June 25, 2011

Simplifying Panda: The new SEO rules

I know a lot of my friends who sell online are probably sitting around reading about Panda right now and not understanding much of what is being said. So I thought I'd start a simplified list of rules based on what I'm reading. I'm not saying I'm an expert or anything, so you should still be doing your own research. This is just a quick list to help you make a few changes.
  1. Make your site unique and appealing. We've been told for years to do this because it improves our chances of having people share our content, which helps SEO. But now whether or not people like the look of your site and how user friendly it is directly affects your SEO.
  2. Make it trust worthy. If people feel confident following your advice or inputting their credit card info, your ranking will improve.
  3. Click throughs count. If someone clicks on your site and then clicks out again, it will hurt your SEO. If someone is interested enough to click through a few pages of your site, your SEO will improve. You need to have a better click through rate than other sites similar to yours.
  4. Content for content's sake doesn't work anymore. Google has finally found a way to lower the ranking of "content farms" (sites with tons low quality content that is full of keywords). This means that having unique content and doing keyword research is still important, but you need to do more. You need informative, entertaining content that keeps people interested and makes them want to pass it on to their friends.
  5. Duplicate content is worse than ever. Even if you're duplicating your own content across the web, you will be penalized. This update was made to specifically target "scraper" sites. These sites have little to no original content, copying it from all over the internet.
There is a lot more information out there, but hopefully this will help your get started, especially if you have trouble wading through all those tech blogs. I'll continue adding to it as I find more info.

Here are the articles I got this info from:
http://www.seomoz.org: How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Pracrices Forever
http://searchengineland.com: Official: Google Panda Update 2.2 Is Live
http://searchengineland.com: Google Forcloses On Content Farms With "Panda" Algorithm Update 

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for a quick read post - very helpful to me as I'm sure it is to others selling online!

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  2. UGH! They're at it again. Thanks for posting!

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  3. I actually like these changes, even if they make more work for me. Farmers and Scrapers drive me nuts.

    Glad you guys found it useful!

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