Google PlusFacebook iconTwitter icon+44 113 260 4010 contact@branded3.com

Blogs »

Thoughts on a few SEO things

Most of the UK has been doing very little for the last couple of weeks thanks to 4 bank holidays but there is still a load of interesting SEO news to wade through.

Firstly Google Analytics now has a page speed report which is very good for finding the slowest pages on your site.

Next up is Village Voice who were caught spamming reddit and then said they were very sorry, blamed an agency and said they knew nothing about it. Turns out they were caught spamming Digg years ago. Plenty of people spam social media sites but you need to have the guts to stand up and admit it if you get caught.

A new company is offering digital due diligence services so investors and people buying companies can see whether that company is likely to get hit by a Google penalty or not. Sounds like a great idea aside from that company has a marketing strategy involving outing businesses to Techcrunch. Outing is not a marketing strategy no matter how useful & noble the business idea is.

The big news of course is that the Panda update is still here and hasn’t gone away. We have still not seen a single credible report of a site fixing itself although there will no doubt be a few borderline cases that move in and out of the Panda zone as Google tweaks the algorithm. The sites we have seen so far all have a few things in common:

  • Content which is very similar to other sites (gadget blogs get hit by this)
  • Content which is duplicated on other sites (ecommerce & affiliate sites struggle here)
  • Sites which get all their traffic from Google (a lot of people who focus too much on SEO struggle with this)
  • Sites that get way too much traffic from Google anyway (if you are getting 50k visits per day and lose 10k then that is a correction, not a penalty)

Finaly, Overstock.com the big US site hit by a Google penalty recently has now been released from the penalty box. It seems that ecommerce sites can use link spam in the runup to Christmas and then be penalty free by Easter.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 3:55pm ON Thursday, 5 May 2011

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.sagive.co.il/ ofir

    great articale patrick..the page speed report is not that great, i use firbug
    …

  • http://www.webelementinc.com/ Web Designing Mumbai

    Nice article and thanks for the updates. Keep up the good work. Looking forward to some more informative posts from you end.

  • http://getdeadbeatmillionaire.com/ Deadbeat Millionaire

    Yo… Patrick… I have been searching the info about panda update and I can find it right here. You really helped me save some time researching! Thank you! Keep writing us great post man~~

  • http://www.libertymarketing.co.uk Kris

    If companies can spam their way throguuh xmas in the knowledge that they’ll be free by the bank holiday sales whats to stop them building this into some sort of strategy – not much of a penalty if you ask me.

    Panda seem to have boosted our rankings by weeding out many spammy competitors – we knew it would only be a matter of time before they got hit!

  • http://www.searchandmore.co.uk Jason Walker

    couldn’t be more right – outing is not a marketing strategy, as for village voice all I can say is you get what you pay for – Don’t blame the agency you hired them in the first place.

  • http://socialmediamagic.com/blog Kimberly_SMMagic

    This is great Patrick, thanks so much for laying it out in simple terms so companies can understand things. There have been so many blogs that have told us about the changes but not a lot of them so far really broke it down this way. TRULY Appreciate you sharing your knowledge and hope to network with you in the future.

    Kimberly
    Social Media Magic

  • http://www.networxrecruitment.com networx recruitment

    We haven’t really seen much of a change with the Panda update, I’m looking forward to try the speed test. Does it test all users or is it just a sample of them?

  • http://www.goedkoperparkerenschiphol.nl Parkeren Schiphol

    Nice article. Still waiting for the Panda Update in The Netherlands.

  • http://www.uberseomanchester.com Keith

    Panda has not affected any of our or our clients sites too significantly but I believe this is due to no use of duplicate content and generally good quality content overall.There do seem to be contradictions as usual by the Google ranking factors and algorithim though

  • https://www.semantic-ad.com/Social_Marketing.html Austin_SEO

    We have a social marketing company in Austin, TX; and have seen a huge amount of social site spam. Good of Reddit and Village Voice to look into this and punish the offenders; makes you wonder why Google and the other search engines didn’t suss this out beforehand.

  • http://www.xtremedigitals.in Mohit

    Thanks Patrick. I really liked the post. Simple and crispy points. Bookmarked!

  • http://www.realestatewebsites.com Mike

    “A new company is offering digital due diligence services so investors and people buying companies can see whether that company is likely to get hit by a Google penalty or not.”
    I have always wondered how investors would see value in a company that could be destroyed by Google. This would be a great way to evaluate the risk.

  • http://www.propayroll.nl/ payroll

    Nice article, keep putting them up. Still don’t see the Panda update though, since some poor quality sites still seem te rank high…

  • http://allthingsfancydress.co.uk fancy dress

    Thanks for an informative article. My sites often contain very little content but do not seem to have taken any significant hit from the Panda update although I am investigating deeper into the theory that the Panda update is not just an update that is released by Google but it is an actual ranking filter similiar in a lot of respects to page rank.

  • http://allthingsfancydress.co.uk fancy dress

    Panda may be more of a ranking filter similiar to pagerank than simply just an update to the Google algo like caffeine was….thanks for the article though and keep them coming

  • http://www.wao.co.il/ Eitan Yariv

    It is Interesting to read what you have written just a few months ago about the Panda update- It had hit Israel two weeks ago without any dramatic change for well competitive keywords. I wonder how much the “Panda” update we’re experiencing different from the earlier versions that hit the US and UK.

  • http://www.loveyourshoes.co.uk Hush puppies

    Has anyone heard the story of the guy selling fake Rolex watches? He was featured in the NY Times in an article , the article contained a link to his website which helped him to rank higher being an authorative and trusted link and helped him sell lots more fake watches. A friend told me he was one of the reasons why Google had to make changes

  • http://www.eliteinfoworld.com/ Brijesh Gosai

    Hello Patrick,
    I’m really Thankful to you for sharing such a nice Article.
    I was looking for some information about Google panda, and i have got the information and my concept about Panda has been cleared.

  • http://www.jamesmesherphotography.co.uk James

    Thanks Patrick, just what I was looking for.

  • http://www.breakdowncoveroffers.org breakdown man

    the thing with SEO in 2011 is that the game is changing by the week it seems, also the big advent of social media means we have more to look at.

  • https://www.loans4tenants.com Jason@Loan Finder

    SEO is constantly changing, its tough to keep up with the updates. I like the page speed report on Analytics, its a great tool for finding and improving the speed of specific web pages.

  • http://www.Beaverlogcabins bespoke Log cabins

    Recently Google switched off a link evaluation signal in its latest update to the algo , does anyone have a few thoughts about that?

Feedburner Users

Tags

.Net AJAX Android apps Bing Branded3 C# CMS competwition conversion CSS development e-commerce email F# Facebook features Gmail Google HTML HTML5 IE9 interactive internet Internet World JavaScript Leeds Digital Festival Microsoft mobile web PHP rankings SEO smartphones social media Twitition Twitter URL user experience web design web usability Windows Windows 8 WordPress YouTube Zend Framework

© 2013 Branded3 Search Limited Company reg. no. 06479012, All rights reserved.
Part of

St Ives Group Logo