Googles Panda Update

Posted on 25/10/2011 by Michael B

It’s funny really that with the latest update from Google (or I should say series of updates, as it’s been going on for most of 2011 so far and could continue into next year), that certain websites have been affected adversely whilst others have remained untouched. In fact their search engine result positions should have increased slightly to compensate for those which took a hit and therefore dropped.

I have a great example of why some of the sites probably dropped out of the rankings and it all comes down to the old classic of low quality content! A friend of mine has a site, it’s an information site and he’s ploughed a good few quid into it over the last 5 years, unfortunately he has taken advice from some rather bad seo companies during this time, so is now being told that he has a number of problems.  He did take a hit in the last panda update, just in case you were wondering.

Basically what happened before is that the seo company he was using had told him to create numerous pages, with the same text and titles, with the small difference of including a different town or city name on each of them, they were all indexed, albeit not ranking very highly though, however when the latest update happened, his ranks for those pages dropped through the floor.

So it looks like the old trick of having numerous landing pages for all the different towns around the country may have had it’s day. My gut feel is that if you live in say Swindon, you could design a page for “Swindon [product or service]” and possibly another for Wiltshire if you provide the service throughout the county.  To be fair if you made sure all the pages are completely unique you will probably get away with it for several town names, however, the day of this sort of thing has limited time, so don’t base your entire SEO strategy around it.

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Wondering about the Design

Posted on 23/05/2011 by Michael B

Design certainly isn’t my forte and as you have probably noticed (if anyone has found my blog at all yet, or more likely you are reading this in the future sometime but reading an old post, if that makes sense) it still has the standard template which comes with a WordPress install. While it actually looks OK if you change the picture at the top it isn’t that exciting.

So my dilemma is if I should tackle this myself or just get someone else to do it for me. There are certain pro’s and con’s to doing it either way, namely, if I get someone else to design it for me, they will probably pay no notice whatsoever to the seo elements of a website, I’ve seen it numerous times before, a beautifully designed website which nobody will ever find as there are fundamental seo mistakes which will prevent it from ever ranking well without serious time spend in optimisation and doing redirects etc. On the other hand they would do it so much faster than I can do myself as design isn’t my strong point and there would probably be a lot of trial and error in getting it right.

Then again I probably already have a pretty clear idea what it should look like and I’ve never been very good at trusting other peoples judgement, ironic really as when people ask me to do optimisation on their sites they have to trust me as it could take a little while before the results start to show. It really depends on the state of their site when I get hold of it initially, some of them are really bad and I need some help, if I do I use a Swindon SEO company and I’ve known Steve the owner for a lot of years and trust his judgement on these things. He’s pretty good at spotting some strange thing such as an outdated sitemap, or old pages which have links pointing to them which we can redirect. Sometimes these things can make a difference in almost no time at all. He must be pretty good as if you do a search for SEO Swindon, there he is at the top of the page with 2 pages of his website! He’s not actually in Swindon though he lives in a village nearby but as I understand it, most of his customers are either there or at least in Wiltshire.

Anyway I’m still trying to decide if I should do this design myself, buy a template or have a complete bespoke design done, still undecided but I will have to do something, it looks a bit plain as it is.

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More Updates

Posted on 12/05/2011 by Michael B

OK so with the recent updates which happened in the US and have now apparently spread across the pond to Europe and most importantly the UK (it’s a joke, don’t take offence) what is next?

There are rumours of another big update coming soon, although I have no idea how true or likely this is, I would imagine Google is pretty exhausted now.

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Things to Note

Posted on 12/05/2011 by Michael B

I need to emphasise the importance of unique text on pages so I will create exactly the same links pointing to a few pages as an experement:

  1. A regional page which has never ranked
  2. A page which used to rank but then lost it’s position
  3. A page which you write a unique paragraph for and add it at the bottom instead of the existing text
  4. A page which we leave the original text on

What will most likely happen, is that No3 will start to appear, but the others will not, however if you then add some unique text to those pages they will in time start to rank too.

I know it sounds like a lot of work to make them all unique, but with the recent updates, unique content is more important than ever.  See this document from Google http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

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A few Pointers

Posted on 12/05/2011 by Michael B

The key thing with a database driven site, is to be sure the same url is used each time a specific page is called, but also that they are all unique enough to prevent being de-indexed for duplicate content.  I’m confident the recent drop in ranks is because the URL’s changed, but we need to work out how to get those ranks back.

Google obviously has noticed, they make billions every year by indexing web pages, their entire revenue streams rely on crawling and indexing web pages, they do it very well, so there is no chance whatsoever that they wouldn’t notice!

This is the reason why your site has recently dropped out of the search engines for the regional “stop smoking” search phrases. The fact that “stop smoking malburton” is returning a completely different page is proof of this.

The pages Google was previously ranking no longer exist on the site and for some reason the search engine friendly URL’s you had before have been replaced with dynamic URL’s instead, I can only imagine this is to make the site database driven.

Probably not what you wanted to hear, but this is the source of your drop in the search engines.

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