Hello guys i haven't blogged here for a while but work, work and more work is the reason why i couldn't blog more often.But i promise that will blog more often giving more insights into the experiments that goes behind every single SEO service that I ever sell.
On June 7th 2011 , the weather was crisp. coffee was great and there was 100 emails in my inbox, and i was looking forward to another normal day in the office.but some of the guys in the office started raising the alarm as two of my big sites took a big dip in rankings.
On analysing the sites that lost ranking and comparing it with SEOMoz ranking factors 2011 we couldn't find the odd one out.Everything was done according to the white hat book.Something similar happened to one of my sites during my early days my first site which was an social network (which still runs well) had a similar fate only to return stronger.
Now we are going into the realms of assumption and observation.
Why did the update happen ?
I have couple of my friends working in spam team and usually they dont know what the heck is going on as well, programmers are left in the dark during most of the decision making and investors call the shots.What this has to do with the latest update well eventhough Matt cutts may deny it i think most of the decisions made in the last series of updates are very much centered around stuff that make money to google.Mainly the stuff that a company called demand media run.But to the credit of matt cutts he has done well to resist all he can but eventually like in every facet of life money wins.This is the war that will determine how search is going to be in the immediate future.
What are the changes ?
I dont have a list of SEO warriors to power through a survey like SEOMoz to provide you will stats.Though i am skeptical about those stats you cant do SEO experiments in a months time period.SEOMoz ranking factors survery was conducted just 1 month after the febuarary google panda update.Which not enough time to guage the changes accurately.But it does give you a overall picture on what's hot and not.
So What is Hot ?
Apparently SCRAPER sites, the likes of which use duplicate content from various sources.All your Wp robot, WP mage and other wordpress sites are the target of this update.So its not exactly shooting in the dark but some collatral damage is to be expected. Some of the most severly hit sites include ehow, buzzle and ezine. all had sufficient loss in revenue to push them into knee jerk reactions.I know of a guy who published 700 odd article in ezine who got banned without a warning :) imagine 700 pages of unique content gone.
Ironically while most of the initial knee jerk reactions were centered around duplicate content some of my autoblogs which used feeds and a rewriter began to rank pretty well.Infact i had a site gaining 300% more traffic for no apparent reason.I havent touched the blog in ages.Only reason i see why that site got better rankings are
- Site was older than the site from where the content was scrapped
- Site pages backlinks than site that had original content
- Site was socially more active
So if you can ensure these three factors are taken care of on your autoblogs you will have a very successful blog in present scenario.Its hard to imagine why people call the panda update a verdict against duplicate content when instances such as these illustrate its far from it.Infact i was surprised by bing which seem to be going the righ way as not to implement experiments on live search every three months.
The pie chart below is from SEOMoz survey which also clearly points out factors that affect a pages ranking on search.Using these factors wisely can counter Duplicate content penatly
What do I think ?
Like if any cares :) but still i will go ahead and say what i think about these frequent updates. The frequency of changes from google in the recent months are not what you can say webmaster friendly how many companies or businesses in the world have a resources like SEOMOz to commission SEO experiments on such short notices and optimise their sites accordingly.In the end there will be a handful of big heavy weights who will muscle their way for a period and rinse & repeat.
Unlike google , Bing's strategy of doing their experiments behind closed doors and not updated the search frequently may help them in the long run.Providing users with a better search result which is stable and not turbulent
To be Continued...I will give you insights into what new SEO services i have planned post panda and how you can reap the benefits next week.
Cheers everyone
