Google Panda
4.1 Leaked Dos' and Don'ts
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| Google Panda 4.1 Dos' and Donts' |
Hi and welcome guys, today we are going to talk
about Panda 4.1update and the Google leaked dos and don'ts. Recently, another
algorithm named Penguin has been getting a lot of attention in Google. But I
want to make sure that we don't forget about Panda.
Penguin is to SEO as like a serial killer. It's very
scary, and it comes around every now and then and slices and dices websites.
But Panda is more, in my opinion, kind of like a terrorist. He's always kind of
out there. In your nightmares, waiting to strike at any site, whether they
think they're breaking the rules or not. So
I think it's very important to keep Panda in mind, even in the wake of Penguin
craziness.
Panda 4.1 (#27) On Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Google began rolling out a new Panda date. Pierre Far from
Google announced on Google+ a significant Panda update, which included an
algorithmic component. They estimated the impact at 3-5% of queries affected.
Given the "slow rollout," the exact timing was unclear. The latter
point is worth its own blog post, but that’s the not the focus of my post
today. Pierre explained that the new Panda update will result in a “greater
diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher”. He
also explained that the new signals will “help Panda identify low-quality
content more precisely”.
I first spotted the update late on 9/23 when some
companies I have been helping with major Panda 4.0 hits absolutely popped. They
had been working hard since May of 2014 on cleaning up their sites from a
content quality standpoint, dealing with aggressive ad tactics, boosting credibility
on their sites, etc. So it was amazing to see the surge in traffic due to the
latest update.
So what I did, I searched the whole Internet for the
last few months for every single reference of Panda I could find, I filtered
all the references from these materials coming directly from Google of any
reference they made to a quality algorithm, any specific, actionable thing they
said to do based on that quality algorithm.
What I did is I made a complete list, a complete
do's and don'ts list.
The first section is the do list, and I've broken it
down into four major dos that you should pay attention to for your website.
Dos'
Ensure
task completion
Google's been talking a lot about task completion,
not only on mobile side, but also on the desktop side as well. When I searched
all the Google sources for this information, I found that they talk about
having worry about your user metrics, what users are doing on your site,
whether or not they're satisfied with your content, whether they're bouncing
back to Google, or they're leaving your site to go directly to some other site.
So I defined that all down to say ensure task
completion. Whatever tasks that page is supposed to complete, you want to make
sure it completes it. If it's a sign-up page, you need to make sure they sign
up. Above the fold, you want to make sure it loads in the first three seconds
and the main content is very clearly a sign-up page, if it's supposed to be a
sign-up page. Or a download page, or if it's supposed to be informative page,
if they wanted top five points on X, Y, or Z, or on IIT exam, what are the five
top best things about IIT, it should say that above the fold so they can
complete that task and Google can make sure they can track that they complete
that task.
Of course, your analytics will tell you whether or
not you're succeeding in that regard. If you see a lot of drop offs on that page
that could be a problem because those could be bounces back to Google.
Offsite References
So what kind of references am I talking about? I'm
taking about any possible reference that you can get. By with Google can identify
that this is a quality site, that people recommend this site, that's what you
want. So you want people in the social world talking about you, sharing you,
any of the major social networks, I don't care. Also, you want the experts in
those particular social networks talking about you. Because Google knows very
well who the experts are, and they definitely will take into consideration if
experts are talking about your content. At least, this is what I found on my
list.
Also, everyone knows you want links. But the links,
of course, should be topical. If there is a forum or a blog or a magazine in
your industry or a newspaper, anything like that in your industry, if they're
not talking about you, that's a problem. You need to make sure that they're
talking about you, and, of course, it should be in a positive way. Hopefully,
they're not talking about you in a negative way. That could be an issue.
Finally, you need to make sure you get reviews. The
four star rating, nine out of ten blips, whatever it is, you make sure you get
reviews, and they should be on independently verified sources, but also that
Google can read, so Yelp, Zagat, and Google+. That is all telling Google that
this site is a quality site.
Reputable
business information on every page
Three, you want to make sure you have reputable
business information on every page. This was something that was a little
confusing, that a lot of people don't know about. You need to make sure that
you have on every page your address, your phone, and contact information. You
want to make sure on your site you have a strong mission statement, a strong
company directory. Not just a standard WordPress form, where you click it and
it might email somebody or it might not. You need to make sure that all the
business information on your website, the phone number, the address are current
and correct and that they can easily contact you and tell that you're a
reputable business from any given page. This includes copyright information as
well. You want to make sure your copyright is up to date on the site.
Mention your sources
Google is a company run by academics and so it
should be unsurprising to find that these academics want you to -- what did they
tell you in college -- mention your sources. So if there are any big Wikipedia
articles or any larger industry related websites that talk about your
information, you should be giving a link to those people. You should be mentioning
your source and indicating to Google that you're an upstanding web citizen, and
you know who the big dogs are in your industry and you're mentioning those
sources when it is applicable.
There are many more things you should be doing, but
again, I can't go through them all together.
Now let's go to the don’ts. There are many don’ts
but as for now, most important don'ts I've listed here.
Don’ts
Do not repeat keywords anywhere
This is important. You don't need to repeat keywords
too much on page, and you don't need to repeat keywords too much across your
site. You don't need ten pages about your blue shirt, red shirt, and green
shirt. You don't need ten pages about the law you do in Delhi and Singapore and
Thailand or wherever else you're doing law. This is definitely kind of a spammy
signal for Google, and Google has mentioned this a million times in many
different places.
Also you don't need to pepper your text with
multiple keywords either, especially not to link it to other pages on your site
just to try and make Google understand you're about that. Google already knows
you're probably about that topic.
Making
SEO content
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| Google Panda 4.1 hits your poor SEO Content |
You see this sometimes a lot, that people think that
they need to update their blog on a weekly basis, or they have to have that
freshness signal, and they will sacrifice quality of content for rapidity of
publishing.
Again, this is something that Google had mentioned a
many times. This is low-quality content, and you don't need it. If there's no
one to amplify your content, then there's no point in doing so. If you're not
going to publish content that people go "wow" about, then you don't
need to publish it, and you can save that money.
Don’t
forget to close the door
You need to make sure that the spelling and grammar
has been checked, that all the pages have been checked for errors, that there
are no miscellaneous 500 errors, there are no naked Apache 404 errors. You need
to make sure that, essentially the website has been looked over and proofed.
This is, as Google tells us, a direct signal that they're looking for in their
quality algorithms. It makes sense because you don't want to see a site that
has these kinds of errors on it.
Don’t
put too much ad
Finally, number four and this is another
controversial one, is you do not want to interfere with the website usage with
ads. So Google has been very clear in the Quality Raters Guidelines, in
particular, and in a few other leaks from a few other Googlers, that you do not
want to interrupt the user process of them going through your page by having a
giant ad here and a giant ad here and a pop-up that comes up that they have to
click away and then they're scrolling and reading down a little bit more, and
then there's another ad that gets in the way. They have to scroll past that.
This was directly mentioned in the Quality Raters Guidelines as a very blatant,
low-quality site signal.
I know it cuts into revenue, and I know it could be
an issue for some sites to have to consider changing this. But again and again,
every Panda review that I do, I see issues like this as well.
Thanks for paying attention. My name is Deepankar
Dey. You can email me if you have any questions about this or any SEO questions
at all. So thanks very much and we'll see you next time.
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