Post Panda Optimisation Tips from Jim Boykin at SMX Melbourne 2011
Here are my notes from Jim Boykin from Internet Marketing Ninja’s session on Post Panda Optimisation at SMX Melbourne 2011:
Topic: Post Panda Optimisation
Summary: Content Algorithm Changes, learn how to start keeping up with the updates.
Speaker: Jim Boykin – CEO, Internet Marketing Ninjas
What is Panda – attempt by Google to algorithmically differentiate between low quality and high quality sites. Update designed to reduce traffic to low quality sites
What is Low Quality Content?
Thin Content – Low word count, little educational value, contains numerous spelling and grammatical errors. Before, having stuff in the supplemental results wasn’t going to hurt you, now it does
Duplicate content – copied from another site or instances where same content is used across multiple pages of the same site
Keyword Stuffed Content – overuse of one or 2 keyword pages throughout page content
Easy way for Google to tell – if you released 500 pages at once, all had 3 paragraphs, all with similar word count per paragraph, looks very similar
Ad heavy content – an extremely high number of ads on a page with relatively little content
Low quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s ranking
If you have 10000 page website, 3000 pages are good, but 7000 pages aren’t really good, Google will not only lower those 7000 pages but also those 3000 pages
So it will affect your good pages as well. A few bad apples can spoil the whole barrel
Page that links out to lots of low quality pages can have its score lowered.
Links out to highly trusted web pages on highly trusted site will help trust score, linking out to low quality pages will lower trust
Like passing pagerank in reverse
Panda isn’t just targeted towards content farms! Jim had ecommerce sites hit.
Recommend reading everything on SEObook.com about Panda
SEObooks Private Forum has some good techniques about Panda
Panda has been an algorithmic chance and doesn’t have manual exceptions applied to it
Some sites with high quality content also affected, it means something on the site has triggered a flag, can be hard to find
How to check for duplicate content
Copy 7 to 10 words from your site and search for it in quotes, your site should be number 1 for that search, if other sites can up there is a problem.
Problems with panda is often copied content can rank above yours.
Can also use this to search for site:youdomain.com “put 7-10 word phrase” and you can see internal duplicate content
Panda is about content and usability
Amit Singal from Google says in the Wall St Journal on Feb 24 the day after Panda “we often measure whether users click the “back” button quickly after visiting a search result, which might indicate a lack of satisfaction with the site”
Usability Factors
– Time on Page – if people spending less than 15secs on page, may be problem if they return to google
– Pages Visited – you may have a problem if no one reaches your deep content except from a search result
– Brand Loyalty – are 90% of your visitors first time visitors from search who never return
– Exit Rates and bounce rates – what are people doing on your high exit pages, if they find the answer that is great, but if the bounce rate is 100% and everyone is going to your site from a search in google, then going back to google and clicking on someone else and never returning to your site, that is the worst signal to send to Google
– Recommended tool Grammarly.com
Usability of website now plays a bigger role than ever – try a site called unbounce
Now you can’t have a million pages, need to consolidate stuff down
Engines don’t want a million “spark plug” pages where the only thing different in model numbers, so consolidate content, block content with robots.txt
Take 10,000 pages of content and put into SEMrush, if you see only 300 that rank, beef them up
Not an answer but can help
– Link Building
– Social Media
Jim’s suggested solutions
- Study Google Analytics
- Perform a Clicktale Analysis
Author rank / Agent rank will become more important
Also one factor Amit Singal from Google said was “would someone trust this site with their credit card?” Jim says ecommerce sites really need to have every trust seal in the book
Jim says – when 301 redirecting, there is more power if you take the content from the old page and paste it on the new page. Google will compare it to the cached snapshop and pass more power if same content
Download the slides at IMninjas.com/mel
Username- melbourne
Password- ninja
