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Google Puts Power Into Original Content
April 21, 2011

Posted by KaceyM in : General , add a comment

The Google Webmaster blog says it’s getting great feedback from searchers and from websites regarding it’s newest algorithm update. “Based on our testing,” states Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, “we’ve found the algorithm is very accurate at detecting site quality.” He even goes so far to say that if you think your site is high-quality and you’ve been negatively impacted by the recent update, you should look harder at your site, and not at Google.

Google is putting more emphasis on what so many white-hat SEO gurus have been preaching for years: make a quality site, fill it with original, meaningful content, keep your end-user in focus, and use your code appropriately and  the search engines will find you. There are no quick fixes in Search Engine Land; building a web resource is a marathon.

Content thieves beware–Google is watching. If you’re going to use someone else’s content, don’t copy and paste. Use their resource as quotable material and strengthen your content with the additional link to their site.  Do the right thing: create your own content and link out to your source material. Google, your clients, your users, and even your competition, will respect you for it.

The only question is how much like Big Brother Google will end up being. How it determines quality will shape how we shop, learn, reach out, and connect with friends, businesses, and entertain ourselves with videos, movies, and online gaming.

 

Full Tilt and PokerStars Seized by FBI: How will the chips fall?
April 17, 2011

Posted by KaceyM in : General , add a comment

If you haven’t experienced it in person when you logged into your Full Tilt, PokerStars, or AbsolutePoker account, you’ve most certainly heard the news: The FBI has seized these three online poker powerhouses along with 8 more offshore online poker rooms on charges of money laundering, bank fraud, and wire fraud. Here’s the indictment that started the online poker scandal.

In an article posted by CourierMail, which sites Daniel Tzvetkoff, a 28-year-old Australian “boy wonder”, as the first domino to start the cascade. Tzvetkoff allegedly shared his knowledge of how the casinos circumvent American banking to transfer and launder money back to offshore accounts. This information proved to be quite handy, as he was arrested and, until recently, held without bail, for the same charges (money laundering, bank fraud, wire fraud) last April.

The CourierMail article goes on to suss out why federal prosecutors choose to follow the money rather than the actual access:

“The federal prosecutors believe that online gambling companies act illegally by offering US citizens seats at virtual gambling tables, but they have not taken the companies on in court. The companies, and powerful lobby groups, argue that online poker, roulette or blackjack are games of skill, not chance, so are not technically “gambling”. Rather than risk losing such a case, the prosecutors instead chase the proceeds of gambling, and prosecute related cases of bank fraud, illegal money transmission and money laundering.”

Business Insider also posted articles regarding the online poker scandal and the “Boy Wonder” and his table-turning backlash.

Online player forums blew up with the news. Casino Affiliate Programs started posting the news as more and more players lost access to their accounts (and their available balances). The Games and Casino Poker Forum has line after line of online poker players expressing concern, both for their active accounts and the industry as a whole.

For the rest of us, it’s a matter of seeing the big picture. Most affiliates see this recent waive of seizures as a sign of things to come. On one hand, if the US Federal Government takes down the big dogs who are funneling illegal money, they can bombard the current system with  a new one, using US companies, US regulation, and generate US taxes and income. On the other hand, if the intention was to remove online poker from the US completely, we’re in for more and more drama.

In the meantime, however, the estimated 30,000,000 US players who like to gamble online will likely find other ways and vices to use their extra cash–and you can bet it won’t be to help fund education, healthcare, highways, and sanitation salaries.

 

Google Panda: The Biggest Losers
April 11, 2011

Posted by KaceyM in : General , 1 comment so far

Google Panda is all about making content farms and duplicate content sites an endangered species. Even sites with modest amounts of generated content were affected, and some more than others.

Barry Schwartz from Search Engine RoundTable ran a poll after Google Panda/Farmer was implemented asking how its users were impacted. “We had 313 responses to date, which isn’t a bad sampling size,” he noted at the time, adding, of course, that the owners of the websites most impacted were most likely to respond. Here are his initial results, as noted in his blog post:

Mr. Schwartz goes on to tell you his advice on getting off the Google Panda “naughty list” in a subsequent article, “Google: Remove Low Quality Content if you were impacted by Panda/Farmer.”

Sixtrix published figures of the hardest hit sites, and SearchEngineLand published an easy to understand version. These are the ten hardest hit sites:

As sites on and off this list negotiate the new Google algorithm, one thing is for sure: it may not be the quality of the content that is the issue, but rather how that content is used.

Personally, I am happy to see this update. Content thieves – who needs them? Good riddance I say! As far as the article marketing goes – I don’t see why thoughtless gibberish should rank as well as quality, researched, unique articles anyway. Why should some of us work hard while the rest coasts on what is mostly BS?

If people would put the time they spend coming up with ways to game Google towards creating quality – I think they would do a lot better anyway. (Ok, SEO guys, you can beat me up now :) )

 

 

 

 

Google Panda: What To Do If You’ve Been Affected
April 11, 2011

Posted by KaceyM in : General , add a comment

Now that it’s been established that the new Google Panda is unsympathetic to article farms and content factories, what do you do if you have relied heavily on article marketing? While it appears a lot of the directories are pretty much worthless now, there are a few things you can do.

According to Google’s Help Desk Agent Wysz, in an article posted in the Google webmaster Help page, “If you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

Google’s Help Desk Agent JohnMu gave very similar Google Panda advice, stating, “If you do have such high-quality, unique and compelling content, I’d recommend separating it from the auto-generated rest of the site, and making sure that the auto-generated part is blocked from crawling and indexing, so that search engines can focus on what makes your site unique and valuable to users world-wide.”

The days of creating cheap content for a link and some traffic are over. Auto-blogs, $3 articles and non-informative basic overviews of a broad topic are not going to help you anymore. To get links you will need to create high quality content with images, video, and niche websites that will display the content after serious editorial review.

 

Article marketing is not dead; quality articles on quality sites will still be beneficial. What is dead are articles that have no value to readers and sites that accept such articles. Consequently, links from these places are also useless.

 

Find out if the new Google Panda has hurt your website.

 

How to check if you were affected by Google Panda:

With the latest Google algorithm update sweeping through the Internet, websites are scrambling to re-optimize their content to ensure appropriate search rankings. To see if you were affected, Wordtracker suggests you follow these steps, which we’ve summarized from their Google Panda survival guide:

  1. Go to your Google analytics dashboard.
  2. Check the graph, but even if all looks well, go to the next steps to make sure.
  3. Go to the Search Engines report in the Traffic Sources menu, and there you choose “non-paid”
  4. Now click on “Google”
  5. Click the “Keyword” column heading above the list of keywords
  6. On the large sub menu, click “Country/Territory”
  7. Now enter “United States”, or alternately, if the algo has been rolled out in the UK by the time you see this, “United Kingdom” into the filter
  8. Find the 24th of February on the resulting graph.

Do you see a dip? Ouch! Wordtracker also has a series of suggested steps to help you get out from under that Panda.  These are some of the ones most likely to help:

  1. Find and isolate the pages and page types hit worst on your site as compared to the pages that fared better.
  2. Make a list of your different page types (for instance, if you have forums, quality articles versus lower quality articles, light category versus quality category content, product information, blog posts, etc).
  3. Put the list in a column in a spreadsheet and start building a content tracking table. It will be helpful to add columns for relevant factors like how many ads are present, how much content is available, any “dupe” (duplication) factor, etc. You will also find it useful to note the number of pages and % drop in Google US organic visits. The next step in your table construction, of course, is to fill in the values for each type of page.
  4. Now take a look at your risk assessment. Says Wordtracker: “Look at how much of your site (% of pages) is taken up by your lowest quality pages and improve that.”
  5. If you find that you have a lot of duplicate copy, which happens with some content management systems and on several ecommerce websites that include URL’s for “faceted pages”, make sure to add rel=canonical tags to the duplicated pages. This stops Google seeing those pages as duplicate content.
  6. Of course, you’ll need to edit any “over-optimized” pages and improve anything that might make the user’s experience better.
  7. An important note: Make sure to offer users more information when they first land on one of your pages (for example, provide images, videos, attractive text and pages linking to your best content).
  8. Be nimble and quick. Making as many improvements as fast as you can may help shake off any Google penalty. Once your content improves, you can slowly add back any missing ads, marketing, etc to ensure you are making the most of your website with getting slapped by Google.

This, of course, only helps if some of your pages are affected, and others are fine. If you whole site tanked, you’ll just have to figure out what all the offensive parts are and replace them with quality content.

So which of the biggest websites was was most adversely affected by this? Read our next post: “Google Panda: The Biggest Losers”.

 

Google Panda: Size Matters, but Quality Counts
April 11, 2011

Posted by KaceyM in : General , add a comment

The buzz is on about the new Google algorithm update named Panda by Google, nicknamed Farmer by webmasters. It was first implemented in the US, and, by the time you read this, it will also likely be live in the UK.

It all started with an announcement by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer in the Google Blog:

“…in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

As the repercussions of this change were felt around the Internet, we discovered a Wired.com interview with Google engineers, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal. Here we find these comments:

What you didn’t hear a lot about from Google is that this update also goes after copied content. In January, prior to the update release, Matt Cutts made the comment that Google was “evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

A few weeks later Panda/Farmer made it’s debut. So we can assume that it also targets duplicate content and copied content. This, of course, is something most webmasters welcome with open arms. Content thieves are a never-ending nuisance. We can only hope this new algo puts them out of business.

See our next post: “Google Panda: What To Do If You’ve Been Affected”