Google Launches Panda 4.0

The Panda algorithm, which was designed to help boost great-quality content sites while pushing down thin or low-quality content sites in the search results, has always targeted scraper sites and low-quality content sites in order to provide searchers with the best search results possible.

Panda 4.0, which Google and Matt Cutts confirmed began rolling out yesterday, has definitely caused some waves in the search results. However, the fact that Panda 4.0 is also hitting at the same time as a refresh of an algorithm targeting spammy queries like payday loans makes it a little bit more difficult for webmasters to sort through the damage.

With the payday loans refresh impacting extremely spammy queries and Panda targeting low-quality content, some webmasters could potentially get hit with both of these or by just one or the other.

While usually people complain about losing rankings, Alan Bleiweiss from AlanBleiweiss.com showed via Twitter that Panda can also bring about some serious improvement to a site's traffic as well.

Prior to Cutts confirming via Twitter that Panda 4.0 hit, there had been plenty of speculation about a change with either Panda or Penguin, although many found it hard to pin down exactly what the change was.
"It was interesting to see the chatter amongst SEOs over the last few days," says Marie Haynes of HIS Web Marketing. "We all knew that something was going on, but there was significant disagreement on exactly what Google was doing. Most of the black hats were saying that it was related to Penguin because they were noticing huge drops in their sites with the spammiest link profiles."

This would have been the changes to the payday loans update, where the goal is to target the spammiest search queries Google sees. There was also plenty of debate on forums and Twitter about whether the shake-up we saw was Panda-related or Penguin-related. And with the payday loans update thrown in there for good measure, it was definitely confusing.

"I was really hoping that this wasn't a Penguin refresh because the majority of the sites that I had done link cleanup on were not seeing any improvement and if Penguin refreshed and none of my clients were seeing ranking increases, then that would not be good," Haynes says. "I was also puzzled because one site that I monitor that has been adversely affected by several Panda updates saw a vast improvement today. It does not have a bad link profile and would not have been affected by a Penguin update. "

"When I heard the announcements that Google had released two algorithms over the last couple of days – payday loans and also a big Panda update, everything made sense. And still, so many of us are waiting for that big Penguin refresh. It wouldn't surprise me if that happens in the next couple of days," she says.
Google has said previously that they try not to throw multiple updates at once or within a very short period of time, so it is interesting that they pushed out two completely unrelated updates – although updates that could both impact some the same sites – within a couple of days.

Releasing two back-to-back updates makes it a lot harder for webmasters to analyze the changes and what specifically was targeted in these updates, and could affect Google's ability to evaluate how well (or not) the two updates worked. It also means webmasters might have a challenge knowing what changes need to be made in order to recover search rankings.

However, Haynes speculated that some of the Panda change might have been to reverse some of the damage done to sites that had great content yet were impacted for other on-page reasons.
"I think it's too early to say what this new iteration of Panda is affecting, but I can tell you that in the case of the site that I saw big improvements on, no cleanup work had been done at all," Haynes says. "It was always in 'Panda flux.'"

She says some Panda refreshes would hit it hard and then occasionally the site would show a slight increase with a refresh.

"This is by far the biggest increase, though," Haynes says. "It really is a good-quality site and I believe that what caused it to be affected by Panda in the first place was a site layout that caused crawlers to get confused. Underneath that confusing layout is a site full of really good content. It may be that Google found ways to see past structural issues and recognize the good content as the structural problems would not affect users, just crawlers. But really, that's a guess."

Panda first blazed onto the scene in February 2011, and was believed to be Google's response to criticism of how well content farms were ranking. Google later announced that they internally called it the big Panda update, after Navneet Panda, the Google engineer who created it.

While there have been many smaller Panda updates and a couple larger ones, each rolled out monthly over a period of 10 days, Google had announced several months ago that Panda would be integrated into the algorithm updates and that the "softer" Panda would be less noticeable. However, that clearly isn't the case with Panda 4.0, which has had a widespread impact, both positively and negatively.
Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz also studied the changes they saw from the latest Panda update, and noticed that eBay got hit particularly hard.

    Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the "Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top 10).

In fact, Meyers notes that eBay's drop was so significant that it dropped from 1 percent of their queries to 0.28 percent. It won't be surprising to hear of more sites who have seen a drop due to Panda 4.0 – especially sites that have been notorious for having low quality content.

We will definitely see more come out in the next few days as webmasters and SEO professionals have a chance to evaluate the changes and what might have caused sites (either their own or competitors) to either rise or fall in Google's search results. And since we're still awaiting a Google Penguin update (Penguin 2.0 launched a year ago this week), I wouldn't be surprised if we see one of those updates coming soon, especially in light of Google releasing both the payday loans and Panda 4.0 so close together.

For more detail visit us:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2345884/Google-Launches-Panda-4.0

Verisign Blames Google For Drop In Domain Registration & Renewal Rates

The number of new domains being registered, and existing domains being renewed, is slowing down and Verisign — the company that operates the .com and .net domain registries — says Google is a main reason why.

On the company’s Q3 earnings call yesterday, Verisign shared the following data related to domain registrations and renewals:

    total .com and .net domain registrations grew only one percent in Q3, below the company’s previous guidance to investors
    registrations of .net domains were down one percent from a year ago
    the domain renewal rate was 72.3 percent in Q3, down from 72.9 percent in Q2 and from 73.3 percent a year ago

The company gave two reasons for the slowness in registrations and renewals: “macroeconomic headwinds” in Europe and changes in search engine algorithms — more specifically, Google’s ongoing changes.

CEO and President D. James Bidzos spent considerable time discussing Google’s impact, and not just related to the recent EMD update that targeted exact-match domains with low quality content, but also Google changes as far back as 2009.

    First of all, you recall that back in 2009, that was really the first time that we saw a major change in search algorithms that targeted the monetization players who were essentially trying to exploit the search engine algorithm to get themselves placed higher in results so that they can drive traffic and monetize it themselves.

    We saw that over a period of time, after those changes, there was some recovery and the monetization community adapted to it. We saw in 2012, changes which affected Q2, which we’ve discussed with you before.

    I think there is a more serious effort by the search engine algorithm players here to sort of clean up search results and improve the quality, as Pat said, to drive some of the monetization community down further. So we discussed in the last call, the Panda and Penguin programs, for example, that Google utilized where they were targeting content farms, they were targeting keyword stuffers and now, they’re also targeting exact name matches, which typically are monetization names often.

    So for example, if you search for purple blue widgets, and purplebluewidgets.com happens to be a registered domain, that in the past, would’ve been likely to score very high in the search results. However, if the search engine algorithm is tweaked to go out and consider other factors, the age of the domain, how many pages are on it, how fresh is some of the contents and give it a score, essentially, on how likely it is that it’s truly quality content that the searcher might be interested in versus something that had been set up for monetization purposes, I think the search engine algorithms are essentially targeting that kind of traffic to get it out.

Domain Name Wire has compiled some interesting data in its coverage of the Verisign call, showing how new .com/.net registrations have dropped from four million every quarter back in 2007-2008 to 1-2 million per quarter now (see the “Net” column below). And the yearly growth in new registrations, which used to be in the 20-30 percent range, is now down below 10 percent.

domain-registrations

Google’s Panda update and Penguin update could be said to impact domain registrations and renewals over the past couple years — Penguin was launched this past April, while Panda dates back to February 2011.

But what about 2009, when Verisign says it started seeing Google and search engine changes impact its business? Well, there was the Vince update in February of that year. At the time, Google referred to Vince as a “minor change” that relied more heavily on certain trust and quality signals. But to the search engine marketing industry, Vince was a change that favored brands and pushed them higher in Google’s search results. And that’s exactly the kind of change that would impact webmasters that were trying to make money online via new domains, parked domains and, really, any domain that didn’t meet Google’s standards for trust and quality.

In its call yesterday, Verisign told analysts that it expects to add between 0.9 million and 1.3 million new .com and .net domains in Q4 — down from the 1.4 million added in Q3.

Google: EMD Update

The EMD Update — for “Exact Match Domain” — is a filter Google launched in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content — or those previously missed by EMD — may get caught. In addition, “false positives” may get released. Our latest news about the EMD Update is below.

Introduction – What Is SEO

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.
This SEO tutorial covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

•                       How Search Engines Work 
• • The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren't. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.
  First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.
  What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you'd better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. - in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.
                                                
  After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.
  When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.
  There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.
  The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.
  
  
  •  Differences Between the Major Search Engines  
   
• Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.
  There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.
   
  

   

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SEO TOOLS

Backlink Tracker Pro
Free tool to check your paid / traded inbound links. Get notifies when your inbound links have been removed or transformed to search engines inbound links.
Similar Page Checker
Google are known to target sites that contain repeat / identical articles. Your articles could be just like other sites on the Internet, or webpages from within your own web page could be just like each other. This device allows you to figure out the amount of likeness between two webpages
Search Engine Spider Simulator
This tool simulates a search engine crawler by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a search engine would see it. It also displays the links that a search engine would follow (crawl) when it visits the webpage.

Backlink Anchor Text Analysis

This device help you figure out the weblink textual content used by your inbound links to weblink to your wesbite

Backlink Builder

This device allows you develop a LOT of excellent inbound backlinks. It looks for sites of the concept you specify that contain look for phrases like "Add link", "Add site", "Add URL", "Add URL", "Submit URL" etc, most of the outcomes could be prospective inbound backlinks. Backlinks are essential for position well in google.

Backlink Summary

This device provides you with a conclusion of your opponents inbound links. 

Keyword Density Checker

This tool will examine the specified URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and shows the density of your keywords.

Redirect Check

It is import that a search engine is able to follow any redirects that you may have set up. This tool helps you determine whether the redirect you have created is search engine optimization friendly.

Reciprocal Link Check

This tool helps you ensure that your weblink lovers are backlinking to your web page. It also determines the anchor-text used by your weblink lovers to backlink to your web page.

Domain Age Tool

Mature domain names may get a minor side in serps. This device shows the estimated age of a web page on the Online and allows you to perspective how the web page checked when it first began. It also allows you discover out the age of your opponent's domain names. 

Keyword Suggestions Tool

This device will help you figure out appropriate and well-known key terms relevant to your website. 

Website Keyword Suggestions

This resources tries to figure out the concept of your website and provides search term recommendations along with search term visitors reports. 

URL Rewriting Tool

This Search Website Optimization device allows you turn powerful URLs into fixed looking HTML URLs. 


Keyword-Rich Domain Suggestion Tool

 
Having a KEYWORD-RICH website is an important aspect for Search Engine Search engine optimization. This tool will suggest search term wealthy areas.


           

SEO Technique

SEO Techniques are a set of specific tasks that would be performed by a Search Engine Optimization Company, when employed by a Client who desires high search engine positions to attract targeted traffic, with the intention of increasing their conversion rates and brand awareness.

Effective Website Optimization should enable the Search Engines to Index a site, utilising the most relevant keywords, related to the content which is promoting the goods and services offered by the Client. Implementing successful SEO Techniques require's an extensive knowledge of logic and a very good understanding of the targeted market sector.

Search Engine Optimization must be focused towards Human visitors in order to achieve good quality traffic and conversion rates. Page Content should be specific, informative and relevant to a search query. Writing relevant, quality content is one of the most important factors or SEO Techniques, which will unlock the doors of your website to real visitors.

A website is a visual and graphic interface to a Company. The web designer will incorporate many skills including graphic design and expert coding to represent the Clients goods and services, to reflect the quality, expertise and brand of the Client. The foundation of strong SEO Techniques should be developed prior to the website design stage by an SEO Specialist. The combination of a professional web designer and SEO professional working in tandem will result in an effective Internet platform, for Search Engine Marketing.

The are many methods of installing good SEO Techniques, but be aware that there are bad techniques that should not be used and avoided at all cost.

Bad techniques include Hidden Text, Optimizing Irrelevant keywords, linking to bad neighbours, keyword stuffing and Doorway or Gateway Pages. These methods of SEO will reveal very little relevant traffic, bad conversion rates and have a high chance of getting your website banned from the search engine index. These methods are often used by "so called" SEO companies offering services at very, very cheap rates.

The Development of your Internet Marketing Strategy is an ongoing process, when optimizing for natural relevant search engine results. The SEO specialist will become an integral part of the Marketing Team.

Studying Market Trends and the analysis of competitors and consumers, combined with extensive keyword research will form the basis of the optimization methodology and will outline the SEO Techniques required for the Internet Marketing Strategy.

Key factors to combine within the SEO Project Plan are as follows;

Domain Name - Short names are easier to remember ! Include short Primary Keywords ! without hyphens were possible.

Domain Extension - .com or .net For the Global Market. Use .co.uk for UK Country specific traffic

Host Location - If your attracting UK business host in the UK.

URL Names - include relevant keywords - unique to each page.

Robots.txt - A file which permits or denies access to robots or crawlers to areas of your site.

Navigation Structure - Keep it simple.

Meta Tags - Title and Description. - Unique detail for each page, related to page content.

H1 Tags - Use for the short on page content description.

H2 and H3 Tags- Use for Headings for sub category's within the Content

Page Content - Critical Component.

Internal Keyword Link Strategy - Use targeted keywords to link between pages.

Keyword Visibility - Within page Content.

Image Alt Tags - Helps with Accessibility.

Privacy Policy - Assures trust and confidentiality.

The site should confirm to the W3C standards.

Create and submit sitemap's - formatted in either .xml -.htm - .txt.

Create and submit RSS feeds to relevant feed directory's

Create and submit Articles

Find relevant websites within the same market sector or niche and form a link partnership.

Submit your website to relevant or industry related directory's.

A link exchange should be formed by utilising relevant keyword Anchor Text.

Utilise relevant Social Networks and Forums related to your Market Sector.

Utilise Blog sites relevant to your Market Sector.

The above factors are proven SEO Techniques, that will help increase targeted traffic from achieving good or high ranking search engine positions.

Search Marketing Company's require an understanding of logical information processing, this article is a primary example of the organic optimization services provided by WebPageOne Solutions.

AUTHOR: SEO RAHUL TRIPATHI

Using CRO to Make Great Content

This week we are joined by Carlos del Rio from Agillian, who is based here in Seattle, WA. Carlos will discusses a method that will help you make great content by following 3 easy steps. After watching the video dive into the comments and discuss what your thoughts are on using CRO to make great content.
P.S. It looks like we might have also been joined by a fly, so please excuse him when he flies across the screen a few times....

Hey Mozzers. I'm Carlos del Rio. I own a consultancy called Agillian, and I am the author of "User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want" and a "Strategic Framework for Emerging Media," which is kind of a mouthful. Even I have trouble saying it.

I am here today to tell you how to use CRO to make great content, and when I say to make great content, I mean for any portion of your marketing campaign. So, you need to make sure that you meet the most basic portion of conversion optimization. I mean the three things that are the most important for all conversion rates are a clear action, a clear purpose, and a clear value. That's what every landing page is trying to do. That's what every pay-per-click ad is trying to do. Tell a person what you want them to do, tell them what it is about, and communicate what the value they're going to get out of the interaction. So, "Buy tires cheap," or "Buy tires, free delivery." Something where they know what it is that they are coming for and that they get something at the other end. For example, if you are writing a piece of content for your blog, you want to be able to answer, "Is it clear what the purpose of this blog is? Is it clear what the topic is? Is it clear that there is a value for this person to share it with their friends?" Essentially if you are doing blog and content marketing, it is really for the links. We know that's what it's about. Same thing with if you're making LOLcats. Same thing if you're sending out an email to solicit a link buy.

So, in all of your strategies you want to know what is this particular campaign doing. Is it helping our users understand what they can do with us? Is it helping them understand who we are, or is it helping them understand what the value is? Each one of the individual pieces, like each piece of link bait or each email or each tool that you build is supposed to answer all three of these very clearly. You want to know exactly how to interact with it. You want to know what it is going to do. You want to know why is it of value to you.

So, if you take the example of, like, LOLcats, we've all seen these. The difference between the millions of LOLcats that nobody cares about and the LOLcats that end up being in your Facebook stream every 15 minutes are that the ones that get shared answer the clear action, which is share me; what is the purpose, this is a LOLcat; and what is the value, this is the funniest LOLcat that I've seen all day. This is the LOLcat that crosses over with my community. If I was to make a cat playing on a computer that said, "I'm up in your Internet messing with your title tags," you're going to find that funny because you are in SEO, but almost everybody else is going to be like, uh, lame.

If you were, say, This or That, Rebecca Kelley did a thing recently that was, "Does Justin Beiber look like Velma from Scooby Doo?" This enrages both people who like Justin Beiber and people who like Velma. So, what she is doing is creating a place where you interact with this piece of content, and she has two groups of people that want to interact with this type of content. They get to show what they think, and they get a value out of having you know what they think. When they pass this on to their friends who come in and do those three things to derive value for themselves, you get traffic, which you are monetizing.

It is the same thing with the LOLcats. Cheezburger makes money off of people coming to visit. They get people coming to visit by thinking about a clear action, a clear purpose, and a clear value from the perspective of their users.

In the same way, you are here in the Moz community, and they have two kinds of users. They have basic users and they have premium users. Well, they keep building new tools, and they have to think about: What is the action of this tool, what is the purpose of this tool, and is it going to be valuable to the community? When they write out to every one of the basic members and say, "We have this great new tool," they have to really go through this process twice. They have the process of does the tool meet these standards? Is it clear what I can do with the tool? Is it clear what the tool is going to deal with? Is it clear that I can get some value out of it? They also have to write an email that it's very clear what they want you to do, which is switch from being a basic to being a premium user. It has to be very clear what this tool is going to do for you, and it has to be very clear that you're going to derive value out of it. Otherwise, they aren't going to get a good conversion rate.

So, hopefully, these examples will give you something that's actionable for your business and let you take conversion rate optimization into all of the things that you're doing for your marketing.