Panda Algorithm – 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 Tools & Process to Fix Google Panda Penalty

Gregory Lee — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 07:02:16 +0000

Updated: December 26, 2012

Google, Bing and Yahoo cracked down hard on duplicate content starting December 2010. Penalties hit hardest on February 24, 2011 in the Google Panda algorithm update. Bing and Yahoo rankings followed suite.

How To: The SEO Tools and Process to Address Duplicate Content

Comparison SEO Tool

An SEO services client with which we work has developed multiple websites for different brands, but the client recycled the content. Instead of writing 100% unique text for each website, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages were used universally across multiple websites. They were getting away without noticeable revenue loss, so despite existing duplicate content penalties (though not actual penalties – more accurately wasting crawl budget and possibly dividing link juice) on interior entry pages, the client decided it was not a big enough priority to rewrite all the content … until now.

February search engine algorithm updates penalized entire websites that have pages similar to any other site that the search engine credits as the originator. Even if words are rearranged and the brand name is switched out, the Google algorithm is not fooled. Google chooses one website as the originator and penalizes the others.

In late 2010, various rankings started to slip. On February 24th, clients with duplicate or similar content across different websites saw a total drop off for #1 ranked keyword phrases. Google guidelines for duplicate content indicate that the algorithm perceives these similar pages as “deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic“.

By the way, these guidelines were [initially] updated March 20, 2011, less than a month after the [first] Panda algorithm update.

Systematic Process of Identifying and Addressing Duplicate Pages

If you are intimately familiar with your websites, like this search engine optimization consultant is, you already know which pages are similar and possibly causing duplicate content penalties. If you are an SEO agency taking on a new client with duplicate content issues, leaving it up to you to figure out where the duplicates are within their online properties, then you may need a few SEO tools to help identify possible duplicate pages.

UPDATES: Google Panda Filter Dates
Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 weeks later)
Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later)
Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
Panda Update 2.51: October 9, 2011 (minor filter update about 2 weeks later)
Panda Update 2.52: October 13, 2011 (minor filter update)
Panda Update 3.0: October 19, 2011 (3 weeks later)
Panda Update 3.1: November 18, 2011 (3 weeks later)
Panda Update 3.2: January 18, 2012 (8 weeks later)
Panda Update 3.3: February 28, 2012 (refresh to update index 6 weeks later)
Panda Update 3.4: March 23, 2012 (refresh to update index 3.5 weeks later)
Panda Update 3.5: April 19, 2012 (refresh to update index 4 weeks later)
Panda Update 3.6: April 27, 2012 (refresh to update index 8 days later)
This has become crazy to update. Just check the SEOMoz Google Algorithm Change History.

To determine if your website fell victim to a Panda filter, check your traffic. Panda “penalizes” your website by dropping your rankings, not just on pages with duplicate or thin content, but universally across your website – including your homepage. If you were hit by the Panda Filter, you will see a significant traffic drop on one of the dates above. Subsequently, if you address the issue, your traffic should be adjusted the next time the Panda filter runs. Each time the filter runs, it updates the Google index.
Update: February and March 2012 updates were merely when the Panda Filter was run again in order to refresh the Google index, so that changes made to websites will be reflected in Google. In other words, if you implemented fixes to get out of the Panda Filter before February 28 or March 23, you can check traffic at those dates to see if your fixes did the trick.

Identify Duplicate Content

This paid tool makes your process simple, but costs money. Copyscape is a tool for finding copyright and plagiarism offenders. Since Google generally penalizes the copier and not the original author, plagiarism is not an SEO issue. For this reason CopyScape is not a regular part of the SEO arsenal of tools. Don’t ask me why as an SEO I even know about it, but I’ve known about it for years (guess that’s part of the multidisciplinary Blend SEO approach).

The process to identifying duplicate pages is, using the paid version called CopySentry, you can feed it your non-penalized website and let it find the duplicate content out there amidst your penalized websites.

Using free tools takes a little more time and effort. Download and install A1 Sitemap Generator, a great sitemap generator program with a fully functional free 30 day trial.

Run a scan of your penalized website. It will generate a list of pages of the website, ignoring those blocked by robots.txt, following any redirects or canonical tags – meaning you have a list of webpages that spiders crawl.
Among the sitemap output choices, you can create a text file list of page URLs with each URL on a separate line.
Paste this list into excel and start your search for duplicate content. Use your intuition and Google to check blocks of text. If a different website ranks number one for any block of text, that website is credited as the originator. Mark this URL and the originator URL.

Test or Check Duplicate Content

Once you have a list of pages from your penalized website and their counterpart on the originator website, you will want to check their similarity. Are they similar enough to require a rewrite? Run the URLs through a webpage comparison or duplicate content checker tool. After you go through several pages between two sites, you will eventually get a feel for where the cut-off is for rewrite verses no rewrite. Any pages with similarity higher than your cut-off require a writer to take a look for the duplicate or similar language. Similar content on the penalized website must be completely rewritten.

Update: Unfortunately, my favorite duplicate content diagnostic tool has been abandoned.
This first similarity tool is my favorite. Some only give a single percentage, letting you wonder how much of that similarity is due to non-visible code. This tool tells you, without inundating you with too much information. There’s no captcha, so checking through your list is quick. I embedded the form below, so you can try it here.
Duplicate Content Check

This next tool, embedded below simply gives you a single percentage. Depending on the template between your penalized and originator websites, the number you get will seem pretty low. My cut-off with this tool was about 10%. Anything over 10%, required a copywriter to rewrite the page or at least a section of the page.

This comparison SEO tool by SEO Book compares the page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring on different pages.

Here are several more alternatives you can try.

The post SEO Tools & Process to Fix Google Panda Penalty appeared first on Blend SEO.

Panda Content Farm Google Algorithm Update and Duplicate Content

Gregory Lee — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 23:14:20 +0000

How the Demand Media Content Farm Works

If you are in the SEO business or work with a search engine optimization consultant, you’ve heard about the recent Google algorithm shift known as the Panda Algorithm update, Farmer update, or Content Farm update.

The big break on the story is in an interview between Cutts and Singhal of Google with Wired Magazine.

Here are the major take-aways as of now.

Little has been said about link farms. The main issue seems to be your content, as apposed to your back links. Scraper websites are those that automate content by republishing that which is already on other websites. Content farms generate content with little value in order to capture search traffic. Take a look at the info graphic about how the Demand Media content farm works [Image Source].

This is not a new issue. Apparently, Google’s technology on how they filter, analyze and make decisions on duplicate content has changed. As far as white-hat SEO, the rules are still the same. The penalties just got a bit more serious.

Some of my SEO client sites, despite warnings about duplicate content still don’t realize they have significant duplicate content. A new SEO business client who owns hundreds of domains was pointing different domains to the same webserver, serving the exact same website – same IP address and everything. Only the website domain credited as the originator will sustain rankings.

In other situations, the same text copy is used on several pages of a sister company websites under different brands. It used to be that the duplicate pages from these re-branded websites would not rank. Now the entire site is losing overall rankings.

This kind of thing means they are due for copy writing frenzy. Find the offending pages – those that use the same copy from other sites and rewrite them as unique.

You can post your new page of copy on a live test bed site and check how similar it is to the other page using this tool.

[Update: March 31, 2011]

My update to this article, along with in depth background on the history of the biggest search engine algorithm changes was posted today on the Medium Blue blog. I provide search engine optimization research and development for Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing.

The post Panda Content Farm Google Algorithm Update and Duplicate Content appeared first on Blend SEO.