Blog Optimization – Blend SEO

Free SEO Consultation Diagnosing PANDA Filter Penalization

Gregory Lee — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:21:36 +0000

Symptoms of Panda Filter Penalty and Strategy to Escape the Filter

Google Panda Filter Strategy

I enjoy giving free SEO consultation and advice. The following conversation string is copied out of emails between myself and the www.rocknrolltv.net?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss website owner who filled out the BlendSEO contact form because she abruptly lost rankings for her blog. Per the website owner’s request, I have omitted her name throughout the conversation.

The unifying theme you can learn from this conversation is that rich, unique content is essential for organic search engine visibility. Content is what the search engines rank. If you have content, optimization is a matter of finessing and organizing the content. As you read below, the ranking problem is due to her website being caught by the PANDA filter. After comparing competitors and with an understanding of what degree of thin or duplicate content trips the PANDA filter, the proposed solution is based on content. There are some great SEO tips in there as well.

Website Owner:

Hello.

I’m interested in possibly hiring your services to help me with our site. We seem to be hitting some penalties with Google. Our site is a music news video show with affiliates. The affiliates give us coupon codes which we have to push. Several of the promo code pages have slipped drastically in the Google rankings and I’m not sure why. I used to be #6 or #7 for “4inkjets coupon code” .. now I am down around #80 or so. This has happened with a few important keywords to me and my income! Please let me know how you work and if you think this is fixable.

Thanks.

Greg at BlendSEO:
Hello [website owner]
You may have either been penalized by the Panda filter, or other competitive coupon websites may have popped up around you crowding you out of top rankings. Do you have access to ranking and/or traffic data? I see you have the Google Analytics code on your site. Did you lose rankings and organic search traffic on a single day or gradually over time? If on a single day, what date? Panda filters were run in January and then approximately every 3-7 weeks afterward. We are currently due for another one any day now.
My first impression is that you have a WordPress blog where the main theme of the content is centered around celebrity news. The coupon code appears to be “thin” content compared to the news content. The other sites ranking on page 1 of Google are completely themed about coupons/promo codes. One initiative of the Panda filter is to rank websites where the site as a whole is a quality resource for the search query. You may have read that one goal for the Panda filter is to eliminate affiliate websites with “thin” content. You don’t really fall in the category of a site with thin content, except in the area of coupon codes. For example, there is a link in you navigation to a “Promo Codes” page that has no content (http://www.rocknrolltv.net/promo-codes?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss). There is not a real strong connection between printer ink, coupon codes and celebrities, but you may be able to gain back some rankings if you start blogging about coupon codes and building out that area of content.

Website Owner:

Hello Greg,

Wow. This is VERY informative. Thank you! I am formulating a plan of attack and repair now.

Yes, the loss in rankings happened suddenly. It happened twice which I thought was odd. My competitors with video shows and affiliates have also dropped so what you are saying in regards to thin content is making sense. Although these guys seem to be holding up better than the rest of us: www.emmaandpete.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss

But all of us have dropped from the top ten as there used to be a little gang of us battling it out. LOL. (all content producers for the same network!)

Good point on the promo codes page. I shall remedy that.

I do have another site or two that I could use just for the coupon codes. www.thesecouponswork.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss It is a little out of date but I could update all of the codes on there and build out the pages etc. And then blog regularly on it to keep things rolling etc etc.

Would you agree that the coupon site would be a better approach and in the meantime, remove dupe content and maybe… start blogging about coupons on the rock n roll tv site? Sort of a two pronged approach?

I appreciate your time with this and if you have time to answer. Great. If not, that’s cool too. It’s hard to figure this stuff out when you’re a video producer/musician first and trying to do SEO the best I can … second! ha ha!

Greg at BlendSEO:
I think the strategy looks good.
Emmaandpete.com has a good amount of content related to the coupons as “Emma’s Blog” (http://www.emmaandpete.com/emma?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) seems to focus on it completely. Also, “Pete’s blog” has tons of really long posts with tons of copy about whatever he seems to be interested in…as well as “Cooper Acres” also has tons of text about it. All this text content makes for very rich content. Videos are great for users who watch them, though they only provide as much search engine friendly content as an image. Those sections of Emmaandpete.com appear to be categories that get pulled into the blog loop on the homepage. With all that on-topic content mixed with other rich content, I’m not surprised they did NOT get penalized for thin content.
SEO Tip
A good rule of thumb for length of text on a post is 200 words.
Also, I notice each of your posts has a smattering of content about several different unrelated affiliates. You might have better luck if each post only talks about one affiliate, and goes a little more in depth talking about that affiliate within the post. Working the subject matter of one affiliate into a post should give that post a more unified and stronger theme of its subject matter. Using a couple links from that tighter themed post back to your affiliate landing page will carry more weight than one link from a loosely related post that also links to several other unrelated landing pages.
Part of the Panda filter penalizes sites that have too many advertisements on one page. I would suggest removing the horizontal banner below each post:

and the one midway down the homepage:
If you do this, and narrow your post content to one affiliate per post, I would not be surprised if you bounce back up the next time the Panda filter is run (it has been run about every 4-5 weeks).
Increase Relevance to Improve SEO
You can take the themes a step further by coming up with a way of categorizing your content so that only certain affiliates are pushed with certain types of rockers. For example if you only push diamond promo codes in articles that mention Aerosmith. Or if you don’t write about Aerosmith frequently you could choose some other way of categorizing the rockers like old school rockers, younger pop stars, older pop stars, etc. Then divide up the affiliates and assign them each to one of these categories. When a post falls into a category, only mention those affiliates assigned to that category. If you consistently associate affiliate content with a type of rocker content, Google will see the pattern and associate them together. As long as you use a logical way to categorize the rockers, Google has probably seen that association before among all the web content in the world.
Another way of building an association between the affiliate content and the rocker content might be to take a literal connection. For example, pushing the 4inkjets in a post about a rocker who has a lot of tattoos, pushing ice/diamonds in a post about a rocker that mentions their jewelry, push match.com in an article that discusses someone’s dating life, etc.
The more consistent you are in presenting the information, the more likely Google is to recognize a pattern in your content. This will strengthen the relevance of your content around your rockers and affiliate related content. Google’s goal is to serve up relevant content for search queries. So keeping the affiliate keywords relevant to your main content will help your rank better for your affiliate content.
Attract Relevant Inbound Links
This consistency between your affiliate content and main content will also help leverage your inbound links. My guess is that your posts naturally receive links because of the video content and rocker news content. The strongest inbound links have meaningful anchor text related to your post content…and those links come from pages that are related to your post content. Aligning your affiliate content with your rocker post content also aligns it with your most powerful inbound links.

Website Owner:

This is incredibly helpful, Greg.

WOW! Thank you so much for answering in great detail. You obviously know what you’re doing and everything you have written makes alot of sense!

I will remove those ads.

What about the 4×4 squares on the side. Do you think maybe keeping two of them is okay? Does it matter if they link offsite to a ‘conversion’ page rather than in the site?

Greg at BlendSEO:
I see you removed 2 of them. It is fine if they link off site, but you need to have rel=”nofollow” in the link code. Not a huge deal, but Google can devalue your links if you allow ads to pass PageRank by not using the nofollow. This is what you have….
It should look like this….

Website Owner:

My only other question for you is this.

Posts should be 200 words. Should I simply use my video script as the post so it is all the rock news? This would provide a post that is very appropriate for the site in terms of searchable terms and be over 200 words at the same time. Then… do what you said and align one affiliate with one rocker type thing and write about that as well.

Greg at BlendSEO:
Using the video script is a great way to do this.

Wow. This is really incredible. Thank you so much.

Okay. I was wrong. One last question. I assume I should not ‘go back’ and make changes to previous posts?

Greg at BlendSEO:
There’s nothing negative for SEO. It’s just your preference. I didn’t want to assume.

Another plan is to puff up the FAQ pages and other personal pages so Google knows we are ‘legit’. (I read that can help?)

Greg at BlendSEO:
Your FAQ, About Us and Contact Us look pretty thorough already, but more content can only help.

Thanks for the brilliant idea. I will implement it today and find a way to redo my categories to align them with affiliates. Very cool!

The post Free SEO Consultation Diagnosing PANDA Filter Penalization appeared first on Blend SEO.

SEO for a Blog Accompanying a Company Website

Gregory Lee — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 02:40:52 +0000

Have you decided to create a blog in addition to your main website? Is it time for a company blog?

How you setup your blog is crucial for SEO.

Where To Install a Blog:
– Subfolders?
– Subdomains?
– Separate Domains?
How to Integrate the Blog into the Main Website Architecture
Optimize Website Navigation Anchor Text
Optimize Blog Categories
What to Remove from the Blog

Steps 1 and 2 (concerning blog location and navigation) were discussed in a previous article on the 5 step process to setup your blog for SEO. As a quick review of these two steps, the strategy for blog SEO is to integrate your blog within your main company website. Typical blog architecture creates a strong web of interlinking. Blogs also attract links from other blogs and directories. The inbound links hit the web-like framework of interlinking and spread authority throughout the blog. Search engines naturally view a blog as a tightly interlinked section of your website. That is why, if you want your blog to benefit your main website, it must be actively interlinked. That means, install it in a sub-folder of your main website, so link authority will count toward the domain, not toward a sub-domain or separate domain.

Step 3 is your first act of optimizing your blog using keywords. Imagine if you were a s search engine starting at the top level of your website. The first thing you read is the domain name. Optimize it. You might take a quick scan of the text near the top of the homepage, and then go right through the main navigation. What do each of the links say in the navigation? What is the file name of each page where they link? The internet is too big to read every inch of every website, so you pull what information you can from a quick preview. Using meaningful keywords in the main navigation anchor text and file names is only logical. And its something every SEO consultant can agree upon.

This concept carries right into the next topic, optimizing blog categories.

Optimize Blog Categories

Approach SEO for your blog categories the same as you would for your main website categories. Each category of your main website is located in your main navigation and is leg of themed content. Your blog now stands as one of those legs. Within it are its own legs. Pick a theme for each category. If you are writing for the reader, than you choose subjects that you know your readers are searching for. Carefully choose relevant keyword rich categories as the legs for your blog. These category names will appear in the category URLs and provide keyword rich anchor text in the blog-wide menu as well as other links throughout the template. You will naturally gain a high percentage of anchor text keyword density on and pointing to URLs with those keywords.

What to Remove from the Blog

Typical items you find on the side of blogs include

categories
recent articles
blog roll links
calendars
date archives
author archives
tags

… and I’m sure you can find more. These devices provide blogs with their biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses. For every article you post, your blog creates multiple views of it, each with a unique URL. This is great for building up a large body of content, however, take it too far, and search engine bots get lost in duplicate content.

SEO for Categories and Recent Articles

The strategy here is to become aware of the URLs created by each device and trim down the duplicate content, leaving each URL looking as unique as possible, even though most content is reused. We already talked about optimizing categories, so those can stay. Recent articles links can also stay, since they simply link to the individual article URL – the same URL you get from the read-more link or article title link to read the individual article. However, you need to consider limitation or removal for each of the other items.

Blog Roll SEO

Your blog roll links give a LOT of link juice away. This might be a good place to link to your main website or other online properties where you have a vested interest. Some bloggers fill this area with endless links out to other bloggers. In doing so, you just have to consider how much link juice you want to hoard or trade. And in the trade, though there may be a reciprocal link sending authority back to you, the visitors that click off to another website may never come back. Therefore, my strategy in the blog roll is to keep it in the family (unless you have a really, really good resource you want to list).

Calendars and Date Archives

I like to completely eliminate calendars and date archives. Calendars are a long known source of duplicate content. If a client insists on having a calendar, its best to use a rel=nofollow in every link of the calendar and disallow it in the robots.txt. The Robots Meta WordPress SEO plugin even gives you the option to disable calendars and date based archives.

Blog Author Archives

Author archives can go either way, depending on your situation. For example, if you only have one author, that author archive will be an exact duplicate of the blog home page. But if you have several authors contributing evenly, your blog content will be split between them. A nice long description from each author will further contribute to making these pages unique. Category pages can be treated similarly. Create a reasonable number of categories and assign each post to just one category. Give each category a unique description of 100 words or more to appear on the category view and every category page will appear unique from the others, with just a fraction duplicate content on the homepage. For example, if you have 7 categories and you set your blog homepage to show the most recent 7 posts, 1/7th of your homepage will be pulled from each category (assuming you write posts in a rotation of categories).

Blog SEO Tags

Tags are nice to keep in the template because they create on-page keyword anchor text. They in a way have replaced meta keywords. Create a tag for every keyword relevant to the article. Spam should be no temptation here since these appear visibly on the blog. However, I don’t like robots indexing those tag pages, since blog themes are pretty tight and after a while, the same keywords are reused over and over. This means the tag archives pretty much look the same from one tag to another (duplicate content). For this reason, it’s a good idea to disallow tag pages using robots.txt. The bot will still crawl the anchor text link on the page, follow the link, crawl the tag page, but won’t include it the tag page in the search index.

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