Google Panda Algorithm 4.2 Update Is Rolling Out Now!

The digital marketing community is posting news that it is has been confirmed that Google is rolling out Panda 4.2 algorithm update right now. They say they changes in rankings are not happening at once, they are ‘applied’ really slowly.

According to Google (sorry, could find any references) only 2-3% of all queries will be affected. Also this update refers to English language web.

Earlier today, Google Releases Panda 4.2 & You Didn't Notice http://t.co/Q4XyEuwhSB

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) 23 июля 2015

So what now?


Thousands of webmasters is holding their breaths and hope their website will not be affected. The reason is that for most of them it means death of the business or at coma for sure. Now you will see how lucky you are and how successful you were to deliver quality content to you Google and your visitors.


Another really huge cradle of webmasters and business owners is praying for Google’s mercy and hopes their websites will recover. Hopefully my website was not hit by Google Panda by I’d really like some other of the projects to recover.


Let me remind you that the previous official Google Panda 4.1 update was ten month ago, September, 25, 2014. Some people really counting those updates and they it was 28th or 30th one.


Need help?


Yes, a bit of advertising myself. I have been following Panda updates since it happened the first time. I cannot guarantee I can help your website recover (nobody can, at least now) but I can review your content strategy and create a to-do list so the text time Google releases Panda your business will have changes to grown again.


If you are just about to build a website and want advice on content strategy, I can assist too. Better safe than sorry.

How to Survive Google Panda Updates

Intro: I wrote this article 3 years ago, but the information is still useful, so I decided to publish it on my blog. Well, it is useful for those who are still of the safe side and free from Google Panda penalty.

On the 24^th of March Google tweeted about new Panda rolling out. They stated that only 1.6% of search results were affected. If it is truth or not, it is really hard to tell, but the only thing we know for sure is that lot of websites lost their rankings.

Webmasters call this update ‘3.4’, but nobody knows for sure what’s the real number is. In fact the number of the update is not as important as the question about how not to get bitten by Panda next time it will be rolling out.

Panda is one year old already so we can now tell more about its behavior and its tastes in order to give you more insight in what factors of your website might trigger new algorithm penalties.

1. Low unique content ratio

During the pre Panda period lots of webmasters used to save money on website copywriting by scrapping quality articles from other websites. Today you must avoid publishing content which has already been published and index by Google. If you are still going to do it, either make sure unique content will still be dominating or put a canonical URL to the article source.

2. Duplicate internal content

Duplicate (or near duplicate) internal content is in common with online stores where the same items might appear under different categories several times. If that is your case, you should do everything possible to avoid duplicates within your website’s pages:

-                     Adding more unique content to the pages where duplicates exist

-                     Implement correct pagination

-                     Adding canonical URLs of the most important page to the pages where duplicates exist

3. Duplicate content within your network

If you have couple of websites (e.g.: yoursite.com, yoursite.net, yoursite.co.uk) and each of them has a large portion of the same content, then you should fix it immediately because it might be signaled as spam to Google. You avoid this you should remove all duplicates and substitute them 100% unique text content.

       4. Low text to ads ration

Lots of webmasters earn money by placing Google Adsense ads on their websites adding few text content. If you put too many ads and little unique content on the page you are too under the risk. If you want to survive the next Panda update, you should either remove some of the ads from your website’s page or write longer articles and ad unique images.

5. Server response codes

You should regularly check your website in order to make sure you don’t have broken links and when the user enters a page which doesn’t exit, server responds with a 404 code. If your website has dynamic pages, then you must ad canonical URL to every page, otherwise each link pointing to your website with a nonexistent URL will put that page into Google’s index which content of some of page creating internal duplicates which were discussed in the point 2.

Building Panda-friendly website is not difficult. The only thing that you must remember that new algorithm loves unique content and website engines that work without errors creating space for positive experience for your users. 

See How and Why They Make Us Do More Clicks [Note]

The rumors that Google takes Google Analytics data into consideration when ranking websites started when, I guess, the first Panda hit.

Now I see lots of websites dividing their articles into several sub-pages to make me click, click and click. I think this is not only about SEO, but about selling ads as well, however I don’t always like it.

Here is an example: an article about the history of the Superman logo at BusinessInsider.com.

What I don’t like about this particular page?

When I enter the page, I don’t see a single logo, but is forced to click one more link which, by the way, I found later then I was expecting. What I see is an into, which I don't even want to read.

I understand implementing this in order to make the pages load faster. The Superman logos are really big and it would really take much time to load all of them at once, but still I think they could have fit the images size to the screen, because I still have to crawl down to see the logo itself.

Another example is this article on Diabetes diet by Joy Bauer, where the pagination isn’t really necessary (because the page is not heavy), but still there are ten more pages which tell you what to eat if you have type 2 diabetes. Well, this a smart move and it works, judging from the Google Analytics data [yes, a hint is here]. 

Unlike Superman Logo article, all content here perfectly fits the screen and easily digestible. Besides, when you click Next, you enter another page (not another section of the same page) which tells Google Analytics people seeing lots of pages which equals to “people like this website because they spend much time”.

My Digital Marketing Experience Packed In 178 Words

Why Hire Me?

1. I know how to build a Panda-friendly website: everything from server-side to on-page/on-site search engine optimization. Deep SEO audit is available.  

2. I know how to develop a working SEO plan to increase your search traffic 10 times and more within 6-10 months

3. I know how to considerably improve search visibility within the limited budget

4. I know how to plan, manage and perform SEO-friendly content development

5. I know how to calm down Google’s Penguin and avoid spammy link-building tactics

6. I can determine and eliminate issues caused Penguin and/or Panda penalty

7. I can manage a team of copywriters, designers and developers, I can write tasks and control their performance

8. I can set up any contextual or social media advertising campaign

9. Empowered by Avinash Kaushik’s books, I can tell what exactly your Google Analytics reports tell you and what you can do with that information to improve conversions and user experience

Additional info

I own a small copywriting firm and write for my blog (http://alex-seoer.blogspot.com/) from time to time. 

Reasons to Switch Your Websites and Online Stores from Python to PHP

This is another real-life story how I and my partner developer convinced my client to move her website from Python to PHP. If you are one of those that have a python-based website then you should probably read it too. It case you are a developer and have something to add, you are really welcome.

My client is a sweet and talented young lady who creates beautiful closing from fibers by Channel, D&G, Armani and other well-known throughout the world names. Initially, we discussed way to promote her services on the web, including SEO, PPC and even remarketing. However I realized that I cannot start doing SEO for this website because all main website’s parts are located on sub-domains, that would simply be wrong. The website also suffers from lots of bugs, so the question naturally arose: what shell we do now?

I advised migrating the website from Python to WordPress which, as you know, is written in PHP. Yesterday my partner had a talk to her over the phone and this is what he told her about the reasons to change the programming language.

1. Ability to create a good mobile version of the website. As we all know, the website is going mobile and the number of mobile surfers is constantly growing. No doubt, having a mobile version of the website is a must today.

2. Python developers are expensive. I am not sure about other countries, but here, in Ukraine, it is difficult to find a good Python developer. They are, of course, expensive because there are not many of them.

3. WordPress can handle it all. My client’s website is partially an online store, but, since they sell one-of-a-kind clothes, they don’t need advanced website store engine features or anything out-of-a-box. Such plugins as WooCommerce and WP E-Commerce can easily cope with the required tasks

4. Website’s maintenance. Again, WordPress developers are cheaper, so in a long-term switching to PHP would be really beneficial.

5. SEO is taken into consideration. I want to change the website’s structure to make it more SEO-friendly. My client is worried about the rankings they have now, she doesn’t want to lose them. This question doesn’t really about migration, but it is should be noted that the programming language does not really affect your rankings directly. What affects rankings is website’s architecture, content, back-links and other factors. Programming language here is only a tool to build a website.

Basically, I think the very first reason is sound enough to make a choice in a favor of PHP. The project is just at its very beginning and I am sure there will be interesting and informative stories to tell.

Why Did They Do It to Skype Usability in the Latest Versions (2015)?

If you are a Skype user, then you know its design was considerably changed couple of month ago. I am using it from my PC, so I am writing about my experience from that particular angle.

The things I don’t like (and don’t understand) are, similar to those that my business partner (web designer) has, who sometimes uses it from his smartphone. The fact that I am not the only to dislike the changes gives me more confidence in sharing my point of new.

Okay the things I hate about the new Skype usability are as follows:

1. Tiny box for typing messages.

I presume this change is better for mobile users, but do hate when I can’t see much of the text I type, especially if I write long messages.

2. Huge smiles.

Well, I presume this design initiative again springs from the way they communicate via mobile devices. The tendency, I believe, is shortening of text messages and stressing emotions. I think we don’t share information with each other today, do not discuss and analyze via messengers, we share emotions we feel about a certain things.

3. Default cursor location

This innovation is the least user-friendly from my prospective. As you switch from one talker to another one, Skype allocates typing cursor into the Search box. What the heck? If I click on John Smith’s contact window, then there is a very high likelihood I want to send a message to him, not to search for somebody else. This is very irritating. Correct me if I am wrong.

The last update happened not so long time ago. I updated the software immediately because I was hoping to get a better Skype. But they just added a huge dark box when you mouse over the smile that shows even a bigger version of it. The dark box preview is probably 20-30% bigger the smile that you see in a popup window. Was it really so necessary?

I am almost sure the Skype’s UX team did an analysis before they developed and applied these changes and I’d really like to know the reasons for such changes.

Most of the time, I use Skype for chatting and do calls pretty seldom. You are welcome to share your own experience using new Skype and messengers’ usability tendencies in general.

P.S.: I finished the article and then tried to stretch the messaging window and it worked! I’m waiting for them to fix cursor issue shortly as well.

What Contact Options Should Your Local Website Have

Have you ever thought of how it is easy for the prospects to contact you via your local business website? I strongly believe reaching you out should be easy, especially if you providing services that require urgent reactions on client’s request. Why? Because having no easy-to-use contact option will probably force people to contact your competitors instead. Remember, people are always in a hurry, they are extremely lazy and you shouldn’t make them think how your website works.

In this article you will find valuable information on common mistakes related to contact options on local websites and helpful guidance on how to fix them.

Email vs Contact Us Form 

I have seen lots of websites that have both: contact form with fields to fill out and email to which your visitors can shoot you an email. I would recommend to have only contact us form because of the following reasons:

• You don’t display your email which sometimes might be important 
• You force contact us form submission which can be tracked. It is good to know for your marketing team and yourself where conversions come from 

If you still prefer to have your email listed, I would recommend having it featured on an image, not in text version.

Phone Numbers

• Again, I recommend having it featured on an image
• Don’t use the same phone number though out all advertising channels. If you have an unique number on the website, you will know for sure where the client came from
• If you can offer a toll-free number to call or a callback, do it. It’s a good tone. 

Live Chat

Add a live chat – why not? If a person wants to clarify quickly something, but doesn’t feel comfortable taking over the phone, chatting is a good option. Besides we chat all the time via messengers and social media, so you are not asking for any unnatural activities from your visitors. There are some considerations that I’d like to highlight.

- Make sure the chat window doesn’t pop-up, crawls across the screen or makes loud sounds and annoys people. This is a very back welcome

- Make sure the chat has options to fit your website’s design. I believe it is very important.

- If you have several departments, then you should check if your provider offers that option.

- Don’t forget that ‘live’ means there should be an operator online during the business hours. Let them know what your business hours are.

Request Form Submission

On a separate note I want to write about the websites where the only option to contact business (except a phone number) is a complex request form with tones of necessary fields to fill in. I have seen dozens of plumbers’ websites and some of them had that awful form where users had to submit their zip codes, addresses, phone numbers and many other things. ‘Why do they formce me to do all this? I am yet not sure if they are right guys for me!’ – This is what I think. ‘I need guys that don’t ask for what I am not ready to give yet, what if they can’t solve my problem and will waste so much time typing and submitting’ – I am getting a bit frustrated and open a neighbor website in a new window.

Conclusion


Before you implement any contact option on your local website, you need to make sure you visitors will understand how to use it, they will not spend much time to use it and they will have a filling that succeeded to use it correctly. Respect their time and don’t overload them with unnecessary tasks, they are already in need, so don’t make things even more complicated.

Things an SEO Could Probably Do on Friday

Friday is the last day of the week and our brains are usually already exhausted. We all are already there, having fun with our friends and family. This is why we should admit we might be half-professionals on Friday.

Let me share some of the ideas about what you still can do and remains still effective and professional to the bone.

Check SERPs
If you do it manually and there are not many key terms, then checking SERPs would probably be a good thing to do in the end of the week. This work is rather mechanical; the results are simple data so to hard brains activity is required. If you have tones of keywords and automate the process, spend some time to see how the things are going and make some notes on changes that require attention on Monday.

Check Reports

If you are a team lead or outsource any kind of services, checking reports is a really great thing to do on Friday. Let’s say you ordered 50 articles for your blog; then checking them for plagiarism is a great Friday activity. You can simply click Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V, and then Enter and think about your favorite band’s concert you are going to in the evening.

Evaluate Work
As an expert you should always seek for perfection. Write a list of activates you or your team performed during the week and write comments on in what way you can achieve better results. Always write comments.

Plan for the Next Week
Planning is a very important task which requires lots of thinking, researching and brainstorming which is not the right thing to do on Friday (maybe). Don’t worry if you think you can’t make yourself write a really good plan today, you will read it once again on Monday and improve it with fresh ideas. 

Generate Reports
It don’t matter whom you are reporting too, it is very important but rather mechanical work which can be done at the expense of permissive brain activity. For example, playing with custom Google Analytics reports is really fun.

Reinclusion Request that Worked (Real Life Email Sample)

Dear Google Webspam Team Member!

First of all let me thank you for the time you take to read our request to your team. 

Our website, shirthunt.com has been continuously losing its rankings with every Google Panda/Penguin update.

Content Issues

We saw significant drop in the number of visitors to our website after first Panda update was released.  Because our web store had very difficult structure, some sections of our website could look very similar and create very similar or duplicate content.

In order to remove possible internal duplicates we did the following:

-          We have completely redesigned our store and we think that now the new design is much more easier on an eye and more user-friendly.

-          We have completely rebuilt website’s navigation. We removed all unnecessary pages of different clothing types and substituted them with filter options. We hope this change makes shopping easier and also removes possible internal content duplicates.

-          We have written some interesting biographical facts about almost each band and placed that information on the pages dedicated to particular band to give additional value to the visitors

-          For more than half a year we are writing interesting articles for our blog (www.shirthunt.com/blog) about bands and their albums, musicians, music instruments and other things that we think might be interesting to our visitors.

EzineArticles.com

We too were publishing quality articles at ezinearticles.com which were copied by lots of low quality websites. Some of those the articles (at other websites) contain links to our website, some of them where used to link to other websites and some of them just copied the text (or its part) of the articles. You can view a detailed report of how particular article was used by other websites.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnVJnNeyAg4LdDh4dGQ1MXpzOXVpY2N5MVhYLUdGcGc&usp=sharing]

A list of all removed articles can be viewed here:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnVJnNeyAg4LdEV6eV9EM25IeEpremV0TE9DM0pZdVE&usp=sharing]

Number of Articles Removed: 22

Number of Articles that were copied from ezinearticles.com by other websites: 19

We presume that this might have been of the reasons why we received Unnatural Link email, so all the articles published at EzineArticles.com are now deleted.

Back Link Profile and Link Disavowal

We too have reviewed more than 2000 back links extracted by the tool offered at Google Webmasters Tools analyzed them and found out that links from 24 domains might have caused Unnatural Link alert. We have listed all the suspicious links in the .txt file and submitted link disavowal request. We too emailed the webmasters with the request to remove links pointing to our website. Some of the links were successfully removed, some of them cannot be removed because of how those pages are generated by the website’s engine and we still didn’t get a reply from some of the webmasters either.

You can view a more detailed report on our activity and the status of each case in the Google Doc below: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnVJnNeyAg4LdE85MC1rZXB1aXBOSjBZaUVMRl95eUE&usp=sharing]

Here is a link to a Link Removal Request email we sent to webmasters

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x7W6uC95jKrvgSo9khABDBO1MaXzoHK2GDUf_W7xt0I/edit?usp=sharing]

You can find Gmail account access details that we used to send link removal requests below:

*******@gmail.com

Pass: *****

We too have planned even more content Amazon affiliate

-          YouTube Video

-          Music API usage

Conclusion:

We have much improved the look and the substance of our website, removing a possible duplicate content and making the site more user friendly.

We made a detailed and thorough research and requested to delete and remove all suspiciously looking links that could possibly violate google's guidelines, to be in full compliance with the google's policies.

We understand how important it is to comply with the rules and the laws in general and the rules of the online community in particular; we always did and will continue to do our best to keep the web community clean of any spammy material or links.

Very Truly Yours,

**** ****, Esq

On behalf of Shirthunt.com

What Present Would You Like to Get from a Digital Marketer?

Christmas is coming and everybody is waiting for miracles to happen. I am too expecting lots of good things to happen and some of them depend on other people. If there is a miracle or at least something really good that I can do for you as an SEO and digital marketer, I am ready to do it.

So what kind of things I can do for free on Christmas?

SEO Consulting

I can spend some time with you on Skype answering your questions (or I will write a post to answer your question) on link building, keyword research, website structure or any other SEO matter that you might be interested in.

PPC

I also have experience in creating and managing PPC campaign on all search engines and almost all social media websites. If you are not sure if this type of ads is right for you, then ask me.

Social Media Marketing

SMM is what everybody is interested in. Let me know if you want to learn more about the strategy that would work for your organization.

Design and Content Creation

I haven’t got much to offer for free here, except the information that I have a great designer and native English speaking technical writer on my team. I will do my best to offer you the best price for their services.

I will the next year will bring more clients, more conversions and more traffic to all of your businesses. And of course.. all the best to your beloved and families. Marry Xmas! 

Organic Traffic Dropped 30%! How Bad the Things Are in Fact?

Couple of days ago I received an email from my client. He was really worried because they faced a really huge drop in organic visits during the last two month. Take into consideration they usually have 25k a day, so you can imagine the size of the problem.

I do not build links for them because the client is so popular in the US that links grow like mushrooms after the rain. Unfortunately not always those pages get links that we need but this is quite a different story.

So what was the task? I needed to find out whether the traffic drop was caused by decrease in rankings or this is a seasonal change in people’s search activity. In case of decrease in rankings I had to find out where the biggest loss is.

Okay, I opened a Google Analytics All Web Site Data Acquisition Overview report and saw how the traffic amount changes when comparing the last 30 days to the same period of time before. All major traffic sources showed from -23% to -30% decrease.

You see, even direct traffic, which has nothing to do with an SEO and rankings was 25% lower.

Then I logged in to Google Webmaster tools to check out how the number of impressions and rankings changes during the same period of time. Yes, indeed, top 20 keywords that were giving the most of the traffic drop from -0,5 to -2, 90% of them -1, but (this is very important) all of the keywords are still in top 5-6!

This means the website should still receive the same amount of impressions, isn’t it? However, the number of impressions decreased to -25% on average for all the top keywords. This proved that the problem is not as big as I could seem to be, however a slight decrease in rankings is observed which is a signal to monitor rankings and make sure things are not getting worse. 

Cap (‘Shapka’) Condoms Advertising

I will explain ‘Shapka’ [en. ‘cap’] condoms advertising pun for my English speaking followers. The condoms are Russian, so the brand is in Russian. However the tagline runs in Ukrainian: ‘kohaj palko’, which can be translated as ‘Love Hot’, ‘Love Passionately’.

‘Palko’ is also a vocative for the noun ‘stick’. So basically the tagline encourages a stick to make passionate love.  I think they call THAT THING with a ‘stick’ word globally. :) let me know if I am wrong.