. I want to easily find the part, know that it fits my bike and isn't low-quality crap, then compare a few prices and buy it.
I will not Tweet about it, I won't share it on Facebook, I won't post about it on any social site, niche site, bulletin board or forum. I won't even discuss it with my bike loving buddys except in a negative sense. "I had to replace the &^$%^&$% carb on my bike". I don't care about the site. I don't care if the site was built in the 80's by a blind person and had typos all over it. In fact, I never want to speak about that particular part, or probably that site, again. I want to buy the right part, at a decent price, install it, and have it run (forever).
There are obviously situations where customer loyalty and buzz is a big factor, but on many commodity type products and other items, that interaction just isn't there.
I think these kinds of updates will eventually be that chink in the armor that allows someone else to catch up to Google and relieve them of some of their power. Walmart isn't the biggest retailer on earth because it has a great user experience.
This was a great explanation of Panda. Not sure I agree with everything, but well done.
I have to laugh at those who think Panda is exciting or has been a good thing. If anyone has ever had any dealing with Google at all they should know that Google doesn't usually do things that actually make sense. Example, Google Adwords. Adwords started as a great tool for people as a cost effectively way to reach their audience. I know because I spent thousands a month on Adsense and was happy to do so.
I had been a faithful advertiser for many years and only promoted "quailty" websites that provided very good content to our users. I still have these websites today after 10 years and they are number 1 in their niches. Then, one day, I had one of our sites get "slapped". I didn't know why this had happened. At this point Google had stopped allowing phone calls from Adwords advertisers so I could not understand why after all of these years they would do this. Finally, after getting through to email support, they said the site "did not meet their guidelines" and "did not provide a quality user experience". This made no sense. This particular site was 100% relevant to the keywords being targeted, gave the user exactly what they were searching for, yet it was now considered no good after 6 years of running on Adwords with no issues.
Why did I say all this? I said this to show that Google makes decisions all of the time that are not in the best interests of the end user. They claim to want relevance, but can you really trust their subjective view of what actually makes a site "useful" and "relevant"? I say no based on what they have done in the past. How can Google determine a sites value to the end user? They can't. The will get it wrong most of the time.
Adsense is another example of how messed up Google is. I have a few sites that have Adsense on them and the Adsense staff would tell me the best placement for ads. Do you know where the say to place it? ABOVE THE FOLD!
Then Google says they will penalize sites with too many Adsense ads when the Adsense staff told us to place the ads in the first place!
Just a quick look at this thread:
https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en&start=40
will show you Google gets it wrong most of the time.
That thread is about the Farmer update I believe but shows that Google does things that just don't make any sense and really do not provide a better experience to their users.
Look at the comment by:
askthebuilder
Here is a gentlemen who is an expert in his field, has a high quality site which was praised by Google and lifted up as an example of how to make an Adsense site.
Yet, his site gets dropped losing 50% of his traffic.
I own over 65 websites, some number one in their niches and most have not really been effected "yet" by these updates. I do have a few that were effected and am still trying to understand why.
Sorry for the long post but I have no faith in what Google does and think this will be another Google debacle. The people that are excited about this Panda update are usually those that are having issues ranking and hope this will help.
I wish there was an alternative to Google but alas, there is not! Until there is, we have to spend our time trying to decipher Google's encrypted messages.
Amen to that. My website got hit by Panda. I lost 20% traffic overnight. I went 20.000 visits (via Google) down per month. I have regained a little, but honestly I don't care to do many changes to accommodate Google. I get emails almost weekly from visitors who like the content, because it is brief, easy to read (e.g. does NOT have anecdotes and other irrelevant content in there), and easy to understand.
Additionally, my website has had a growing %-rate of direct visitors over time, so I know my website is worth visiting :-) I also have my own news letter, RSS feed etc. so I guess I'll just put a stronger focus on these channels that Google does not control.
I too wish there was an alternative to Google. I used to love Google - in some ways I still do as a uer. I am starting to like the blended search as a user. But as a webmaster it get frustrating sometimes! I share your sentiments.
Daniel.
Panda, as described here, has two major gaps. The first is a “catch 22”. If Google can only measure the user’s experience when the user clicks on the website from a Google Search Engine Result Page or uses a Google browser, then how will results from far down the list (ex p. 140) ever be evaluated for Panda criteria? Nobody will ever experience those sites from a SERP, and only a limited group will experience from a Google browser. Therefore there will be no experience to measure, right? Well, maybe not. I can think of two ways that Google can measure the user experience on underperforming sites; AdWords and sites target to Android/Chrome users. …and therein lays the second issue. I love Google. I’ve always sided with Google whenever it’s accused of co-mingling search and sales operations, and I’ve always operated under the assumption that AdWords has no impact on SERP. If that remains true, then sites advertised on AdWords cannot improve their “Panda” based on the user experience of an AdWords click-through, even though it’s entirely possible for Google to measure. The third thing to mention isn’t really a “gap”. It’s really a question that leads to a social and economic issue. Can a site get a better “Panda” by attracting Android users? If so, it won’t take long for every SEO or marketer to catch-on. Then, every site that benefits from traffic will be tailored for Android, and every CMS platform will be designed specifically for Android. One might note here, that most SEO/SEM efforts are already tailored for a Google product; the search engine! However, that’s different because every user can choose to use Google search, instead of a search competitor, without making a purchase decision or impacting other functionality of their connected device.
This WBF makes clear one thing: every site must have a "Marketing Oracle" working in.
And I believe that Panda made many Cassandra claim: "Why people did not listened to me?"; I honestly believe that there were many signs showing what could have happened and actually happened with Panda.
In general, what Panda means to me is that to be good is not enough. And that is true also if you played by the book and were acting as the first palladin of the White Hat cause. And it's logical: with bazillions websites competing, you cannot be just good: you must be freaking good, unique in the real meaning of word "unique" and you must be a reference, the reference, in your market - big or small it could be.
That is why there's one thing I particularly liked of this WBF: the importance of direct tiping and direct traffic. That implicitly means "brand recognition", and brand recognition (does nobody remember we had Vince?) was something Google was suggesting us since a relatively long time. Brand recognition, or being considered a Persona/Entity, means that you have been able to fix in the memory of the people that you are more than a domain name. If people search for you for your brand name, search for your services with branded keywords, that means you have done something in order to make you stand out respect other sites, that maybe see just in the organic search their main source of traffic. And who could be prized? The site that everybody remembers and go directly, or the one people forget the name and recognize only when they find it again in a SERP.
That is the reason why direct tiping/traffic is an important metric now. And that is why is a need to work over our website entity.
But, obviously, that is just one of the many Pandarank factors.
Nice overview Rand, this is a handy Panda site audit checklist. I like how you've broken down the update into each section we should be assessing our sites against to see what needs improving.
I'm looking forward to Google's next "re-jiggering" of the algorithm.
Do you know that I send this video to people who ask me to explain panda. I couldn't have gotten it this close. This is a awesome video.
The part about quality sites that were wrongfully hit is bugging me a bit. i heard that before, but if they changed their content, improved their design and got some social media engagement going for them, still it takes time to increase in traffic again, get back those ranks and improve the bounce rate, how is that done if Google doesn't see you corrected your mistakes. Yous said in the video that even though they may think they did correct, since they are not seeing the results they probably didn't correct their mistakes yet. From what I have seen it just happens that everything is right, but Google is slow at noticing that and reacting to that improvement. Any thought Rand? besides waiting, as I know that people tend to get jumpy when all their work seems to have no effect, so they rush the gun and make things even worse...
From what I've understood of Panda, and Rand is confirming it (as did Danny Sullivan in a post on Search Engine Land previously this week), Panda in not a change of the same algorhitm of Google, the one we see in action every time googlebot crawls our site. Panda is more a ranking algorithm that works over the result conformed by the more general algo one.
That means that is something that is "manually" launched by Google every amount of weeks: that's why we talk of Panda 1.0, Panda 2.0 and now of Panda 2.2
The reason is the tech aspect of Panda, that is extremely resource consuming to be run in automatic every time in every crawl.
That means that if a site as been hit by Panda, even if it corrects all the Panda factors that were wrong, it won't reemerge from the obscurity since the next Panda crawl is launched: and that can mean weeks (between the first realease and the second past 7 weeks).
The main problem is this one: if you have not correct all the site, if you missed to correct simply one thing, Panda is not going to make you return ranking as you were before. This is my real concern of the site wide philosophy of Panda, and that is probably the reason why there were so many collateral victims.
I read Danny's post and I figured before that it was manual, but like you said, it still bugs me that even though 99% of the mistakes were corrected that 1% acts like a brake and holds the website down. Now I think this is a major oversight by Google, shouldn't it reevaluate the site from scratch every time a new Panda update is launched and rank the website accordingly?
There is nothing new about Google's lack of fairness in their index. Look at link spam for example, how many times did you see the #1 result and it was obvious that all they did was buy links - and got away with it.
As far as Panda's 'magic' influence on sites goes... I see what Rand's saying but guess what, at the end of the day it's just another bunch of signals and metrics which can also be tested and understood better.
So we better roll up our sleeves and do some testing and comparisons so we know what will work and what will not. Trying everything under the sun could be a very costly and time consuming exercise.
yeah, you are 100% right, but this part just strikes me as an obvious oversight that can be easily corrected, now there is either an issue, their choice not to do so or they just don't care...
About testing, yeah, it will take a lot of resource and time, and in the end with the speed at which things are changing we wil always miss something I guess...
Well that is why you hope people share these types of panda related tests, to see what actually works and what does not work becuase it saves time =)
But then aggain the problem with SEO is if some one has some really great hot shot tests going on they will keep it secret.
I try to share all things if possible.
I agree with Dejan, but at the same time Google is making us pull up our socks. Its not so unfair to expect good quality info upon and search. the machine diagnostics is where its at. I have a few corporate clients using those now. I'm working on a web conversion program as we speak.
Oh, I am keen to hear more about this program. I have been working on one myself.
I don't think there is anything manual about it. I suspect the reason Panda is recalculated every four to five weeks is that it takes that amount of time to collect a statistically valid amount of user metrics.
Just before Panda 2.2, there was a lot of churn in the SERPs starting June 6th. It was like they were doing widespread a/b testing. So sites suddenly popped back up for three or four days - or untill G had enough SERPs impressions for them to be able to have gathered enough data about CTR, pogo-ing back into the SERPs and so on.
It's the data gathering that's holding them back.
Agree with Gianluca and it is a "Google dixit" fact: manual push means long intervals between Pandas. If sometime we have to rely on test-error-fix-test this new time scale will make reactions and rank healing efforts a lot more difficult, slow and blurrs the landscape we SEO have to study for our clients or company.
Some of this concerns me... it just seems like a lot of these signals could be assumed to have meanings that they don't or that are even contradictory. For example, what if your average time on site decreases because you improve your code and decrease load times, or your average number of page views decreases because you improve your usability or ajax some things that used to load separate pages?
We talk all the time here about correlation and casusation. It seems like the difference between the old days and now is that Google is starting to use indirect correlation data instead of raw "causation" data. You can tell something about a site that has 100 .edu links vs a competitor's site that has none; you can't tell anything about a site that has 25 average page views vs one that has 3 - I can think of situations where the first site could be the better one and situations where the second one could be the better one.
On the one hand I'm glad Google is using more signals to try to improve search results, but on the other hand, I'm concerned that the more indirect signals are used, the more opportunities there are for Google to get things wrong.
I'm extremely excited that there seem to be MORE factors that affect your SEO! I can see how the Panda update -- no matter how difficult it may be for us SEOs or for some sites -- is really focused on providing the best content and results. This new way of SEO levels the playing field a bit and forces SEOs to focus more evenly on qualitative and quantitative aspects of the site.
Thank you for the post. It was extremly helpful and well done - I think even my account executives and clients will understand this view of SEO much better.
I think the key here is that the page has to be engaging and text on its own won't suffice.You'll see greater reward by creating complimentary content such as video or a series of images to illustrate each point as you'll see an improved time on site as well as content that is more sharable in nature.
I'm sure SEOmoz has a great engagement figures!
We have now entered the era of philosophical SEO.
In the past, rankings have mainly been based upon things that SEOs can see and count such as links, titles, headings, bolds, and anchor text. Everybody insisted on "scientific studies".
Now rankings are based upon data that are invisible to the SEO. When you can't measure and count the only tool that remains is philosophising - something that SEOs have turned their nose up for in the past.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Though Panda may seem like magic, it's still technology and I wouldn't be an SEO if I wouldn't try to poke at it with a stick and see what it does. I'm not giving up!
Agreed. If Panda is based on machine learning, then it can be quanified. Although the complexity of that quantification may prove exceedlngly challenging.
Well, if not understanding the technical elements at least we should be able to figure out some qualitative parameters of content and websites which seem to correlate with the rankings.
The take-away from Daveh's comments is more impactful than that of the article imho. The serps do not reward quality content per se. Never have and still don't. Put up a keyword-optimized page that's 100x better than its #1-ranked wikipedia-stub-equivalent and then sit and wait two years while it gets nowhere if you don't believe me. Good content will not necessarily attract more links either.If you don't have a marketing budget or knack for promotion, the best content will be squashed because that which is already visible is gaining ground faster than you can catch up, simply because it is already getting a lot of eyeballs. The internet used to level the playing field. I'm not so sure that it does any more. This isn't a whine - I do well online through a mix of high grade evergreen content and marketing push. But the field is definitely a rat race... and all the while companies can make more money by scraping-n-framing and building sites that are, essentially, a million pages of crap... they will continue to do so. Panda was one weak step towards combatting this imo, but there is a long way to go.
What might concern some people is that if you're basing things on what people like then the majority of people like awful low quality stuff. Just look at what's popular on TV.
I generally agree with the notion of seeking better results, but have concerns I'd like to see addressed:
I feel for the motorcycle parts websites of the world and all the other catalog sites. Many are imprisoned by their platform and will be unable to replicate an Amazon-like experience without considerable expense.
The main post-panda hit companies and individuals I've seen have been "the little guys" especially non-profit organisations. Quite often they have had quality content, sometimes in large quantities. They appear to have been hit mainly because they do not have the resources to pay dedicate staff to run social media engagement programs and, as you say, because the user experience on their websites hasn't be the best. From what many have told me, espeically the non-profits, they still don't have the resources to have their sites redesigned. I find this a shame, as whilst the Panda changes have cleaned up some of the mess, it may well spell the end end for some of these small organisations.
At the same time I have seen sites boosted by Panada that are scrapers of other sites of the original article. The main trends I have noticed with those are the higher ranked sites do tend to have better UX but, and potentially more importantly, they also have a much higher social media presenc, espeically on Twitter and Facebook, than those original article sources, quite often from what appears to be follower-farms.
Still its an interesting thing to follow
I had no idea "rejiggering" was a real word.
So what I'm really wondering is how many of these Panda updates does Google plan on releasing?
Or is it more of a "we'll continue to update it as long as there is a need for improvement"??
The problem with bounce rate, if you have an instructional site, is that if you have good information searchers will not need to go to another page. They will go fix the problem that you taught them how to do. SO in this case, bounce rate works against good information.
Great point. If you're SEO efforts are really working well you're sending people directly to the information they need and depending on the type of site (like an educational one in your example) they may not need to look any further which could lead to a high bounce rate.
Although I'm sure Google will also consider time on site alongside bounce rate. A high bounce rate alongside a lengthy average page view duration should still indicate healthy user engagement.
Also, you'll likely be competing with other instructional sites for rankings, so any comparison with competitors should remain valid.
In terms of ranking factors, both current and future, nothing exists in a bubble.
But how much of a factor is bounce rate, sure it is probably only a small percentage...I have seen websites with a high bounce rate which have ranked great for years...
I would be more worried about time on site over bounce rate imo, becuase sites where users get all the information video off one page will bounce, especially with high search intent keywords.
He did mention that this is relative to the type of sites you are completing with. It you are getting those few people to look at other related info on your site, more that the next guy, you will rank better. Even if your page views are only 1.25 compared to his 1.001.
I want make websites about some interesting things, but I don't want to make portals about these things!
For example, I want to write a lot info about motocycle parts, but I don't want write anecdots, funny stories, history and other crappy things about these motocycle parts. I have GOOD site with GOOD-USEFULL info about these parts - why do my SERPs have to be lower than SERPs of some stupid sites about motocycle parts anecdots?
Thanks for your videos!
I think the example of the motorcycle parts might not have been the best to use. If you were selling motorcycle parts online I do not think you would have to worry about someone posting clowns and jokes.
However, anyone could put up a list of parts and prices. It would be nice to see a few sentences preceeding the section on carburators or brake pads, etc. Something that helped me as a consumer find the best product or alert me to special information that I need to know. Maybe the information is cms driven, based on make and model.
Yeah, I know, sounds like a lot of work. But, a good presentation, navigation and just a little extra effort will go along way. Do you think that everyone selling motorcycle parts online will take the effort? Probably not, which is a good thing - for us.
I have had top ranking since 1998 for many sites. They are ugly sites (my first attempts) with tons of information in a conversational, "dutch uncle" style. People eat this stuff up and fortunately, so does Google.
Hi Rand, awesome video, I think Seomoz should run a webinar on new startegies for SEO due to Panda Update.
I find this Panda update very strange. I have many keywords still ranking very high (p1 in search) yet some of the more competitive keywords seem to be knocked down to second page. I edit one thing after the other and for a short time I will see my search results increase to 1st page. At this point I feel I`m there and I`,m happy- the next day I will see it drop back down to 2nd page.
I know I`m making everything on my site better but I still get dragged down no matter what I do.
What confuses me is why. My sites bounce rate is not too bad around 50% give or take 7%.
The only things I can see is that I do not have a members section and I have 1 copied article on one of my pages. Will these factors affect my ranknings for highly competitive keywords?
My low competition keywords are at the top of page 1 as I have previously mentioned but getting the more competitive keywords on page 1 is like pulling teeth.
Why wouldn`t Google at the very least give us a direct reason for keeping a result on page 2 when you know it should be on page 1? Would it be so hard for the raters who downgrade a site to let the webmasters know why so they can fix it.
People spend countless hours,days,weeks and years working on their site and to see it fail because of a reason you cannot figure out is unbelievable. I look at a few of the sites that rank higher and I believe my site should show up in searches above theirs.
I have a review site and I find it very hard and maybe even practically impossible to get people to click a like or +1 botton to share it. What is so exiting about reviews that people would want to share.
I sure hope they come back to ssee the changes I`ve made so they can return a correct ranking in search for my pages.
Sorry if it seems like this comment is all over the place but this has me sleeping less and fixing things that I thought were already good.
I`m going to try and look at my site the way you say and see what I can come up with - so far all I can see is that it`s just a members section or some type of social thing. I will try re-writing the one article which I copied (however I do give proper credit).
Thanks for the heads up with your tips.
Have a great day.
Mark D.
Another note:
Great video this week Rand. While it no doubt sucks to see quality sites getting hit, I for one really like what the publicity of Panda is doing for SEO, both for people who do SEO and for our clients and bosses who we do it for as I love the intent behind it to push for better sites with better content.
I've always approached SEO this way as I've always thought spending the time to create content that gets people to share and link for you is a lot more scalable for building quality links and traffic than any of the link schemes out there. And it's definitely a hell of a lot more satisfying! It was a tough sell at one place I was at that was convinced microsites with spammy keyword pages was the solution and while it did work at the time, I can say for certain I never felt challenged or innovative at work and this type of environment doesn't breed creativity nor does it attract quality people. Just from a simple business case aspect I think that sets you up for a losing battle.
While Panda is a significant change, it's definitely no surprise. The best SEOs I've worked with approach every situation thinking "If I were Google and I wanted to find the best page for my searcher, what would I do?" While they didn't really talk about CTR or time on site for instance, it always seemed natural to me that if I were an engine and had that data, why wouldn't I use it as it's a HUGE sign of whether or not that searcher liked the page I served up for them? For me, Panda seems like common sense and has made my job easier when I'm arguing my case for why we need to spend time/money creating pages that are actually useful to people.
And of course, I'm also excited because I think this change is a great opportunity to broaden the importance and clout of SEO within organizations as non-SEOs better understand that our job has so many touch points and we're not just sitting in a corner changing page titles and editing meta descriptions.
"Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today."
Exactly! Not just everything you do with your website, but everything you do online can impact SEO. Sometimes we lose the forest for the trees when it comes to Internet marketing. It's not about changing one thing and waiting for Google to notice you played nice. You have to approach your SEO from a variety of ways to stay ahead of the game.
Great Whiteboard Friday, Rand. I'm not sure what to think about the Panda updates because they will continue to make SEO based around more non-concrete metrics. As you said, it's not so much about good content, keyword placement, and link building anymore, but instead, about crafting an excellent user experience. Now, that's obviously something every SEO/Webmaster wants to achieve, but how can you possibly measure that? Sure, analyzing bounce rates, TOS, and the like are good indicators, but it now seems like everyone needs to take a step back and look at their site from a bird's eye view instead of nitpicking the details.
It's exciting change, and one that I believe can genuinely improve search, but I have to wonder how SEO will dramatically expand to include metrics that aren't explicitly measurable.
Shouldn't Google be hit by Panda since all they do is scrape content for their results... Panda schmanda
This is definately going to be a hot topic now for a while and I can see everyone who comes here will return to their website and distance themself from the word SEO and change their landing page URLs to say hey I am a Web Strategist. But, its true, us people involved in helping our client websites grow online have to sit up and take notice of yet another excellent white board friday topic as the real website optimisers are not just your run of the mill SEO person.
Reading through all the comments I was intrigued by two. The first by SandraMoz - you make a good point about ecommerce websites and all the product pages, and Rand himself when he was talking about motor cycle parts. Like tomorrow I am to visit a large company who sells tires with lots of pages on all the diferent tires they want to offer online. So Sandra has a good question about this type of challenge for website owners who are trying to serve up the very tire the person is searching for to buy.
I was also intrigued by the comment from 'fchristant' who listed his website and said he was 'peanuts' and not operating a big site so didn't know why he had a PageRank of 4/10. So, his nearly 11,500 page website with at least 32 inbound links that Google listed, is just a peanuts site. This is really quite huge and funnily enough the URLs for each page are not that SEO friendly. It would be interesting to know though one thing - is the site meeting with its objectives? What is its purpose, what do people do once their, are the immediately bouncing out again?
For those who have managed to read all the comments down to this level of the page, hi, I hope you had the excellent read that I took time out today to enjoy. There are some very talented people in the moz community.
Great Whiteboard Friday and coincidentally timely related to a book that I was recommeded by a friend called Final Jeopardy, Man Vs. Machine which is all about building a machine learning algo to beat Jeopardy Champions - a huge natural language challenge and one that is related the challenges that Google is addressed in Panda with respect to complexity and scalability - IBM Watson - The following 5 minute video talks about the project - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5-sR7W7md0 (no affiliation - just interested in the topic of machine learning and I guess this book talks about how Google is using). Have any other SEOMozers read? Did it relate to Google much?
Understanding a bit of detail "under the covers" on this stuff can potential provide an understanding, insights and maybe even an SEO edge. No doubt Bing, Yandex and others all have similar machine learning, natural language processing challenges, its just that Google matters most .... for now and for the foreseeable future.
Great Video Rand! I think that the idea behind Panda is brilliant, by factoring user behaviour Google can determine what sites retain their viewers, based upon new measurement metrics, we can finally see those poor quality websites stubbed to the darkness. This update was bound to happen, with so many webmasters utilising link building services combined with copyrighters, even poor quality websites were given more work to position for adsense related revenue. However, I do think there needs to be some more equalities around what constitutes something good, because now I believe brands will always have an upper advantage because of their budgets and their abilities to re-design and further invest in their websites, whilst smaller, legitimate online businesses may suffer even though they do try to deliver something good for the end user.
Great info in this week's WBF, much appreciated. I agree that the role of SEO is changing where doing good SEO is not quite enough, with social and offsite marketing also playing a role in SEO. This is evident in how Google is using machine learning and incorporating UX metrics along with branding signals, all things that SEOs should be looking at. I think what Rand is also alluding to when he mentions that a good portion of your visitors should be coming to your site directly and not from SERPs is that websites should not be putting their all their eggs in the SERP basket for traffic and that sites with high brand singals should have a solid distribution of traffic. Google will always make tweaks to the algorithm and ranking metrics and the sites that rely soley on SERP traffic will always be a slave to the algorithm.
Great Post on Panda Update. I am agree with the point that website should have content that people like to share and like. I think Link Bait strategy can work great after Panda update rather just publishing promotional articles in cheap article directories.
Best Post on Panda, Thanks Again!!
Regards
Ajit Singh Kular
Finally panda helps Flash websites, these websites browse more because of attractive animation menus and much more which attract users.
ALthough i disagree in a sense -- i absolutely hate flashy sites when i'm just there for information -- i think you're touching on an important concept:
Some site inform, some sites entertain.
I propose that there should be two (or more?) kinds of "like" buttons -- BTW, the only thing i got from this truly awful video transcription is that google have come up with there own "like" button and they're going to factor that into their rankings:
Informs +/-Entertains +/-
And it would be nice if there could be some universal agreement on the single best way to implement the idea -- instead of the bewildering array we already have (like, stumble, delicious, rss, +1, twiddle, diddle, fuddle, nipple, etc) -- then webmasters would have an easier job of making it easy for users to judge pages.
And then google, et al only need to use those judgements and present results grouped according to information value and entertainment value. Finally, those of us who use the internet for different purposes will save time focussing on the right group of pages
Hi Rand, thoughtful video.
Engagement metrics seem to be a large part of the Panda update, IMO. I know for sure site speed is a biggie. As well as heavy pagination, and wild tag clouds that cause thin pages and higher bounce rates, which in-turn Google may see as less user friendly. I agree that tighter or a more tuned Panda will be coming, as door way and keyword rich domain sites are still ranking well. They are not from the 90s but some are from early 2000, 8).
Trust and quality are also very apparent as you said, as brick and mortar sites such as Sears/Walmart and others are diversifying their product bases and are ranking well for products they are not an authority on. These are products that have their own mature markets and aged sites in them. These larger sites post higher metrics in user and trust and stomp out more authoritative, niche and boutique style stores. So it seems that content and authority may not override trust and engagement factors from large domains. With that said, I agree again, more tweaks to Panda are in order as I can clearly see those larger sites also spinning out thin and in some cases duplicate content, yet rank well. Food for thought, if a large domain has high engagement metrics data from its core market, can that large domain expand to off topic products and leverage its trust, age, links and user metrics to rank higher than sites that are authoritative have more focused content for the same product, who are good in their own metrics, but don't have the sheer size to command the same volume of metrics being gauged?
Thanks!
I haven't change my SEO one bit since the first Panda update and our organic search traffic has been totally accelerating upwards ever since it's implementation.
My SEO isn't even clean. It's sloppy and amateur.
Go figure.
Great video Rand.
Mark
Hi
If for example the domain demo.com get penalized by Google Panda Or Penguin and its rank fell down or its visit from Google become less than usual, if the administrator of the site change the Domain of his site in Google Webmaster Tools and make it demo2.com is it possible that the penalty transfer to new domain or not? Is it a good way to cheat Google Panda or Penguin?
Is it possible for any changes which administrator of the site make to be infected by penalties for the prior ones?
Regards
Intersting info Rand :-) I didn't know the the algo update was named after an employee.
Someone gave me my first 'thumb down' for this comment... it hurts a bit, but I'll get over it in time ;-)
Nice video, I think in the end of the day you need to spend time creating quality content, webmasters begin to have problems when they start buying content online which is low quality. Or they outsource to content to people who re spin content.It may cost a bit but I feel it is worth having content writers in house who you can train up with SEO.
If you want quality you need to pay for it!! If you take short cuts you can end up in problems.
I have had one site which was hit hard by the original Panda update, the reason been that it was a Ezine Website similar to Ezine Articles (yet smaller). I think it was a strategy that worked well in say 2006 yet in recent times Ezines do not produce results. I am running a test with this specific site at the moment where I have pretty much chopped the whole site apart removed all the content which is duplicant and replaced it with original content. (waiting to see where this test leads)
Do you think Google's text analysis skills got better or is it external metrics they use? (users, social, links...etc). Or maybe it's a combination of both...
Combination of both for sure think about it, make unique great content which is long. Then boom get the content shared, linked by 1000s of people and you have increase in results.
The only problem is this type of thing is that big sites like Mashable can release a post, even if the post is bad, low amount of content, they will still get 1000's of social activity for that post. See what sites like this now do is try and target every SEO related thing on the web even a large amount of non social media related stuff.
Oh well you just need to think about how you can be ahead of the game and become a "powerful web strategist" as Rand has said in the video.
Excellent point: "The only problem is this type of thing is that big sites like Mashable can release a post, even if the post is bad, low amount of content, they will still get 1000's of social activity for that post."
Yes not saying Mashable has poor quality content all the time (only limited) The fact I have seen some examples recently where they may only throw up the 100 characters of content and a video which is popular and it will get shared 1000's of times no matter what due to the authority of the website and the fan boys and girls who will just like every thing. Then you have people who automatically links to all types of posts on big websites.
When you really think about why people share content and the reasons behind it, authority really plays a huge part too.
Yes not saying Mashable has poor quality content all the time (only limited) The fact I have seen some examples recently where they may only throw up the 100 characters of content and a video which is popular and it will get shared 1000's of times no matter what due to the authority of the website and the fan boys and girls who will just like every thing. Then you have people who automatically links to all types of posts on big websites.
When you really think about why people share content and the reasons behind it, authority really plays a huge part too.
But in reality big sites are the ones that got hit harder. wiseekk.com, ehow.com massive sites but they coudn't still get out of the grip
"The only problem is this type of thing is that big sites like Mashable can release a post, even if the post is bad, low amount of content, they will still get 1000's of social activity for that post"
...and here is the fundamental flaw. The big boys will always win with these rulesets in place. Severeal of my websites were absolutely murdered. I'm talking, 30-40% of their income dropped like a rock because of Panda. Not because I had sites with 2 sentences per page, nor was it because I built a bajillion links to these pages and got penalized, but simply because they don't get shared often (or at all) since they are mainly storefront-slash-content sites. Sites that were ranking at the top of page 1 for several 2 and 3 keyword terms, now on Google page 2, getting essentially no traffic and certainly pulling in no income. Others have boosted up higher (of course, meaning they are also earning more). However, those are the ones that DO get lots of Facebook Likes & Google +1's. Mostly on sites like Squidoo.
One thing's for sure, nothing is harder than ranking a storefront or especially an affiliate store. Nothing.
What's upsetting is the metrics for the lowly brand new website, and the webmaster praying to see 3-4 more Facebook Likes by the end of the day, when there are big sites out there who crank out a simple article of any topic and get 2k FB likes in a half hour.
How on earth are the 'little guy' sites going to survive this?
That is exactly the same thing I said.
I was hoping to make a little extra money by creating an affiliate website. I work a lot with product feeds and my VPS is actually too slow, but I can't afford an upgrade.
So it means the ones that can hire IT-specialists, own dedicated servers and hire programmers are the ones that will benefit by it.
In Dutch we have an expression: The water always flows to the sea (meaning: the rich alwasy get richer.)
And thus the poor poorer.
I am still scoring well in Google (my site is in Dutch, but Panda is already active in The Netherlands)
The other thing I noticed is when my Adwords Campaigns are running my website scores higher in the search results ankings. I know they say this is not true, but it's significant.
So I totally agree with you, if you don't have enough money already, you are not allowed to make some more money. If you have enough you can afford all kinds of systems to make your site(s) rank high
I think you haven't got the Rand's message correctly. Removing duplicate contents and replacing them with original contents in not going to help. Infact useful original content is not a signal of quality content. Though many businesses/webmasters still think that way. For Google panda, quality content is the one which is liked and admired through the action of sharing (tweets, likes, +1, natural links etc) esp. by those people (authority figures) whose opinions matter algorithmically because of there large fan base and social media influence. So people like Rand and Danny can make any mediocre article great (in the eyes of Google) just by sharing it with their followers. This should not happen but unfortunately that's how it works. So you need to spend more time building relationships with influencers in your niche. Useful quality content is not a decisive ranking factor it is a prerequisite.
The thing is I don't copy with other people do all the time, or even advise, I know Rands information is usually great but I try my own methods, own ideas and own tests to see what works best for me.
The site in question was not even getting much traffic so i dont mind messing around with it, I mean i have quite a few SEO test sites.
Regards.
Does anyone have a reference where Google has said this:
"Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site. So you should try and block those for us or take them down."
This is getting repeated as is, but I'd like the see the orginal source.
"One other specific piece of guidance we've offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content."
Very interesting I wonder what a huge site like Just Landed does that has litterrally 100s of content and article pages, they have published our content for example as they deemed it useful to there users, Be interested who makes the judgement call on that. As stated earlier we have positvely benefited from the update but are looking at ways we can continue to improve as you never know what is going to happen next
Sweet, sweet whiteboard friday.
Panda 2.2 positively decimated our site. We don't build link/content farms or practice black hat SEO. We do create top notch original content that used to rank towards the top of its niche.
Panda 2.2 took the most useful content we had on our site and slapped it silly. It then took a small and unquestionably the least useful part of our site, the only part that contains some syndicated content from another site via RSS, and actually boosted that noticeably.
As of right now one of my highest ranking keywords belongs to a site that hasn't been updated since Pele was playing professional soccer. It doesn't have information that is completely relevant to the keywords yet it ranks #1 and has triple the page rank our article has - which is 4 times longer and contains detailed information about the keywords.
What bothers me is all this Monday morning quarterbacking from "SEO Experts" telling us what everyone should know about great SEO after the fact. Yet still it leaves us wondering how the above can happen where sites like mine get the death penalty and those still running amok creating horrors upon the English language get rewarded.
Wow I just found this site and it's like a book I can't put down. I have found this to be a very informative Video. I would like to say thanks for the information. I don't claim to be any kind of SEO expert or anything but it seems to me Google is just reacting to what has been happening to many sites on the web. Google is like any other business it tries to give the best product to its customers. Unfortunately many peoples SEO improvment efforts have put together sites that were tailord for only googlebots. Google reacts with the Panda update and it changes everything about how they judge a site. I really like the concept that Google is trying to better the users web experience. Perhaps its not perfect but Panda is here now in response to some peoples attempt to "play" Google so they react. Unfortunately even our well meaning attempts to write content that appeals to Google had an impact on the decision to put Panda into effect. One thing I expect is sooner or later people will again try to "play" the system and Google will react again. Ah well at least its not boring and it makes me learn new things so I like it just for that reason. Thanks for the great information I plan on returning many times in the future.
@mvwilkins: there's no sooner or later about it! As SEO workers (Ihesitate to say experts) we are in the game of appealling to bots people alike and by definition we are gaming the system. Hopefully we are reasonably ethical about it.
Great video Rand,Id love to see some before and after examples of site wide changes that SEOMoz feels did a great job of re-design for the Panda Update.I also think its more and more clear on how Google is going to integrate Facebook and Twitter into their search results, building the brand around the community.
Thanks for the great video, which I do believe really does represent Google's true intentions. However, Google's Panda implementation in many cases, such as mine, actually does the opposite from their intention.
My www.quotes-daily.com website is good content. How do I know? Over 55,000 people have subscribed to get this content each day by email. There are over 1200 Daily Inspirations (three years of daily posting) on the website.
How did Panda treat www.quotes-daily.com? Disaster.
In reality, as opposed to theory, Panda appears to check some very specific things, like "duplicate content." rather than any measure of how well people like a website. Because my RSS feed is picked up by hundreds of sites, and my individual posts are copied to blogs and Facebook by thousands of people, www.quotes-daily.com ranks low for its own unique content.
For example, search for the phrase "Inner peace is a choice - make that choice today." [with the quotes]. This phrase was in my post of June 22, 2011. There are 11 Google search results. My original post is the 11th. The other ten are all copies of my post - either through RSS or manually copied.
I dare anyone to look at my example and say that Google's Panda update is accomplishing what they intended.
Maybe now that will change. In the end, there are some people that will be affected by this in a bad way, true. But, I think in the long run, it will keep improving the sites that are out there. it is my understanding, if you are the original writer of content, you shouldn't get affected by duplicate content.
Wow - great, very informative! I actually have a client who has been affected by this update. Hopefully now I'm armed with this information he may actually listen!
I can definitely relate to this. :)
Awesome. I think I'll have to work a lot on my site to meet the new Panda demands. Long long nights to fix all the stuff that doens't work anymore. The strange thing I have already done some of the new things for some of my customers but i didn't get around my site yet. You out there too?
Once again, here we are! Trying to make the difference and interpret what Google wants. No doubt the new update is great news for good content lovers and quality websites (it must definitely bring a downside for those who have quality website but went a step too far in trying to get good rankings regardless of the price to pay).
I think the true question now is how Panda is going to affect different strategies. For example, if I've optimized two different landing pages with the same product feed for two different keywords, is that bad practice? I mean, we're trying to get people to get what they want, and sometimes you have to lay two different landing pages to do it because optimizing for two different keywords might be considered spammy. Does anyone have a hint on this? Any data from where I an actually extract preliminary conclusions?
Itrs good to have panda update for SEO point of view. More the sites and there content will be refined the more the users will be benifited.
Our main goal is to get the site/business benifited; and by this more and new SEO techniques are to be introduced.
Looking forward on this.......
Thanks,
Kunal
Well i have been through the whole story but just like to ask one question.
The thing that stricks me is evaluating websites using feedback from Google quality raters manually. Now is it possible to rate such a huge volume of websites through Google quality raters, and if not then can it be assumed that Google panda will effect only those websites which are quite popular and because of its popularity it is evaluted by Google quality raters. Is this is the reason why popular content firms are being targeted ?
I think the point that was made in the video was that the quality raters looked at some sites, then the machine took over to find those sites that fit the "profile" of the sites the raters did and didn't like - not that every site affected by Panda was reviewed by a quality rater manually and that's why they got hit. That was the point of the scalability discussion.
Good to see Google rankings based on user experience than on website content.New Challenges like this make SEO much more interesting.Thanks for updating on the developments.
I saw the video on another site and commented there, but now I've found you. Wow! Excellent video. I love visual things so when someone explains it to me, draws it out for me, it totally clicks. So often on the web, I just zone out when there is alot of writing. My blog is lots of videos and photos. I share ALOT. Someone once sort of insinuated that this wasn't the `correct` way to do it in the cybersphere, that I was supposed to use unique content all the time. Others were saying that I had to use the keywords 3 times. I don`t I just add my video and photos and I write a little bit about what I shared..because I just don`t like a lot of words. Like I said I zone. Anyways. enough with the words. I LOVED your video, and I`m about to add it to one of my blogs right now. Have a fab day and I`ll be checking out this site more and be back next friday. Gracias! Tina :)
Thanks for lifting some of the fog surrounding the Panda update and what it means to us Web Strategists. I'm going to put that on my business cards - I love it! One of my sites dropped 1 PR and one went from PR0 to PR3, and it is a new site. Going to focus upon the user experience from now on, that is the intuitive way to go as well. Just the right blend of SEO and captivating content and test, test, test. Thanks again!
Hi Randi,
very good whiteboard as always...
BUT I wonder how all of this you said, will apply to large ecommerce websites that have been partially hit by the Google Uk update probably because of a large set of thin and almost duplicated pages that are the product pages. How can you build WOW content for all of these? An d if you can't, does it mean you have to hide all of them to google? We're talking here of about thousands of pages so it's not probably a goosd idea..
Yes, we can all build up product pages, integrating user reviews and related products to make all the pages more unique, but will this be enough?
I would really like to know your opinion on this.
thanks!
Great points raised there our site improved its rankings and we have over 20,000 individual property pages wth a lot of duplication looking property landing pages. maybe the fact that we have an average 9 page views per visit helped us. So recently our page rank went down but our search results went up. overall though as a user the sytem seems to be working because what it did do was penallise sites that have little user experience but not sufficiently to talke them off the first page of Google. So I think its going to take a lot more time before it becomes clear for real estate sites what they have to do.
Thanks Aaron for the wonderful WBF...Am more concerned about the cons of the Panda update..., i tried a search for the following text from the transcript above:" But basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y "this blog post was nowhere to be found and all i could see where sites that hijacked seomoz data.I strongly believe that Panda is not foolproof and has hit many authority websites, but we get to listen to just a few cries here and there.
The one thing that I'm not completely sold on is the content topic brought up by Rand. Great content that wants to be shared is fine, but he is making it sound like there is no need to optimize the content now, it is all about social sharing. I think emphasis on optimizing content is still needed so that Google can make the relationship between your content and the topic being search for. Thoughts?
It seems that as the algos get more advanced websites need to focus more on writing for humans and maybe forgetting all the "gaming the system" type thinking of the past. This means more humanness and less techiness. It's time for more heartfelt and humorous content.
I think Google has updated its pagerank algorithm on 27th june 2011. I would like to know is this update going to show any effect on my Search engine rankings? now a days people are not trusting the pagerank what do you say?
Good post! Certianly will help bring to light, some of the changes panda has brough about some didnt notice. IT has taken SEO from less of a statistical game and more of a social engineering one :-) Its turned it from math into marketing.
Yes, good post, i have a lot of friends with websites, and Panda ... damage. JOCURI
[link removed]
don't be panic about panda. panda is just anther update that enhance Google's ranking theroy as they always doing.
Hello everyone...
Hello Rand... and a special thanks from me for going through the Panda Update in the Whiteboard Friday.
I have been trying to get this into the head of almost all of my clients... trying to change the web strategy but it has been tough getting them to come on board. Hopefully... with ur video it will become a bit easier.
I have a question too... can we go in a bit of detail about the DESIGN side of things and the User Experience??? That would be helpful for myself at least but probably others too.
regards,
Great advice thanks a lot. Do you have any example sites we can check out that have been optimized for this new formula. It would be great if we could see an example of how we should be presenting our sites now!
This morning I find my site (brisbaneweddingphotographers.com) gone from Google's visible results!
Odd... This site has returned on the first page of Google when searching for Brisbane Wedding Photographers for over four years... Now it's gone. Has the Panda struck? Hmm. According to Microsoft "Expression"'s SEO check the Index page - the only one I've really bothered with in the past, it is clean.
This vidcast has been very enlightening. I'll have to find the time now to learn a whole new method of ranging my 30 sites as I watch most of them slowly slip from the search results. Thanks for the heads up. Many questions are now answered. Of course the BIG one is still unanswered... Whow to recover from Googleblow or Pandahit.
Ryadia
Your website is in 3rd place on google/com/au (organic). On top there are Google Places results (maybe you should get your website there by getting Places product).
Use https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool to preview the website.
That is really big change on Panda.... But now what you think about new website... Now is seo not tough for new website. I think new website has to do lot of struggle for better ranking. Can you suggest some tips for getting better ranking for pure new site... Thanks
Loads of comments here. But don't you also all think that a vital part in this Panda update can also be the bounce rate? Because if your bounce rate is high, it is an indication that your site isn't "performing well"??
Or do you think that is not an issue at all?
Did you watch the video? This was discussed - see point two under the heading Usage Metrics, discussed at around 8.30 mark.
Hello David,
Yes, I did see the video but I was asking the community here about their ideas/thoughts as well, to see what others mean and not just Aaron Wheeler and his comments. I think what the community here has for ideas is also very valuable. I apologize for not making that very clear in my comment.
yes, I'd like to know what a 'good' bounce rate is - I would guess all sites have a certain bounce rate but I'd like some advice on what is a reasonable bounce rate to have.
I have seen most effect on e commerce sites where site owners use supplier's content which they have just cut and paste and used on their own site. When they take the trouble to rewrite the content it regains past rank, albeit slowly. For all Google Panda's best efforts I still see a great number of links that have been paid for or are built from link farms. Many big players are still guilty, but I guess in due course they will get their come uppance.
The message seems to be play fair and do not try to game the system. Good on-site SEO folowed by sensible offsite SEO still seem to work.
I notice comments about bounce rate being a possible thing to be penalised, but this is not necessarily a bad thing it depends on the context of the particular website. If the site visitor's query is answered straight away then they may not move further into the site. So someone looking for a telephone number may be happy straight away and will contact the website owner. But if you have a landing page that is designed to get the site visitor to take further action then a bounce may be terrible.
For instance find out more about property insurance would want you to move past the landing page and seek a quote. Whereas Nottingham Debt Management may be quite happy just to generate a telephone call.
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The question I keep asking me since I saw this Video last week is Should I keep looking at all data SEOMOZ provide to me. Is this still relevant? Would be better, instead, forget about how many words on title, how many links my competitor have, how many redirects my site has, what is the competition to that specific key phrase ... and so on and may be focus my time and money in creating cool and usefull websites ... ?
'User experience' and how much they 'like' the site....
The problem is, that can sometimes mean they just don't like the point of view they read; they love what they already agree with. This is quite often true even with a well-written site -- the moment some people catch a whiff of something they find suspect, they'll click out fast. That can become a form of collective censorship -- pushing reasonable sites down in favor of the controversial or cranky or ones that can't or won't want to sell out.
Another problem : a good site's page may have the information the user is looking for, and the user will find it quickly, then go on to another site or another search. The page did its job. That's a good experience, but will result in high bounce and exit rates, thus the site will be hurt.
I realize that G can't and won't get everything right. I just hope they figure out how to get past the matters I raise.
I've noticed that some people in the comments asked for site owners to tell how Panda has affected them. Here's my story:
First of all, I'm peanuts. Not a big site. Not a big rank. I launched a new wildlife photo community about 3 months ago:
https://www.jungledragon.com
It's a photo sharing site essentially. I'm only getting started yet the homepage has reached PR4 in about 10 weeks. The small but growing community is quite active and I'm on 8.4 pages per visit and a 50% bounce rate. A reasonably loyal audience. There are several channels for users to "like" content, via Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.
I suspect I have been hit by Panda 2.2. On June 3, to be exact. Check this graph:
https://www.ferdychristant.com/blog/resources/jungledragon3/$FILE/jd_panda_02.png
I wasn't getting fabulous search traffic due to the site being young, but overnight I'm getting virtually none. My theory is that this is Panda at work. I think Google thinks I'm a scraper. From a machine perspective, I understand this. Most photos on my site are posted elsewhere. Many members also have accounts at other photo sharing services, and their pictures will be there as well.
Panda fails to recognize in this case that a copy of content does not allways equal actual scraping. My members voluntarily upload their own photos and enrich them with metadata.
You should know that I'm a total SEO newbie, yet an experienced web developer. I'm not going to cry about this update, yet I feel mistreated and would love to learn what one can do to fix the issue. I understand the social part mentioned in the video, but I'm already doing that.
Edit: I also wanted to mention that I am using zero black hat SEO practices, in fact hardly even white practices. I did not buy links, write content specifically for SEO purposes or serve any ads. Not sure if any of this matters.
Navneet Panda!! I had no idea this update was named after an actual guy - I thought it was named after a bear! : )
Awesome Blackboard Friday. The best one yet. Thank you so much, Rand!
Great post, Rand. Lots of good stuff in there and you are engaging speaker. A comment and a question:
First the comment: What we are seeing with Panda is a move, effectively, from quantitative to qualitative because it will be hard to quantify the effects you are observing. That is going to put a lot of SEO consultants out of their comfort zone. Anything you can do to help us navigate these deeper waters will be much appreciated.
Here's the question: you make the observation that ads on the page, too many of them at least, are a bad thing. A large number of web sites are 100% ad supported so I would argue that this could be an ever bigger impact on the web than demoting the content farmers. In the B-to-B markets where I work, many sites are sold out for a good part of the year and so the number of ads on the page has risen to accomodate the need for more inventory (this is with SEO best practices in place, vigorous email news delivery in place and SEM not affordable).
Have you done any work on what the threshold for too many ads might be? Or whether there are placement issues?
This is a clear indication that, SEO in future is all about building relationships in that particular niche. Does it mean that one can excel in SEO just in a niche or two, practically thinking it is not possible to have good and wide relations in all niche? Can someone/Rand respond to this question :)
I'm interested to hear what people have to say about bounce rates - Rand mentions that they are a contributing factor to Panda evaluations - obviously a good bounce rate would be 0% but most of my sites are coming in at around 50% in my Analytics - is that pretty bad?
In addition, blogs typically have a higher bounce rate, yet they are the best thing to happen to Google. I'm sure it is all relative to other sites with similar content. So if a site has similar content to what you have and they have a bounce rate of 30% then yeah, 50% is not that great. Problem is that you don't know what their bounce rate is.
Great post Rand et al. Looking forward to embedding your video on our Executive Street Blog to help expand the reach of such great content. Business owners and executives often neglect how important certain things are, by having a basic understanding of the changes in search maybe it will kindle a drive to have good websites with content USERS would enjoy.
Excellent summary on Panda as we see it evolving today, I feel it is goodness for the industry. The SEO process has become more sophisticated, in parallel with Google's algorithm sophistication. Moving forward, the SEO expert needs to have more general marketing experience (branding, USP generation, PM, company/ product advertising, etc).....and needs to stay on top of the latest general online promotion trends. For the most part, ones that have been looking at all this already, do not see a negative hit with Panda.
Kind of upsetting though, just when you think there's some small level of certainty... blam, a whole new way to worry if you're still going to be safe in a few months.
/sigh, no rest for the wicked ;p
Oh man this is an amazing post, and I had to have a kind of a chuckle in the process, is kinda what I've been saying for a while. Incidentally I laughed because a couple of weeks back, after being blasted from a perspective clients office, for being too negative about his website. Although I saw it as positive feedback he didn't. I'd spent a few weeks analysing his site (an insurance company) and found that the website was too grey, didn't offer too many ways for people to get social, the news section was very thin (27 words in one post that I saw) and as such none of these features saw a lot of use. What I was trying to sell this guy was a more socially active website, his main competitor had a large community of some 150k members but he just didn't get it, I showed him the statistics, really went to town, but at the end of the day another wasted opportunity. Think maybe a lot of corporates are afraid of become social because they're frightened of the possibility of negative feedback. Cheers, Lee
We were definitely hit by Panda. The very month it came out, our sales plummeted and have never recovered. I thought it was the economy!
We were a customer-oriented, user- and search-engine-friendly, non-spammy, quality webstore the month before Panda came out. Suddenly we're not??
And I DO spend tons of time making sure everything looks and works the way it should.
It appears that being a customer-focused webstore selling quality niche products is no longer good enough for Google, even though my customers are happy to find me...when they can. In order to play Google's games apparently I'll have to create a fake "social media presence", churning out words and grasping for something even tangentially related to say, even though there really is nothing more to say about our products than our website already does.
Now THAT'S what I call spam.
I've been finding old press releases content from 2006, 2207 etc coming up in the top search results for some different keyword searches. The links in the outdated press releases have broken links to failed company websites. Is this suppose to be higher quality content? Back to the drawing board...
I've been finding old press releases content from 2006, 2007 etc coming up in the top search results for some different keyword searches. The links in the outdated press releases have broken links to failed company websites. Is this suppose to be higher quality content? Back to the drawing board...
All good information. Thank you for sharing it. One other thing I've noticed while doing seo rank research for work is that sites with the exact domain url of the targeted "keyword" seems to have a lot of new power.
Has anyone else seen this trend?
For example there was a site with 8 inbound links at #1 in a highly competitive mortgage keyword term.
On reflection, Panda has been good for companies that put time and effort into their website, which is the way it should be... on a personal note, I think the returns I get from my searches are on whole better than they were pre-Panda. So I for one think Panda has been for the better.
It was really interesting reading all these older posts, I wonder if you all have the same view now?
Rob Lindsey
Exeter, UK
Hey Y'all.
Well that was a very informative video on Google's Panda update. I found it a bit defeating though; anybody else out there share my sentiments. SEO is hard enough, but with all these updates to algorithms it is getting harder to compete. Yeah, user metrics are great; probably where serp and search in general needs to go. But it is making it so difficult for all us website owners that are "a one-man show" (sorry ladies, "one person show)...lol.
How do other small business owners/professionals measure user metrics? Yeah I know about Analytics but so what if you have a high bounce rate, how do you fix it? What specifically is causing your audience to leave prematurely. Does anyone have some secrets on getting user feedback?
Daniel Tetreault.Sidney, BC
This is an excellent explanation of how Panda works and everyone who still has questions about it should check out the video.
Awesome job, Rand!
Sounds good in theory, but I suspect it is all too hard to implement in practice. Can you imagine the processing power and memory required to process all these rules across several billion web pages? The last few years as the Internet has grown exponentially, Google has got a lot dumber because it can't scale as fast as the internet grows. Do the Maths. If Google just charged $1 per site or per page to be indexed, the amount of spam would drop by 90% overnight.
I agree. The panda update will only affect sites whose content is poor and who value their on-site advertising over on-site quality. I think the next major Panda update will be coming in the next month or so. Lets see what happens.
Thanks
I immediately clicked throughout and visited Blog tempest after understanding your roll and it actually is full of attractive material.
This video is a good example of what should always rank well. You give your viewers something interesting and something worthwhile, and you will be rewarded. It's not there yet, but all signs point to some version of SERP karma. You only get what you give, and if you are stealing/cheating Google will come find you :P
Very good video , I added my archive.
Even though this came out over 2-years ago, I still send people here for Panda-related questions. I think Penguin got 3x the amount of attention even though Panda affected a lot of site owners.
One of the major undesirable side effects of giving so much importance to the enjoyment of the experience of visitors on websites is to privilege websites with less content, beautiful designs and which ultimately mainly provide an entertaining experience.
Ultimately, the entire Internet will evolve towards a massive entertaining machine where people brainlessly waste their time browsing meaningless content (every advertiser's dream).
Confusing the fun and the relevance of a website is a very strong philosophical choice and a very irresponsible bet in terms of Web quality for the future.
By the way, when you see how people are using the Web today, for entertainment mainly, it's clear that choices like Panda make the Web enter in the era of massive brainwashing.
I'm going back to a book...
This is a great article on Panda. Tons of information and helps the readers and those doing SEO or looking to do SEO change some of what they are doing to better abide by the Panda update. A great article for people who were hit by Panda to see what google wants to see and what you should avoid.
Three years have passed... is it time to update and reflect?
yeah... my domain have been go into google sandbox... i don't it problem.. can be help me..
https://cto.vn https://sualaptop.cto.vn
Well, Thank you very much to share with us about Google panda updates. I have learned lots of new things. Could you show me some website links with good content, so that i can write a content according. I need one example.
Thank,
Harpreetk
This helped me a lot Aaron. I have not had time to study or delve in since the so called Search Engine wars. Despite white hat good guy efforts, and no tricky stuff, we got hammered into dust on this.
Given we play fair, it's clear we should have taken some time to grasp what was going on. It is crazy that Google has decided to like Mashable over depth. "Munchable bites" as a good friend you guys know just told me. Yippee, let me help dumb down the conversation, I can do that.
So now, our readers get, 50 posts spread across increments of time, with some video or other stuff to keep them engaged (value or no), and maybe I should stop using Google Analytics too ;)
How did we get here Aaron? Semantic learning, AI, down to figure out what 16 year old users want. Wow. I hope we remember how to read and write 10 years from now.
Thanks for your expertness, I will be back reading more.
Always,
Phil
Amazing... so clear, so precisely said and conveyed. Learned MANY things here from this video. Excellent Job!
Another excellent presentation from Rand!
Panda update has certainly helped to filter out the bad sites and keep the cream of the crop in the SERPS. I was glad to see content farms being penalised and content spinning being deemed as a blackhat method. The job scope of a webmaster has certainly increased, and they have to wear a few hats to embark on a more holistic SEO approach to getting traffic and leads to their websites.
Thank you for the great post about panda update. As a new blogger I find this to be so helpful. Keep up the wonderful work, the posts are always so informative I always learn something.
Thanks for this awesome video summary re: Panda update. Glad to learn that Google's search results are moving towards higher and better quality forcing SEO's to up their ante, too.
I think it would be more efficient if Google could give the user a choice whether they would want to put the user-friendly stuff on top, or if they would want to keep the quality-material on top. Maybe they could have a button at the top of the page or something to swap between the two.
"Feel" and "like" are so subjective, it seems like Google just injected so much subjectivitiy into their results...
A lot of those spammy affiliate marketing sites that had horible design and hard to read content got blasted. I have a friend that fell into that category.
I would like to raise the topic about how exactly "killer" design is related to SEO. How could be design related to metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, etc. from a machine point of view? I mean it's not directlly correlated, maybe they've not gone to the extent of taking into account colors and fonts in their algorythms. I suppose that "design" has more to do with the spammy/"original" content ratio on a given page as well as where exactly are those situated on that page.
Hello Everybody
Since the 12th of August, our website, www.restaurants-sud-ouest.com (rates on restaurant) , suffered from Panda : trafic has been decreased by 20% (long train requests)
My conclusion is that we have huge stuf to do with.
I guess to be more interesting we have to :
BUT : How can we do that where as we are only 2 guys to run this website ?
"Ew, I don't know if I want to get myself involved in that. They've got like three hyphens in their domain name,"
Really? So you're the folks who are perpetuating this myth, are you?
Have you not noticed how for most searches there is a Site Build It! site right at the top, with a hyphenated domain name?
Yes, there we are, thousands of us poor hyphenated slobs, and we're laughing all the way to the bank.
Great article otherwise.
Gina
I think it's a good thing that there is now more emphasis on the user experience, it makes you think more about overall experience and how users interact with your content, that's what good web design is all about. I do feel however that this will make it more difficult for SEO guys who were relying on having unique content to be enough.
Very Useful Information. Thanks for this
This algorithm, like the story of the herb was dry and the age of :)
As SEO evolves. Recently, several things are changing. The world of SEO has become too technical and schematic, and websites have become sterile containers filled with keywords, words, images optimized ad-hoc, with extensive use of links and advertising. Intensive use of SEO techniques has inevitably made the content more poor, too attentive to the density of words, rather than their meaning, or their importance in the context. It's a bit 'as if a poet or a writer you had to say: "write a poem or story, but do not use the word the word x or y, and z if you use the word, trying to leap into the text with uniformity, and do not use more than a certain number of times, try to use it with a density of 20% compared to the full text. Oh, and, most important search words to use in the initial part of the text in the center and at the end .... " You understand that this is the art of the writer inevitably caged, limited and difficult this approach would give birth to masterpieces of the past that many artists have given to history. So, back to us, this mass-oriented approach to the optimization SEO has depleted the Web sites of their most important content: the originality and naturalness. Google seems to have noticed before the other, introducing new evaluation criteria for the ranking of sites in search results, and if this led to a dramatic, in some ways down the traffic on many web sites, has also begun to stop the tendency to consider the widespread use of Seo as the sole source of visibility and success. With the latest evaluation of the algorithms of Google, many webmasters have seen nervously down access to their sites, and if it has initially created panic and confusion in the industry, has also opened the way for the foreseeable future: to return value to the content, write interesting things that have high popularity with the public, or at least a part of it. The Bot, by computer algorithm variables and percentages, is evolving, getting closer to our way of perceiving and analyzing information on the web. The SEO will then evolve accordingly, and cold applicator content optimization procedures, should become a sort of "philosopher of the Web", trying to understand what customers really look for and how the customer perceives and assimilates the information contained herein. The SEO should get in the shoes of those who seek and those who probably will read some information, rather than take the role of googlebot and other spiders, and this can only make our work more interesting, more creative and more "humanist", less technical and therefore much, much more interesting. There is little to do, like it or not, Google is always a step ahead, and he proved once again, perhaps changing too drastically, but inevitably, how to read and evaluate the content on the web. Perhaps we can say that being born the era of Web 3.0, which will be a further step towards the past, because the simplicity, naturalness and originality are part of the human race from the beginning. Maurizio Galli (Seo and Webmaster)
All this seems to be talking about the quality of your actual site - which I believe mine is of good quality, low bounce back and high page visits and average time spent. However, mine - like most others has found its way initially by building backlinks. If the user content on my site is good then all fine. But...I've recently improved loads in the SERPs but ALL of my backlinks are web2.0 articles / bookmarks etc, generated by the likes of SENuke/Sick and so on. Which means that in the real world these links are receiving 0 visitors or click throughs to the main site... simply not read - so to a certain extent the quality of the backlinks would seem pretty irrelevant in terms of what's being spoken about here with what panda is looking for for user experience. I would say though that the links generally are extremely well spun and unique, and each backlink is then randomly supported by other web2.0 articles and bookmarks etc. Difficult to see, therefore, where this fine line is for Panda considering such web2.0 activity as deliberate SEO content and worthy material. Right now, it's worthy in the sense that each link is important because other similar content sites are interlinked in the hub of 'activity'. But there is really no 'activity' in the Panda sense. The radar must still be set pretty low to catch the low quality SEO spam but not the high.
Wow. Just wow. This is the direction, I think, that is going to benefit "good" sites and help to clean up the landscape a bit. The whole idea of even being able to drive a spammy site to the top of the SERPs using crazy backlink building techniques and "SEO'd" content (poorly written content from a human user perspective) made the SEO process painful.
This is a step in the right direction if you ask me.
Hey Rand,
My site is also hit by panda and was confused from last month what to do about it? read your post it was very informative and i will try to implement what you have said in the video.
Regards
Nick
Panda has leveled the playing field by adjusting its algorythim to review site for Content Stuffing... If you can over use Keywords and be smacked for Keyword Stuffing it was only a matter of time till well written content that is designed to be a snow storm of information got flagged.
Besides the "little guy" getting hurt, sites have good content but not content that people are likely to share will also be hurt. But that doesn't mean the reader himself didn't get value from it. I work with clients in some more mundane industries like scrap metal and gps fleet management solutions. Unless these companies create something off the wall, their content is not likely to be something that people are going to feel compelled to tweet or post on facebook for their friends. And if they were to create something off the wall with viral content, all that could do is really drive tons of irrelevant traffic, but yet Google would give credit for that?
And then talking about usability be a driving factor...will Panda updates hurt big guys like Mashable and HuffPost, two of the most, IMHO, annoying sites, not because of their content but all the noise on the page (tho HuffPo has gotten better) and the load time from all the ads and widgets is incredible.
Does Panda take into account that sometimes your pages will load slowly because it's waiting for some social media connections to load first?
Google says it's all about being a better search engine for the searcher. But in many ways it has left some of that behind and is making decisions that are good for certain market segments and not as good for others. When Google Places decided to remove the display of listing descriptions and details like Hours opened, many of us were like WTF? How is that not useful info to a searcher? It almost seemed to me that they were only caring about businesses that people were likely to review, like a restaurant or a nightclub.(It has since been corrected due to the bellyaching on the forums.)
All we can do is try to keep up with what Google has convinced us searchers want.
Sounds very interesting but I have a few question.
How do you know all this stuff about google panda?What do you mean if people like your site? Are you talking about google +1How do you know if your conent is panda worthy?
Thanks
Great WBF, Rand. One of my former clients just got hit by the latest Panda update and lost 2/3rds of his search traffic. Your explanation is the best I've seen yet and will help me going forward in my practice. I've been an all-around go-to guy anyway, so these changes will only benefit my business in the long run. Thanks for a great presentation! Only sorry I didn't see it earlier.
Uh... There's just one thing I really have to ask. I noticed you mentioned hyphens. Is "the-tech-guy" an overly spammy domain name? I'm using that right now for my site and, for the love of God, I hope I don't have to change it. Most of my visitors are from social media, but I have a significant presence of Google for a site that just started. That is, Google Romania. I noticed that in the US SERPs I'm not getting much of a presence, but that's probably because the site is like 2 weeks old.
To further inform, I'm writing for the site myself and I have several years of experience in writing engaging content. It seems like if what you say is true, my site will be rewarded. But there's an infinite loop: you need people to like your site to develop a good ranking, yet you also need to develop a good ranking to be liked. If it works that way, then this update only benefits sites that have seniority.
I only hope that hyphens aren't the thing stopping my site. :P
Nice article, thanks
This great news and a good video. Being a digital agency the user expereience in websites is always king to me and happy to see that Google finally caught on to it! Guess web 3.0 is here.
Content has always been king in my humble, but this video draws a clear picture for SEO's designers and developers, the game looks like it's changed with Panda. Because it's so computationally expensive to run it will probably be cyclical, any ideas on the frequency of a Panda sweep so to speak? And cyclical being the case, what’s the opinion of Google changing/amending the background algorithm pre Panda if it runs continually or semi, or is it more likely that Panda is amended keeping everyone on their toes?
I should agree the video gave me clear idea about how panda works and why I am getting so much varied results regarding my site, from past 3 month.
My have to make some serious changes I guess.
Thanks Rand for an extraordinary WF. This is definately a game changer and a long time coming IMO. If we expect Google to upgrade their results we should think about upgrading the quality of the material we submit to it.
This was actually my first Whiteboard Friday, where the hell have I been? Great stuff.
So are the days of outsourcing written content over or should we ask our writers to write with personality?
- perhaps a little cinematic license? "...and then out of nowhere, a monstrous groan..." Who knew bike parts could be exciting?!
I've been following Panda really closely and have managed to keep all the websites I do SEO on, high up in the rankings. I still maintain that if you're doing things ethically and you get the basics right, your site won't be affected. To clarify, but doing the basics right, I don't mean Googling SEO 101 and implementing a checklist, I mean intuitive 101 stuff - SEOs will know what I mean.
Great video, great summary and great to see that Google are clamping down and removing the nonsense websites.
Another reason why white hat SEO is so important. Google is doing it's best to reward SEOs who use ethical white hat practices.
It's such a dynamic field, this SEO, but I love it because of that. Always in demand and always something to work on.
This was one of the best explainations of how Panda worked. I believe good SEO practices still have to be used but make it about the end user.
Take a look at your analytics and see your worst bounce rate pages and make it better, it will help out your site. Many people just don't get it.
Memo to everyone: Rand does not know how Panda works, he'll be the first to tell you. He is guessing and summarising what has been on other SEO sites for months. Tell them Rand
Once again the under appreciated and mostly uknown to normal people - User Experience reigns. Woohoo! Saying "broader" or otherwise makes SEO seem larger, but it is not. User Experience encompasses SEO, not vice versa.
Rand - thanks for the explanation. This actually makes me feel better. I can focus on the good stories and content for my users (what I did when I started my site: fencing.net) and not worry about the "SEO impacts of the post" which has so many people going crazy.
My site spikes every 4 years when interest in obscure sports like mine start to get play. What I'm going to have to start measuring is what, if any, impact the usage of my site's community areas (forums) have on the relevance Google places on the news section of the site.
Do you think that since a lot of the heavy useage is forum/community based that it detracts from the journalism/news credibility of the front page news stuff, or does the forum reinforce it since the community of athletes spends time there talking about what's going on?
The title is a bit misleading. It doesn't appear that best practices have changed much at all, unless former best practices included low quality content, scraper websites and poor user experience.
The goal, from what Google has said, has always been to chase what users want, not what Google wants. The Panda update seems to be a reflection of that which punished sites who were doing the opposite.
I feel pretty fortunate that my main site rose in rankings after Panda, so I am pretty happy with the changes. The only thing from this WBF that concerns me is the part about the 5000 pages of tools. I deal with neighborhoods. Sometimes, especially in the 30+ year old neighborhoods in Overland Park is not a whole lot of difference from one to the other. The differentiation is more distinct in communities 15 years old or younger. Hopefully my content is good. It is, at least unique.
Great post Rand. SEOmoz WBF are fantastic.
I am very new with SEO, and when i heard "i need to create a good content and go social with it" from some SEO Gurus (EGOL), it actually confused me, it makes me think that oh God, SEO is damn hard, not only do i have to think of many already known good practices of SEO, but I also need to have a good content.
But after I watch this (YET AGAIN) an extremely useful whiteboard friday, I can tell you this. That i am actually very very GLAD that google made this changes. For me, it is easier to fight with building a much better site content compared to building a higher amount of backlinks.
Thanks a lot Rand, this Panda made me smile (and perhaps that is the explanation why the new version of my site fare very well on SERP despite being in the public faces for less then 1 month)
I love this Panda...
Mmm... I don't want to scare you, but those backlinks still count a lot if you want to rank well.
The biggest mistake would be to forget this still basic rule of SEO and embrace only UX and content optimization. Content is king, but links stil are its best ambassadors.
indeed, but at least this time the back link is not the king any longer. I am very glad , that there are some panda overthrowing the throne in the kingdom of SEO and promote a new king known only as 'Content' :))
Hi Yumi. I have to reiterate what Gianluca said that you definitely can't forget about backlinks. The update is not indicating that backlinks aren't as important anymore. It does indicate that these other site performance factors are playing a more important role, but with regards to links I would suggest you think of it more in the sense of taking the quality of the site you're getting backlinks from even more seriously than perhaps in the past.
At the end of the day you still need links for your SEO work to show positive results. The way that better content plays into the mix is that, theortically, the better your content is the more likely you'll get backlinks from sites that also provide good content and good user experiences.
And of course, if you're getting links from great sites then you're also going to be getting more referral traffic as well, not just increased SERP traffic.
Thanks a lot, as the saying goes, if we can do all of them, why restrict ourself with only one option? I will definitely not abandon my BackLink hunting campaign :) , but I am just glad that at least the way I take it from this Whiteboard Friday, the Content might become a much more important role than it used to be, and that makes me happy :D
Best Video/Post I have seen about the Panda Update. Very well put together and very informative.
Now, how about the SEOmoz Panda Tool :)
Thanks Rand,
Brent
I've loved the Panda Updates! At Oxzen we've always really stressed good web design and smooth user experience. It's always been good, but its really paying off for our clients now!
I also agree with Rand, I believe Google will be taking their algorithms and search in the direction of the Panda from here on out. I think we can probably expect 1 or 2 more Panda Updates in the next 6 months.
Great WBF Rand. I'm curious to know how anyone here has applied some of these tactics to ecommerce sites since its common to find the same content, ie product descriptions, across multiple sites.
Very nice; Panda The Video! Good, solid frendly content will always win out in the end. If it does not take work, then something is wrong! Again, Nice job...
I think Google has hit this one right on the head. I have always tried to counsel my clients to be creative ( or allow me to be in their behalf! ). With the social trend that is going on, I think a well rounded strategy will be in order from now on. The results will be a lot more interesting to say the least.
Great Post!
Great overview about Panda 2.2. Everything is well explained. User Experience is the best factor in search engine optimization. :)
I own a small auto parts ecommerce site and have seen my traffic cut in half over the past two months. We sell the same parts as everyone else. But besides that we have duplicate descriptions within the site also. For example, Brand A makes an intake called "Intake 1". I have a description for this model. But this model might fit 100 different make and model cars. And each application has its own unique URL address. Would I have too write original content for each application or be penalized by google?
Most of the comments here seem to be for sites other than e-commerce. I would like to hear from you the SEO experts what are the steps for e-commerce to thrive in this new era of google?
You make a great point concerning ecommerce websites. I have dealt with this time and again, and it can become a chore. I am not sure which CMS you are using, or if you are using one, but there are some great tools to help. What are you running your ecommerce site on?
I am running on REC (really east cart), a UK based company. I also do not use a CMS.
Time on site, bounce rate, # of pages viewed are a few of the metrics Alexa tracks and I monitor. 7 minutes on my site, 3.2 pages are OK but my bounce rate is horrid or maybe my WP site structure needs tending to.
I have seen this in action a couple of times already. I've been amazed watching a few websites that had ranked #1 for a long time for specific searches start dropping. Sure, the sites contained thousands of pages, but each page contained nothing more than a few sentences of wiki-like descriptions around industry specific keyword terms.
I've always wanted to see an update like this, the pages on these sites were essentially useless to a visitor but had kept these sites artificially inflated for over a year. These #1 sites that are now dropping in rank had outranked other sites that had 5x to 6x the inbound links and pages of useful, descriptive content such as deep blog posts around similar subjects.
Kudos to Google!
Wow, excellent summary of Panda. I'm grateful for another solid reason to back quality design, engaging content, and striving for excellence.
Nothing against Rand and the great people at Moz, but I think the assumptions asserted in this video are flat-out wrong given the topic. Not to say that you shouldn't work on improving your site and metrics generally...just don't think this has a lot to do with Panda.
As always, great post. Really enjoyed this white board Friday. There have been some great Panda articles, such as this Panda article by Danny Sullivan (I have no direct affiliation, just a great article :)), but love the video.
Cheers!
Don't think I can really add anything - people have commented well already. I think we will now have another client care, client education task to do to broaden THEIR minds. That from the start, web design, UX and what Rand calls the stuff that makes people go 'wow' - that's what's going to matter and THAT IS SEO. Excuse the capitals, but I've had an enquiry from a potential client who thinks they are going to do the web design and then think about optimisation and I just wanted to scream that design is an integral part of optimisation.
Thanks for this video - good to get some confirmation of things people have discussed before - bounce rates, pages viewed, time spent on site etc as being things client must consider as being SEO factors.
Now to go and do this thing! Cheers Rand!
Right... even though - IMHO - this is something any SEO would have started to teach to clients a loooong time ago.
If you think well, Panda is nothing but an algorithmical expression at its best of the basic Google guidelines, that were there since the birth of Google.
If you try to take shortcuts and game the system, you will get caught eventually. Staying white hat means playing by the rules and enhancing the user experience! This is what Google's all about -> a better user experience!
Some great ideas here on how to tackle boring, monotonous, ecommerce pages and make them panda friendly. You are spot on when you said: "...Not enough. Sorry. It's just not enough. There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet." Now with Social in the mix, only the best lol cat videos, err content, will make it to the top of the heap. I see branding becoming more and more important further down the road with these type of updates.....
Lets see if these updates "really" works or not :D .. anyways.. this is quiet a usefull update.. this is going to create a problem for lot of so called SEO software :D .. and yes i agree to the infinity and beyond for that Web strategist part.. yes SEO has got promotion.. they have been ugpraged.. bt most of them are not understanding thier job.. they still belive in some old tactic :| which disappoints me a lot
My job just got more important after this whiteboard friday :) ... I'm a Senior Web Designer and been doing SEO for about 1 year now. So I can say my main focus would be Design & UX.
Thanks Rand for clarifing something that has been on my mind for a while now. That Design is very important and not just content,links etc...
Awesome video...
Yeah, many changes, but... for some of my searchs( long-tail ) i still unable to find what i'm looking for on google ....
I think this will impact in the middle-long term. But, its a good issue from google use this metrics ( bounce rate, avg time on site ) this is what really tell if the ppls enjoy your website or not...
Thanks.
In the early days of the internet search engines started to deliver a direct access to information/knowledge. If you have exactly that piece of information on your site someone asks for (i.e. a translation, the biggest city in Uruguay, the tallest man in the world, a solution in PHP, a phone number...) all the funky new Panda metrics play against you because people won't stay long, come back, like your brand,... In this case it's better to hide your stuff a bit to produce a higher average time spent on your website, more pages visited and so on.
Very good post on Panda Update Aaron. I will pass it on to the Dutch ;-)
The discussion isn't very high on this topic yet in The Netherlands but it starts so your clear explaination is usefull.
Gr. Hans
@OMAlkmaar
Great WBF once again, very informative. It is interesting to see on this site questions about getting more links etc and when you do a performance test, you get 20-30sec load times. That sort of delay has to affect rankings, people just bounce before the page has finished loading.
Ironicly fast engaging flash sites are not crawled by google, async data loads of content are also not crawled. Will that change as people tweet more about 'youve just got to see this' etc? How much will google put focus and weight on the social metrics verses links in the future?
It is also interesting that when you do a site performance scan on a well optimised site, that it is Google and Facebook non-mimified js, css unused tags and short cache values that cause site delays. It would be nice if they cleaned some of these and set a good example too if they are really after the best UX.
Will business sites run on wordpress be the next to be hit, due to cookie cutter look and feel. The sort of content Rand talks about will need to be more impress than the mass marketted web creation software churns out.
As a software developer, there's my take on Rand's insights on where Google is going.
As I was reading your comment... I wonder how sites with no text content at all were affected by Panda. Example... full flash sites with only TITLE / Meta / Footer text. If they are appealing to people then the lack of content should not be a problem. Perhaps Panda scales the effect with amount of content and allows for other signals to act in proportion.
Rand killed the robotic copywriters with this Whiteboard! Now the copywriters that just write SEO articles, so they can rank good have to rethink their whole writing style and ideology :) Nice!
It's time to get creative! Oh and interesting too! Erm, and socially active :P
Nice explanation…thanks for sharing…IMHO, Google wants the web to behave like the offline world, they want brands and they’re turning towards that --> You want somebody to come to your store and buy your stuff: you’d better have an awesome product and a fancy store, the better your concept, the more people will like you. You want people reading your magazine: you better have the greatest content and the best infographics…and so forth...
I think it makes sense…they have the “power” to do so…Again, thanks for sharing!
Loved this article. Perhaps best "Panda theory explanation" ever.
They might also tracking
On Page Factors
1.Variety of Tags like <div ...> or <table >
2. CSS Standard (Alphabetically ordered classes?)
3. Embed type Video, PPT,
Other Metrics like Page download time, CTR.
Time has been come up to spend on design +UX rather than spending highly on content creation through outsourcing.
Thanks
SAMEER
I think that the Page load time will be a key factor as they have included a perfomance tool within Webmaster Tools. They are giving advice without being too direct about it
Mike
You're right...I think the same way. It seems that ussability factors are playing strong roles.
Very true page load is a big one if your sites takes too long to load users will bounce...You will loose sales ect
You think they will be looking at the CSS of a site for ranking? I thought the point of css was to make the design independent of the content. Maybe I am not understanding what you are saying.
Right now I dont think Google looks at your CSS at all, or any of the tags that make up your page presentation, except to look for some red flags like hidden text or some other trickery.
Your CSS can certainly indirectly effect your Google ranking from a UX standpoint, where a better page presentation will inluence the visitor's perception, how long he stays on your site, whether he shares through social media, +1, etc.
There are few things which I did learn from Panda and I am pretty sure if it was not Panda I would never have.
Though I have not recovered from the 50% loss of my traffic but I am hoping to get it back as I fix them. In my opinion they are the thin content for my website.
Ashish
great information behind panda, I don't know what to say, but i still see low quality website come up top 10 on google.
This is an great post thank you.
I'm wondering if it's worth removing low ranking or visited content or even combining it into less pages.
It will be interesting looking back this time next year to see the bigger picture of Panda.
Good points on how Panda changes marketing and web development. I just wanted to point out that it changes so much more, though. Panda changes the way businesses need to structure themselves, and the people they should look for.
In a post-panda world, it is even more crucial to have good alignment between the web team and marketing. Anyone is any web or marketing related role needs to be Renaissance man/woman, and think simultaneously about design, UX, SEO, etc. For example, B2B companies often think about sales and marketing alignment. But what about in the future marketing and design alignment?
Panda isn't an update or a even a ranking factor - it's a movement :)
Rand, thanks so much for the email and insight last night, and as usual, thanks for the reDIRKulous Panda analysis and commentary. Sorry for the DIRK drop but we are based in Dallas so had to give some props to the Mavs of course. Tim
I think it's a great shift; I really love the two paragraphs about the motorcycle parts page. That seems to be the essence of where Google is trying to go. It's going to be a headache for a lot of SEO companies, probably. But right now SEOs write for two audiences - people and spiders. I think Google's goal is to make the spiders completely transparent, so in the end we'll only be writing to one audience - people.
Great WBF this week! Setting the record right about the dredded Panda update! Thanks SEOMoz!
Bah it's only dreaded if you have a naff site, spam and are offering no value. I think these changes are actually very positive for those who have something to offer the world :-)
I completely agree with you Martin. If you try to take shortcuts and game the system, you will get caught eventually. Staying white hat means playing by the rules and enhancing the user experience! This is what Google's all about -> a better user experience!
Amazing explanation Rand. Especially about creating not just quality content for SEO, but engaging content for the reader.
Hi Rand, great info as usual, thank you. So how are you guys including all this new stuff to the tools seomoz provides: How would you integrate user experience, content quality and user metrics to the service you provide now? I´m very excited to hear from you if there´s a project coming that way.
You mentioned Google looking at the user metrics of traffic that comes to your site and that this can be measured through Chrome, Android and the Google toolbar. Would this be the same for Google Analytics? And if so could providing Google with this kind of data have an effect on your optimisation efforts?
If they access these data via Google Analytics - then all the more we should improve our bounce rates and etcs...
It's highly unlikely Google uses your GA data to influence your rankings. In fact, they flat-out deny it. Here's what they have to say:
"Your website data will not be used to affect your natural search results, ad quality score or ad placement. Aggregate data across many customers will be used to improve our products and services. "
I, for one, believe them. If it ever came out they they were using individual GA account data for rankings, this would reflect very poorly on them. And the simple fact is, they don't need to. Google has so many other ways to retrieve or infer the same data.
"Google has so many other ways to retrieve or infer the same data."
That says it in a nutshell. They can say they don't use your GA data, but it's the same data they use in aggregate. For example, when you look at your GA data regarding bounce rates, number of pages visited, how long a visitor stayed on your site, etc, Google has always looked at these things.
They dont need "your" GA data to do it.
They probably pay people to allow them to study their search behaviors...
Rand Thank you so much for explaining this! I was really hoping that you would on Whiteboard Friday and it completely explains why one of my clients sites basically saw a drop is search traffic for the month of June. I think in some ways it makes getting pages going is easier, it sounds as though the linking aspect of SEO has been devalued and UX has taken such a higher priority. thanks again.
Has anyone seen data to suggest that the font size of an article title in relation to adjacent text ads has an impact on SEO, especially after Panda?
Great video, very informative.
I have a quick question.
I have an affiliate site with a lot of external links. If I make them all 301 redirects can I boost my pageviews in google analytics and perhaps help my panda rankings?
Thanks so much for this great video.
I had been trying to get a good understanding of what the Panda changes meant, and it is only now, with your video, that I get it.
As a writer fighting an uphill battle competing with low-paying keyword-stuffing-quality-content-doesn't-matter-SEO "writers", this is a positive change! Maybe people will realize that creating quality content is not easy when you are not a writer. Quality writing AND incorporating SEO is a challenge many freelance writers are not valued enough for (or compensated). if a client owns a website, SEO has to play in, whether they know it or not - unless they have no interest in getting traffic. However, that is rarely the case if they are PAYING for writing - they want visitors. And, yes if you write for traffic, you have to think about search engines, there is no way to avoid it, and become a "web strategist." But, you also have to produce quality writing - even more so now! In the end though - I think it is always going to come back to quality, quality, quality instead of shortcuts. Which is a GOOD thing for freelance writers!! But, Google is always changing what they think about "quality", so you have to stay on top of the latest SEO techniques, even if they are "non-SEO" tactics.
Some Google Panda Algorithm Facts:
1. Un-related themed backlinks do not increase your website's ranking
2. Cheep unrelated backlinks pointing to your website do not increase it's ranking.
3. Google now has a ranking dependence on social platform backlinks.
Hi SEO Van
What do u mean by: 3. Google now has a ranking dependence on social platform backlinks exactly?
toe
What do you mean by "2. Cheep unrelated backlinks pointing to your website do not increase it's ranking."?
Twitter unrelated? Low cost unrelated? How are they evaluated?
How are "1. Un-related themed backlinks" evaluated?
What is the source for your "facts"?
Thank Gawd for the Panda Update! A search engine based on how many worthless terribly written articles one can hire a non-English speaking person to write is not a system that will scale and evolve.
Even quality articles online mean that for every thing that exists there will be hundreds of dull articles talking about every thing simply to "Rank". Not scalable.
SEO is one interconnected part of the internet marketing process; it is essential for an SEO to communicate, understand, and participate in the whole process while maintaing focus on lead generation, conversions, and analysing the data for opportunity. This means link building= relationship building with vendors and others in your niche, social= UGC initiating product discourse and linkbuilding, Analytics= understand your inbound traffic for appropriate Adspend while maximizing CTR and identifying new opportunites.
See and be a part of the big picture.
Maybe I'm naive, but a something doesn't compute for me.
Is G really going to penalize websites that are prominently displaying AdSense advertising all over the page, or just non-G-based advertising?
This was an amazing video..really helpful. Need to work on site metrics most the things matter now from site performance to bounce rate and user interface design. But leaving apart from panda outbound links also do matter for a site to rank better
Sorry to disagree guys, your article is just another one of millions of speculative articles and posts about this update that are all over the internet at the moment. Talking about quality,content,updating, etc etc etc....To understand what has happened just look around the message boards and read about what has actually happened to professional quality websites with tons of top quality content...this panda update is a disaster, and I think it will prove to be seen as one by google in the end....Here is just one such site read this and visit the sites talked about and then re-assess what is going on.... go to...---> https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en and scroll down to a comment by HCI Site
here are just a few of the things he notes!!!..Let me first preface that I've been writing original content for my site, www.homeconstructionimprovement.com for almost 5 years. I'm an expert in construction, DIY and home improvement. I'm a respected member of the profession and I travel all over at the request of many large corporations. So when it comes to quality content I'm very certain I offer that. I also receive thousands of comments from folks thanking me for my content and wishing that had found the site sooner.Last Friday I saw a 40%+ drop in traffic. To say I'm upset would be an understatement. Check out a few examples below to see why I'm really upset.Example #1Keyword Term - Basement InsulationMy article https://www.homeconstructionimprovement.com/how-to-insulate-basement-walls/Used to rank between #3 and #4 along with several other industry experts (I think it's important that I point out many of us in this niche have years of experience and expertise that we share with our content).Now the site ranks #6 which doesn't sound all that bad but it sure ads up on 2,000 articles. So what burns my ass is two results that now show up ahead of mine.https://www.basementinsulation.net/ - This site/article is clearly written by someone who has absolutely NO experience in the industry, it's written by someone with horrible english and 95% of it is crap. If this isn't spam I don't know what is.https://www.homeimprovementweb.com/information/how-to/basement-insulation.htm - This has extremely outdated incorrect information about how to properly insulate a basement. It's also not original content!Example #2Keyword Term - Foam Board InsulationMy article https://www.homeconstructionimprovement.com/foam-board-insulation-values/Used to rank #4.Now it ranks #9 below some really crappy sites including:https://www.foamboardinsulation.net/ - This site / article has only one purpose and that was to rank for that single term. There's nothing of value on it and it's probably one of the best examples of spam I've seen.Example #3Keyword Term - Asphalt Driveway CostMy article https://www.homeconstructionimprovement.com/cost-asphalt-driveways/Used to rank #1Now it ranks #3 behind one fishy site:https://www.drivewaytips.com/costsomuc.html - This site is a mess again, hard to believe this is better quality.
Just visited your website to see your basement insulation article. Here's my thoughts...
- the visitor gets slapped in the face with a huge adsense ad above the content.
- the page takes an awful long time to load... reeealllyyyy freeeeekiiinng looooong
- then visitor is slapped in the face with the "expert tips and advice" popup
- your content is duplicated on many different URLs
- outbound links hit affiliate sites or are textlinks hitting other websites - some dubious IMO
I think that you have good content but the presentation with the ads and links is insulting to visitors. You were complaining really loud about this - there's an unbiased two cents.
It doesn't matter who you are, its all about how you treat the visitor.
EGOL: You said:
"the visitor gets slapped in the face with a huge adsense ad above the content."
I have always found it strange when people say this. Isn't Adsense a Google product? I have a few sites that have Adsense on them and the Adsense staff would tell me the best placement for ads. Do you know where the say to place it? ABOVE THE FOLD!
I just don't understand why a site would be penalized for placing Adsense above the fold when thery are told to do so! Plus, Adsense is a Google product so why would they penailze anyone for using it?
Visit the page and see for yourself.
I am all about adsense... but not like this.
Also wouldn't having an adsense ad at the top like that increase your bounce rate and reduce your pageviews. This goes to the point of the video above.
What a valuable video! Thanks SEOmoz and thanks Rand (by the way I own The Art of SEO book you collaborated on - it's been SO useful/helpful!)I love the philosophy of the Panda update because we’ve always been about user experience - things like writing stimulating copy that educates people whilst they’re reading about our company and trying very hard to word the issues we have to repeat (eg industry regulations or governing body info - that’s needed for a bottom-up architecture) in a way that reading it a second or third time doesn’t bore the visitors. I’ve not had the time to really study our site metrics to know how it’s affected our SERP; I’ve been working too hard on changing over to our new Drupal site (www.ciaalarms.co.uk) for that.Your video has however, reminded me that there are a few outstanding content issues; some forms not working, etc, that clearly need urgent attention. Once I’ve sorted these I’d love a visit from Google’s Quality Raters. Is it just a case of hoping they find your site or can you submit to a queue somewhere?toeknee
Hi (again) Rand
...or anyone else for that matter. Does nobody no of a way of attracting the Google Quality Raters to a site???
Antony
On the topic of sharing, I have been starting to use addthis to my site and my newetters. Are there any great ones out there, that help with SEO and better ranking since the new panda update?
Thanks,
did not notice any change in France …
maybe soon
thanks for sharing !
Sebastien
Has anyone seen surveys, metrics or reports indicating greater user satisfaction, better quality search results etc relating to the numerous recent Google updates ? I haven't.
These updates supposedly relate to search quality but most of the anecdotal evidence in blogs, comments etc suggests people are less satisfied with Google (including market share losses to MSN).
I now view these updates as "The Emperor's New Algorithm Change" - whatever the motive it doesn't seem to be quality - is there any data from Google or third parties to support or refute this view ?
Great Video Rand,
This was my first white board friday, be sure i'm a be here every friday now!
I went from 40 000 unique visits daily to 12 000... we are getting outranked by some smaller sites with barely any back links! We have a bouce race of 30% average page visited is 6+ I'm really not sure what to do at this point should I wait until everything settles and the serps stop moving or should I go back to the drawing board and revamp my entire website?!?
We have regained a few major keywords today doing nothing not enough to get us back to where we use to be before last june 16th... Looking at GA is depressing lol.
Anythoughts on what should be my next move... Wait another week?!?
Thanks
Great Whiteboard.
I found a lot of truth in Rand's comment; "It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist." In recent conversations with senior executives, the talk quickly turned from key words to website redesigns and social media-based campaigns. SEOs are definitely now in the interactive driver seat.
I really hope the new Panda update is able to determine relevancy of content from different times, too. I know it's really hard to categorize a website, especially for a machine, but I really hate looking up things having to do with programming and code and finding nothing but posts from 2006 using methods that are now depreciated or irrelevant to today's practices and features.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing how this new algorithm works out for all of us.
Thanks for this detailed explanation of the Panada philosophy.
It would be great if you could give a few examples of sites that are "liked" by the Panda alo, so that we can learn and improve
the user behavier you described might fit very well to content sites, but what's about online shops? I guess it might be a very good profile for an online shop if users find the product they look for very fast, buy it with few clicks and leave site short after they dropped in. So a good online shop might have the oposite user-metrics than a news-site or a blog.
That occured to me too.
Great article!... I have been hit quite badly... i was position 3 page 1 on google pre panda. I have now dropped to page 5 position 1. This for me is really bad as the sites on page 1 for my main keyword search are what i can second rate companies and websites. One website has not been updated since 2008, and half the pages don't work.
I am scratching my head wondering what i need to do to get back on top. I am trying high quality backlinks but this will take a few weeks to properly kick in, and also article submission.
Google 'recognising' better content sounds potentially dangerous to me (how much can a computer really know what people are looking for in terms of content?), but I think that a higher concentration on usage metrics makes perfect sense.
It sounds pretty elementary to me - if people are viewing a lot of pages and spending a lot of time on the site, then they are obviously finding it useful. Therefore, Google should rank it higher so that more people are exposed to it.
Thanks, a cool and clear overview of what Panda does, what I would like to see more of is the kind of sites that will be affected by Panda, one thing I dont fully buy is the wow factor needed for every page of a website. The motorcycle part being the point in case, no one is going to retain Walt Disney or Shakespear to jaz up part pages pages in great quantiites so Panda must ulimately make it harder to perfrom SEO in highly competed for spaces rather than the domestica world of the small to medium sized compnay in say the United Kingdon where we are still way behand the use of the internet than the USA.
Panda does not seem to be targeting merely spammy (at least in appearance) sites, as far as I can see, do any "accommodation" search and you will see the same type of sites. As you say it has more to do with popularity and trust or perhaps in some categories just the best of the whats available (as in the accommodation affiliate market). Things like images, video, judicious use of tags and categories, are a few on site indicators items that are on the ascendant from my recent observation.
i like the idea od being a "web strategist" rather than an SEO. Think i'll try it out and see how ir fits!
Thanks Rand, I was good practice to read the articles of SEOmoz! I noticed a lot of demagoguery among the various users who commented on the Whiteboard Friday! In little words, too much smoke and no real solution has yet been found. Many are only hypotheses and try to read your post for a return in terms of visits and dissemination. In reality, things that should be discussed by Seo, who have good customer are for example: The content of each page should describe the extent to which what you offer? Insert links in niche forums, can help? Spread each link to its page of the new article, can you help? Create campaigns of free gifts when you participate in surveys on its own website, can you help? And these things that we should speak, otherwise it's just for me "petteguless"! Do not you think? Paolo
How funny. My title on my business cards WAS "Web Strategist". I must be psychic! All my clients should watch this video - those who think they know a bit about SEO and content - it really outlines how Google is working now, and how the playing field has changed.
it really outlines how Google is working now, and how the playing field has changed.
Really? No offense but we heard Rand's OPINION, that's all. Not how Google works, but it may work or how it could /should work.
great video, speaker and enthusiastic show ) SEO has never been just linkbuilding /ranking thing, but about user experience, correct content delivering.
The ever increasing influence and importance of understanding user behavior/psychology and conversion optimization.
Really an interesting post based on panda update..
Thanks Randfish!
Great Presention to the Idea. We should change our mindsit to SEO daily tasks ..
Thanks, great ideas and presentation!
Hi Guys! Quick question, and this is something that has been playing around in my mind with regards to Panda.
Say for example that I own an ecommerce website, and my business is run by merchants hosting their stores on different subdomains such as mystore.ecommerce.com. Am I practically farming, if the sole purpose of my main domain, ecommerce, is to display search listings for products listings hosted on some 125,000 subdomains?
Looking forward to your ideas.
Thanks,
Jurgen Estanislao
P.S. By the way, great WBF, sort of reminded me of my post about optimizing beyond SEO a while back (Heightened Senses: Optimizing Beyond SEO | Search Engine Journal https://bit.ly/fPHa9h)
WOW! Its like being more practical and realistic than relying on some old theory. This would be FuN! :)
Excellent WBF Rand, thanks. Jean Madden
Rand, great post and explanation of what is going on with the Panda update and I am exciting to see the metrics that we all find inside of analytics coming more to the front - time on site, bounce rate, number of pages viewed...etc. These things I think we can control within a reasonable budget through a decent looking site but in regards to compelling content I would love to see some examples of how to make 100+ motorcycle part pages exciting or even a website that has all car make/models/trims/spec etc....and within a reasonable budget. Very similar to the questions brough up by SandraMoz and ICTADVIS.
Anyone have examples of this?
You inspired me to think more about this - and i have to rename my strategy from SEO Page to WOW page. you also inspired me to visualize this and here is what i got : https://www.pantagos.com/visual . TY Great Video!
What an excellent video, really helped get me up to speed with what exactly Panda is about. In fact it made me want to sign up to this site!
Google with this Panda Update has proved that :
If your site helps Google achieve its objectives of 'QUALITY SEARCH RESULTS' then the Google Algorithm helps your site achieve its objectives of SERPs and Search Visibility.
The Panda update is indeed a great initiative indeed by Google to reward the overall quality of the site. Once this algorthmic update is finally put in place Google will not only become a source if information but a source of reliable knowledge.
I would like to share our views further as mentioned on our blogpost published a few days back:
Understanding And Adapting To The Google Panda Update - A Simple, Systematic, Straight Forward Approach
Rand`s facial expression on the first frame of the movie ;)
Hey Guys,
Maybe I'm wrong but... at my own opinion , google should care everyday even more about how the peoples see and interact with a website... I think some softwares which submit pre-made content to a bunch of forums and blogs will be hurt from this update... I totally agree with the changes made by google.
From now on, maybe peoples will care much more about make unique css and visual website prospective...
Good...
Great explenation of the panda update, Rand! :-)
Great post Rand, thanks!
Great video really enjoyed that and I am a big fan of the panda update as our site actually benefited from the updates as we alwaays thought our site was more interesting than the sites that were obviously built to get high in the ranking but didnt have great user experiience, and yes i am pleased some of those companies have been penalised. The only problem for the smaller sites is having the resources to compete against the bigger ones especially when it comes to user experience, thanks again really enjoyed it
Personally I am a little bit worried about the „human factor“. How will the so called quality checkers judge websites that are not created with the purpose to inform or deliver important informations but are just there to touch the visitor’s emotions in order to sell a certain product? For example: how will panda find the “best” Hotel in a certain town? All Hotel Pages will have more or less the same content, right? Is the one with the fanciest design or the best picture on the home page going to dominate the serps?
You forget about user reviews of hotels, accommodations and social signals, these are all included to tell one hotel website from another and point Google in the right direction regarding quality.
But then aggain Hotel citations still cause problems, I have seen 100's of cases where Hotel citations by Google are wrong and spammers hit them hard.
Thanks so much for a lovely whiteboard session. :)
Another Thank You! from the Coye Law Firm editorial staff for a helpful and informative video! Now we will be able to make the best use of our time optimzing for SEO! Thanks again.
[link removed]
Loved it. And I shared it, blogged about it, linked to it :)
Keep up the good job Rand
This is a little out of context but a lot of comments have got a thumbs down when there is really no reason why they should!! I noticed this because of a thumbs down for my comment but then saw this for a couple of other comments as well!! weird.
Great post! I could really learn a lot form this post... Thanks for sharing... I never heard of Panda yet, but this caught my attention... Thanks for the post....
Gotta love this game... always changing
It helped me a lot!!!!
already lots of comments, so I'll be short: a very interesting and instructive post, thanks Rand
This information is good for all internet bloggers. thanks for sharing this post and the video.
We love Google panda. Vab Media has gotten treated very well. Vab Media just went from a page rank 3 all the way up to page rank 5. Totally stoked. Great post. check out our site. https://vabulous.com/search-engine-optimization-services/seo-case-studies/
Great WBF. It definitely covers a lot of the Panda changes.
Awesome Post! Spotted all the metrics I need to focus on my analytics and wel defined the great new era of SEO and finally I want to thank Google for keep bringing Panda Updates as they are bringing more values to quality sites.
Rand, this is truly an awesome video... It did help us to work on the metrics listed out here and make our pages more shareable.. there needs to be a webinar on this topic for sure.. I hope whatever changes are coming in the future as Panda version x holds good for everyone and for us... Amazing post!
This is a great overview, Rand. Panda has improved results, for sure. But it will be much harder to simply "optimize" for search without giving clients a total image of how their presence, not just their pages, should exist on the Web.
And we will get arguments. I just had one with a client about scraped content. Argh.
Enjoyed the video! Thanks!
This is one of the best videos I've seen on Panda. Great presentation too.
Favorite quote: It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. I am an SEO Strategist :)
Clear and concise! The message is quite clear.The user metrics was very helpful and should be analyzed frequently to ensure what you are tinkering with is working.As for the SEO community I think the posts below hit the nail on the head. Provide your client with value by implementing great, robust content and, in turn, the entire web community will beneift.
This video really summed it up for me!! one of the things that baffle me is how can sites with "junk characters" rank so well despite being.. junk!!!! How come Panda hasnt affected such sites?? Or is it that panda has not been released for multilingual sites??
Great article for Panda!
That really was a great informative and interesting video
I too would love to hear about well-ranking sites getting punished by the update. I definitely support getting things cleaned up and I'm glad Google took the initiative to toss some of the bad apples out of the barrel. Once again, doesn't this come back around to taking an ethical approach to business? There's no reason to reward the link farms and other such shady practices... go Google :)
Thanks for the insights Rand - looking forward to more followups on Panda as the year progresses!
Nice post Rand. And nice number of comments! :p
Wonderful updates and greate inputs on Google panda.
Thanks for sharing Rand.