Hi All,
Apologies for the delay in writing up about SEO on our blog, it is a very popular subject in Gloucester & Cheltenham at the moment and I have the pleasure of working on some really cool, websites, and great local business people to boot. I have been guilty really of not passing on some valuable information and keep SEO at the forefront of peoples minds.
So I am going to try to post at least one blog post per week about SEO…..
Let me start with the “panda” update from Google which some of you may or may not have heard of, anyone who in SEO should certainly have heard of it due to the impact we have seen on search results. I guess the first thing is to assume that those reading this blog post do not know much about SEO at all, to be fair that is who I intend my blog posts to be useful for. If you consider yourself an SEO expert your comments and valuable opinions would be welcome below, however I am not interested in getting into any serious debates.
Let me first explain in simple terms what a Google update is and what it is intended for:
Google is based on an algorithm which is just how Google works out the best search results to provide the user with from the keywords they have searched. The algorithm looks at many factors to determine what it thinks is the best websites to fulfill the users request, in SEO we work towards “ethically” getting your website listed highly for certain keywords through this algorithm process. Google must keep the search results of high quality and to provide the user with the best content, products and services when they search, after all it what will keep Google as the No1 search engine. So to keep the search results fresh and to stop poor quality content from getting the top results Google updates the algorithm which then tweaks what it looks for when listings the search results. Still with me?
So the Panda update was aimed at “content farms” websites which takes information from other sources and websites and looks to get high rankings in the search engines. Google did this update because websites with copied information was getting above the original source for the information in the search results, also these websites were just huge information stores and provided little value for many users. However when Google makes changes to the Algorithm the effects can be felt either positively or negatively on many websites. For example we thought nothing of getting a blog post and using it as an article, also as a PR release making the most of costly time consuming information. This regurgitating of information is now not worth the risk!
A few considerations:
- The Panda update was released in the US first but has now been rolled out across all English based searches
- Google say 12% of searches will be affected by this update
- Google really wants to target website quality
More information can be viewed here at the Google blog
The emphasis now is quality of content, and having unique content which in my opinion is not such a bad thing. It might mean expense in terms of hiring some copy writing professional but the benefits in the long term will outweigh the cost. We can help with copy writing so give me a shout if you want to chat more about it.
We have not seen much of an impact on our clients websites because we have always been careful on the SEO tactics used to ranking well, we believe that you should be ethical in your approach and trying to trick the search engines or taking short cuts by using other peoples information is not a good SEO policy anyway. eHow managed to escape the U.S. roll-out of the Panda update, and actually come out ahead, but the site’s luck appears to have changed, based on the SearchMetrics/Sistrix data. According to the SearchMetrics data, eHow.co.uk took a 72,30% hit in visibility. eHow.com took a 53,46% hit. Sistrix has eHow.co.uk as its top loser with a -84% change.
Check out search metrics list of the top UK losers in search traffic since the update:
So my conclusion is many small businesses should not be affected by the Panda update, if you have noticed a serious drop in search traffic since the Panda update came out then please let us know your experience and importantly why your website has been penalised. I can help Companies look at an SEO strategy that incorporates many ethical methods and uses quality content which is probably not bad thing for the search results.
Adam
Web master (SEO expert)
We offer a leading Gloucester & Cheltenham SEO service we do have client across the UK