Panda

Of the two, an update to Panda came first, it seems to have made significant changes to the way on page work is done with websites and particularly by clamping down on doorway pages (these are the ones which are just set up to attract website visitors, but actually don’t really serve any other purpose than to attract them in and send them off to other pages on a site), but also it appears to have made a difference to the way people treak various web page elements.

Penguin

The second big new change is called Penguin, it’s focused on reducing spammy linking practices which have been prevalent for some time now, these are things like the multitude of junk web directories, article sites and profile pages which low quality SEO companies have been setting up for their clients for many years.

I guess I’m quite lucky, as my friend who is in the industry has long said, “do things properly and you won’t end up chasing the changes which will inevitably happen”, I’ve followed this advice and while my results have come much slower than I would have ideally liked, they have remained through these recent updates, so there is definitely something to be said for the old Hare and the Tortoise story.

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.

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 local web business 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 companies based in 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.

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.

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

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.