Was Your Site Mauled By Google’s Panda?

Posted by admin on March 11, 2011 under Coding, Google, Search Engines, SEO, Web Design | Be the First to Comment

To start, there is a very detailed investigation done by Vanessa Fox that really delves deep into the Google Panda update, but I have no intentions of going that deep for you, the basic reader.  Reading her novella on the issue turns me on, but would probably make you sleepy.  So here’s the short of it.  If you got hit by the Google Panda update and saw your rankings plummet, it’s because of low quality, unoriginal content. And if you read Vanessa’s post on this, you’d know how insultingly short that statement really is, but that’s the extent of it.

Google launched an algorithm update called Panda and it affected more websites than they probably expected.  The update was in response to the overwhelming presence of spammy scraper websites that “scraped” their content from other sites.  It affected the sites where the content is primarily duplicate content and who get their popularity from worthless spam links.  These types of sites dominated the search engine results while sites that spent quality time creating unique content struggled to get on page one while they watched these other spam sites flourish.  It seems like a well needed update, but there was tiny problem that Google probably didn’t foresee or maybe they did.

Some of the sites that were caught in this cleansing probably didn’t deserve to be and they were “work from home” resellers.  Those overnight pop-up websites like the Tom Bosley pushed SMC sites were a prime example.  But it’s not the sellers fault.  They just want to make money online and are romanced by the get rich quick mermaid songs.  And there are many companies that operate just like them on a smaller scale. A very large portion of resellers get their content from the manufacturer of their products via CD’s or downloads that they in turn upload to their websites.  That means that multiple websites will have the same exact content since all of the product descriptions and photos are the same.  Since the Panda update was designed to clear out websites that duplicated content, many online retailers got slapped and literally disappeared off of the rankings into the land of double and triple digits.  Whether or not Google foresaw this problem is unknown and whether they plan to fix it is even more of a mystery.

If you’ve been hit due to spam links, it will be a vicious uphill battle to undo the problem and especially if you have an external linking company buying or submitting link requests on your behalf. Your best bet is to cut them off and ask them to stop the black hat tactics or you’re going to get buried in Google penalties. Acquire your links naturally through hard work and social media and you’ll reap the benefits sooner than you think. The Panda update has less to do with this and more to do with the content issues, so let’s talk about that for now.

If you’re a retailer that has experienced the problem of your site being penalized for duplicate content, tell us about it.  Meanwhile, you should dedicate some time to manually change your product descriptions as soon as possible and swapping out your images with alternate photos (if you have the capability to do so).  It may be time to dig into your analytics and see what pages took the hit, because most likely the slap are page specific and don’t typically apply to the entire site. Unless your entire site sucks.  Start with your best selling products first and work your way down from there.   If you have the means, you should also consider adding content like in-depth reviews or blog posts to the product pages.  The goal here is to differentiate yourself from the original content you received from your manufacturer and especially if it constitutes the majority of your website.  And the next time you get a CD or downloadable update from them, be sure to copy your changes over or risk overwriting your changes.

Google will always side on the mantra that content is king.  Gone are the days of plopping down a website, uploading content and raking in the money.  Google is apparently insisting that you work for it.

The Art of Siloing

Posted by admin on August 31, 2010 under Coding, Search Engines, SEO, Web Design | 5 Comments to Read

Siloing is a term that simply refers to how a website organizes its information. Websites that have a ton of information but that lack any structure will spend their days struggling to attain rankings.  It can be very frustrating if you know that you have better content than your competitors, but they still manage to outrank you.  If your site is a diluted mess, expect a long haul of disappointment until you eventually and in most cases accidentally add enough content to an area to warrant Google ranking you.

If you have a hundred pages that talk about Barbie dolls, you would expect to rank well for those related terms. But if those hundred pages are spread out, scattered, and buried among hundreds of other pages that are not related to Barbie dolls, your pages won’t see the light of day in the rankings compared to even someone who only has 10 pages that are well organized in a Barbie doll area and all neatly tied and linked together.

Take a look at this graphic below that is a representation of what a good silo’ed site would look like;

In this example we have a kids site, which silos down to a toys area and a fashion area separately.  Then each of those areas silos down into even more specific areas (girls and boys, etc.).  This may seem like an obvious setup, but in companies where the lines may appear to be blurred, you can miss it.  For instance if you have a heating and air company, you would be wise to keep your heating services pages away from cooling services pages.   Even though it’s very common to see them together, they have very distinctive sets of keywords.  Heating has furnaces, heating, etc. and cooling will have air conditioning, freon, cooling, a/c, etc.  Keep them separate so that you can build up those areas with the respective keywords. Keeping them together muddies up the relevancy of the pages and dilutes your page strength. Just like in the above example, boys and girls pants could share a page but boys don’t wear capris. Stop diluting your message.

I’ve personally worked on sites that have had this problem and when you get into thousands of pages that are all a convoluted mess, it’s extremely difficult to fix and if there are other forces involved that refuse to organize the site the way it needs to be, it’s very frustrating since rankings are few and far between. If you’re in this position, you can slightly overcome it by doing what’s called Virtual Siloing where even if the content isn’t actually residing in neatly crafted directories, you can still present them and link them in that way. It’s second fiddle to directory siloing where not only is the linking structure that way, but also the site directories.

The last thing to note about silos is the interlinking patterns. For instance, in the example above, avoid linking the “Dress Up” page to the “Boys Toys” areas or even worse, another branch of the silo like the “Kid’s Fashion” branch. Cross link to pages on the same level and in the same branch. But if they’re not really relevant just avoid it since it’s not really necessary (like linking video games to trucks, for instance. Same branch, but not really relevant).

If you do decide to cross link branches, make sure that it’s somehow relevant and that it links to the broadest relevant silo possible.  In the example above, if you were to link the “Dress Up” area under “Girl’s Toys” to actual “Girl’s clothes” on your site (a stretch I know), link to the “Girl’s Clothes” area and not to the “Girls pants” or “Girl’s Shirts” area.  Go as broad as you can and stay relevant.

Apply this linking strategy externally also. If you find a kid’s clothing site that’s willing to link to you, have them link directly to the Kid’s Fashion branch page and NOT directly to your home page.  If it’s a boy’s clothing site, have them link to the Boys Clothes branch and not Kid’s Fashion since that also includes a Girl’s Clothes branch that stems off of it which isn’t relevant.

The larger the website, the messier this gets, but once you get it under control, your rankings will move up the charts quickly and you’ll continue to get more powerful the longer you keep this practice moving forward and stay true to it.