Google Panda 2.5.2 released October 13th – Verified by Matt Cutts
Did you notice a drop in Google traffic around October 13th? Matt Cutts tweeted that there was a confirmed Panda release on the night of 10/13. This release is called Panda 2.5.2
Many people noticed their site take an even bigger dive, some didn't notice a change at all, and others noticed they appear to have a new penalty.
I'm not too sure what was updated in this version of Panda, but probably a polish of the 2.5 release.
Why do I have a traffic drop after Panda 2.5.2?
I have heard from many people that 2.5.2 seems to be more major than minor. People complain they lost 40-60% of their traffic overnight. They also say their sites are 100% pure original content, original images, original everything, and they are not sure why they were singled out. If you know your site is a good site, and you received a traffic drop from Panda 2.5.2 or any version of Panda, I would look at your backlinks. When Panda rolls out, it devalues sites it deems to be of low value. When a site is devalued, it's outbound links give out less or no SEO value. Your site could have dropped in rank and traffic because many of your inbound links were devalued.
Another thing is many webmasters are getting more careful about their links, especially since Panda has been released. They are doing anything they can to ensure they are within Google's quality guidelines. Many of your links could have also been turned into a nofollow. Nofollow in addition to devalued inbound links would definitely cause you a traffic drop.
Google +1 Improves Rankings – And now you can buy them!
Google has been quick to let people know that if you have your visitors click on the +1, it can help your rankings in Google. Google is tired of seeing Facebook Likes on all these pages, and while some people have said that having Facebook likes can be a direct correlation to higher rankings, it's simply not true. With Google's feverish hate for Facebook, the last thing it wants to do is to encourage people to click on Facebook likes and use Facebook in order to help gain rankings in Google. So what does Google do? They release a competitor to the famouse Facebook like called Google +1. By clicking on the +1 in the search results, or on web pages, you are essentially voting for that page, and therefore Google will rank pages higher based on user interaction. Great idea. Except this is already falling into the hands of spammers.
Introducing Plussem. This company is actually selling +1s! Not only do they sell them extremely cheap (50 for only $9.99), but they have some interesting ways of doing this so it looks natural. The company works with people who have unique Google accounts that are phone verified. Each +1 comes from a real person and not a bot, and the person maually goes to Google search, finds your URL, and clicks on +1. Since these are real people, they all have unique and distinct IP addresses. They don't all do it at once, so it gives it a more natural feel.
Here's a red flag though. Your site has no +1s. Then over a week it gets 50, and then no more +1s again after that. If I was Google, I would flag this as potential spam. This is going to be exploited by spammers, but it's a normal thing nowadays. Google will release rules and algorithms and spammers will just find ways around them.
Would be interesting to see if plussem gets banned. All Google needs to do is to have a spam team that creates an account, and looks at which sites bought this service and ban them. Easy way to get rid of spammers.
DMOZ is dead – Why DMOZ is corrupt
It used to be that DMOZ was the end all directory that everyone wanted to have their site listed in. Being in DMOZ meant your site passed a human review, noted as not being spam and contained some quality content or material. Google even encouraged people to list their site in DMOZ, because if you were listed in DMOZ it gave Google a clear signal that your site passed the human test.
As DMOZ became more popular, they started to take on more and more editors to help them sort through all of the submissions they get on a daily basis. The editors would pick quality sites, and drop the low quality sites from the directory. Seemed like a great idea.
I have many sites, and about two weeks ago I submitted one of my sites to DMOZ. It's been years since any of my sites were actually approved by DMOZ. It's not because any of my sites are low quality, but because DMOZ never even checked my sites! I know this because I specifically track when dmoz.org comes in as a referrer. For those who don't know, DMOZ has a control panel that their editors log in to. This control panel is located in www.dmoz.org/editors. When they see URLs they need to approve, the referrer comes in as:
www.dmoz.org/editors/editunrev/listurl?cat=
After the cat=, is the category that you submitted your site to.
So let's say you submitted your site to this directory: /Arts/Movies/Genres/Sports/Baseball/
The referrer to your site would be:
www.dmoz.org/editors/editunrev/listurl?cat=Arts/Movies/Genres/Sports/Baseball
They click on the URL to look at your site, and determine if they want it added into the index or not. The editor then selects yes or not, and then they go on to the next site.
Well, here is where it gets interesting... after submitting one of my sites two weeks ago, I checked my logs today, and noticed that I got a referrer from DMOZ! I was excited to see someone actually looked at my site. Now here is where my blood started to boil. The IP for the editor was a competitor of mine!! Yes, DMOZ allows people within the SAME category to determine if you are going to appear or not. What competitor would say yes??
No wonder people are complaining left and right that no one is being added into the index. Competitors got signed up as editors, and now they are making sure no one else gets added into the index. This might not be the case for every category, but from what I saw today with my own site, and my logs, I bet it's the case for MOST of DMOZ!
People have questioned if DMOZ is dead for years. This proves that it IS. The site might be up and generating a ton of traffic from SEO's who are trying to get every possible link, but with this kind of corruption and scam, DMOZ is dead in my book.
Do you have a similar story? Post it here, so we can boycott DMOZ submissions. Maybe then the owners will listen, and drop all existing editors and start from scratch with a better background check!
Post Panda SEO – How to optimize after Google Panda Update
The Google Panda update has many webmasters scratching their heads. After many years of having a quality website, getting high authority links, and creating unique compelling content, the Google Panda update rolls out, and takes with it half of their organic search traffic. Ouch.
In February 2011, Google launched it's Panda Update. The update was designed to get more quality into their search results by removing websites that they determine - through a series of algorithms - to be high quality. It's named the Panda update after one Google engineer that has the nickname of Panda, and came up with this idea. I'm all for higher quality in the Google search results, but this update missed it's mark. The result was that while it did remove a lot of spam from the Google search results, it also took with it a lot of good sites, and pushed up a lot of bad sites. It's a mess.
There has been lots of discussion around the internet from concerned webmasters on what to do to bring their traffic back. Many of them have tried everything and have not regained their rankings. The point of this post isn't to talk about the Panda update itself, but rather trying to determine what the Panda update was going after, since Google is very secret about it.
After doing a lot of research, and speaking with a lot of people, I am going to try and debunk some myths, and give my opinion on my observations through my sites as well as some customer sites.
Panda Update Myths
I keep hearing things such as The Panda update targeted Adsense sites to such extreme thoughs as the Panda update targeted only sites that have dark backgrounds. The fact is that the update did not target only sites that have Adsense, it also targeted E-Commerce sites. It also didn't target a specific background color - let's be realistic. It's not one specific target that people hope to fix in a second and regain their rankings. It's much deeper than that.
It's a site wide penalty
Wrong. Just because many of your pages were devalued doesn't mean it's site wide. On many sites I work on, lots of terms still rank high even through the site took a 30-50% traffic hit. Take a look at your site and look for how many thin pages you have. I know many people generate tons of thin pages with little to no content so they can rank for long tail. However, how many of these pages actually rank? You're diluting your site with garbage pages.
People forget the rule that the general rule of thumb is the amount of PR you have is proportional to your Google allotment. What this means is that if you have a PR10 site, you can bet that every url on your site will be indexed and cached. If you have a PR1, and 1 million generated pages, you can except only a few thousand of thoses pages to be indexed and ranked. Grow your site proportional to your page rank. People can argue that page rank means nothing, but it's an easy measure for an overview site status.
Panda update was to promote big brands
This isn't true overall. Many of the sites that still rank high are smaller sites that are simply better. Just because you are a brand site doesn't necessarily mean you have what I'm looking for. Many big brands are out of touch with the people, and smaller sites fill that need.
Panda update went against ecommerce sites that used manufacture descriptions
Besides the fact that many manufactures require for you to use their description, I don't agree with this. Build an extra link or two to this product page, and you'll outrank 90% of your competitors. Why rewrite descriptions? It's the same thing just in your words... if you think that in 2011 Google can't figure this out, maybe you should be doing something else 
You have a high bounce rate
This is also a myth. Google doesn't calculate bounce rates for their Panda ranking algorithm, but they do measure how many people click on your link, and then click back to go back to Google search. Bounce rates can't be a measure because think of how many sites could have a high bounce rate... Groupon - People go to the site, check the deal, and leave if it's not interesting to them. CNN - Hit the homepage, scan the news stories, and leave if it's not interesting to them. Does this mean the site is low quality? No.
Article Submission Sites and Press Release Sites
These are some of the hardest hit sites, and rightfully so. Most of the content on these sites is regurgitated garbage. Sure, some sites review articles submitted to make sure they aren't duplicated through other sites, and so forth, but most of the articles are poorly written, offer the user little or no information, and are only done for link backs. Now imagine this... these article sites have gained huge popularity because of one indicator - their page rank. If an articles site has a page rank of 6, it's going to get flooded with people trying to fill it with articles to link back to them. But step back and think of how that article site got to a PR6 in the first place. Do you think CNN linked to it? How about Yahoo News? It got it's PR6 from hundreds of thousands of links from poor quality SEO sites encouraging you to submit articles. So naturally, when Panda rolled out, and devalued all of these junk SEO sites and blogs, it devalued the authority of article submission sites. Therefore, your articles on there, were devalued, and those links pointing to your site were devalued as well. The result? A chain of lowered search results from your site, to article sites, to all these bunk SEO sites.
Press release sites aren't far from it either. Many sites don't even review the Press release being submitted, it's usually bogus or junk. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but that is the minority and not the majority.
User Generated Content
People complained that their sites that are 100% user generated content took a hit, and cried about it since they believe it to be unique content. Sure, I agree it's likely to be unique content. But 90% of it is junk. Take a reviews site or forums site for example. The person asks about a review of a certain product. Of the replies that come in, how many are longer than a sentence? How many are "this tv is great, thumbs up". Same with a forum. Someone asks a question, and have of the replies are "why don't you search?" or "bump". User generated content yes... junk? yes.
But my site has a lot of links from authority sites
Awesome, that's great news for your site! But you still got hit in Panda right? It's because the other links to your site were devalued, still causing some devaluing of your site, so you still took a hit. Imagine if you didn't have those authority links. You'd be laying off staff like Mahalo or some online furniture stores.
So what do I do post Panda SEO?
If you were doing white hat SEO before, and took a hit, and aren't sure what else to do to regain your traffic, go back to the drawing board of building links. Do this in addition to making sure you have:
1) Good site navigation.
2) Compelling content that makes the user want to come back.
3) Nothing black hat or fishy like having H1 tags, and then changing the CSS to make them 12px. You think Google is dumb?
4) NoIndex your thin pages (quantity does not equal quality)
5) Build high quality links to deep inner pages
6) Don't pay for links. It's expensive, and it's a short term gain. When Google finds out you paid, then not only will you get deranked, but the years you spent building your brand is down the tubes.
7) If you are an affiliate site, give a reason to go to your site. Just copying a description and posting a link is short term, and won't last. If you can't come up with a unique idea, then this isn't for you.
Think about it this way. If 1,000,000 sites are doing what you are doing, only 10 can appear on the first page of Google search. The top 10 do something differently to differentiate themselves. Take this advise.
How to make your website popular in 12 months
There has been a lot of talk lately about how to make your website popular considering Google continues to release changes that make it tougher and tougher to succeed unless if you have big marketing dollars. Check out this latest "Farmer Update". I've been doing this since 2001 and have learned the tricks of the trade that helped me launch many successful businesses online and grow them to popularity within 12 months of launch.
I've put together a list here of things that I believe need to be done, and need to be done in quality to have your site do well from a few days after launch to 12 months to eternity. Keep in mind that you can do other things that go against Google/Yahoo/Bing guidelines, but then you will never have the long term success you will have by following the rules here. My rules are considered "white hat" which means they follow all guidelines and you won't be penalized for them in the future. If you mix this with "black hat" which is "illegal" ways of making your site popular, then you might gain rankings, but when google releases updates to combat them you will just have spent all this time and resources just to be back at the drawing board.
Most of these rules below pertain to Google since it's the largest search engine as of the writing of this post. This should work with Yahoo and Bing also, but every search engine is a bit different and might weigh one rule more than another. However, if you follow all of these rules, I would estimate that you have a steady flow of 1500 or so people per day on your site cranking out 4-5 page views each on average. Depending on your niche, you may have more or less.
Site Layout
I like to think of the site structure and layout before anything else. Regardless of the type of site you are going to have, eCommerce, Content, Forum, etc.... I recommend that for each one you setup a WordPress Blog that is on your server and is in a folder (mysite.com/folder) and not a subdomain (subdomain.mysite.com). People might argue with me about this, but over the years, I found the folder to be the best to bring and spread PR through your site. The WordPress blog will add the ability for you to have a CMS (Content Management System) in place that pings the Search Engines with updates whenever you make a post. This ping, once your site is established, will automatically add your content into Google with cache. So, no matter what type of site you have, add WordPress to it in a folder. Keep your updates strictly to WordPress.
Domain Name / Site Name
Keep your domain name as simple as possible, and less spammy as possible. Don't include dashes, excessive keywords or anything of that nature. If you can, keep the site name and domain as generic as possible. Keep in mind, this is also important in the future for reputation management. Here is an example... if your site is called Microsoft (for example), there is no other company out there called Microsoft. Therefore, if there is anything online negative about Microsoft, it will come up in a search. Now, if your name is "Blue Cars", you can search for "Blue Cars Reviews", "Blue Cars Fraud" all you want, and it will be too general to link anything back to you. Not saying you should engage in anything fishy, but especially in eCommerce people bash online first, and ask questions later.
Content is king
Before you begin your site, you have to know what it's going to be about. Prepare a list of about 10 topics that you want to cover. If your site is eCommerce based, come up with some topics about the widgets that you sell. Describe the different types of widgets or what makes the ones you sell the best. Once your site launches, you will want to release 1 to 2 of these updates a day. Come up with top 10 lists or anything that people would find interesting and link to. Remember, keep your content rich and interesting. Don't come up with SPAM or simply rewrite someone elses content. You will never be proud of your site, and are looking at a Google penalty around every corner.
Site Design and Code
One of the reasons I recommend WordPress is that it runs so light. Go to a standard WordPress website, and do a view source on it. Look at how there isn't much clutter there. You want Google to be able to come to your site, read your source code, and not have to go through 50K of source code just for a 250 word paragraph. Simple is best. No flash, little javascript, no AJAX (unless if it doesn't affect the content), and basic SEO. I don't go into SEO here, but the simply things like descriptive site titles, ALT tags, meta description and proper inner linking is key. Keep your source code small... under 20K is recommended for fast load times, and no junk. Look at your site, sit back, and think what your reaction would be if you landed on it. Is it easy for you to find what you need within 2-3 clicks? If not, Google won't be able to find it either.
Your Content Pages
Now that you are ready to start on content and post some, it's important to understand that the content you post does need basic SEO. Keep your keyword density to 15% or so, and try a few variations. Don't over use the keywords, it will be considered on page spam. Use spell check, and use the keyword in the Title, Meta Description, heading, URL, and content. In the content, use it once in bold, and once in italic where appropriate.
When writing, if you ever use a reference such as Wikipedia, then do link to it. Outbound links help Google to see that your site is allowing visitors to get more information from authority sites, and this gives them a bit of proof that you aren't a spammer that is trying to hoard visitors.
If you a referencing something you wrote before, link to it within your content. This cross linking helps to spread PR or Page Rank, which is an important in building a popular site. The goal of your site would be for you to get visitors each day to all of your pages. Having most of your visitors come to just one of your pages would mean the rest of your site isn't very compelling, and in a case like this, you would need to re-evaluate what you write about.
Keep in mind... 1-2 pieces of content per day.
If you are adding products to an eCommerce site make sure you write unique descriptions. Don't just copy the manufacture description... your site won't rank.
Links and Link Building
The key to having a successful and popular site is to get inbound links. If Content is King then Inbound Links are the King's mother. You can get your own links by submitting your site to search engines and directories. The best links come when you create good content, and other bloggers will link to you. Until this happens, I recommend you get a link in ODP which is the Open Directory Project or DMOZ. Good luck though, I found it to be near impossible lately to get your site listed there. If you do, it's highly beneficial.
I would also recommend taking 1-2 of your content pieces you prepared and submit them to article submission sites such as ArticlesBase. Usually sites like this have distribution channels, so they will submit your article to other sites and so on, building your link backs. Keep in mind to submit only unique content that you wrote yourself.
Once you are ready and have some content on your site, submit your site to the major search engines. Keep in mind, if your site is www.mysite.com don't submit mysite.com keep the www. there, and be consistent about this. Infact, make sure if someone doesn't type in the www. then your site will .htaccess 301 redirect it to include the www. This is crucial for duplicate content issues. Once you submit the site once, no need to do it again.
Find other blogs or websites that are focused on your topic. Ask them for a link to your site if they find something useful that would help their users. Asking for a link exchange in this day and age is looked upon as potential spam and most webmasters just ignore it. It won't help you reach your goals of a successful site this way. Interview other bloggers and post the interview on your site. They will usually link to you and you don't need to link back.
If you are in eCommerce, ask the manufacture to link to you on their page of "where to buy" or "authorized dealers".
When you launch your site, prepare a press release, and submit it to all of the free press release sites. Be sure to include a link back to your site in the press release.
Submit your site to your local BBB, local library's website and local chamber of commerce.
eCommerce? Create a coupon for a product or service, and submit it to all of the coupon sites.
Create a hub page on Squidoo and link to yourself. Make sure your page is well written.
Comment on other blogs. There are blogs out there that link to blogs that have DoFollow links (as opposed to NoFollow). Posting comments on these blogs gives you PR, so make sure the blog is Dofollow. However, take this with a grain of salt... don't ONLY submit to dofollow, submit to NoFollow also so Google doesn't think you're spamming.
Hold contests, offer free samples, offer free products, offer sponsorships.
Know how to design well? Release a wordpress or other theme, and on the bottom of the theme put a "Designed By" link, and link back to your site. Make sure in the copyright it says that if you use this theme that you can't remove the copyright.
Reviews
I would recommend to review sites on Alexa, and products on Amazon. You can also use Yelp or ePinions. Include links back to your site. Have users also review products you sell. It's tough to do that, but you can always offer them a coupon or a discount on a future purchase if they come back to your site post-sale and review the product. Encourage positive reviews.
Analytics
It's important to know what's going on with your site. Many people use Google Analytics, but I don't like it. The reason is that it's not real time. I much prefer to use StatCounter so I can simply hit refresh to find out what is going on at that exact moment.
Social Media
Social media is becoming more and more important. Make sure you get a plugin for your WordPress site that automatically submits your blog post to twitter, and automatically creates a facebook post. Make sure your site has facebook like and twitter retweet buttons as well as share buttons. I happen to like AddThis.com as a solution.
Enjoy
If you follow these rules, and be sure to release your daily dose of content, you will be rewarded with readers and a successful, profitable, and popular website. Keep in mind to have fun at what you are doing. When it loses it's fun, it's not worth it. Be sure to release a site about a topic you are passionate about. Your passion will shine through and people will appreciate your site for it.
Questions? Submit a comment with any questions, and I will be glad to help or elaborate. Nothing site specific, please only ask general questions.
Google Loses 150,000 Gmail Accounts and Emails
Oops.
If you noticed today that your email account with Gmail has no emails, you're not alone. Google estimates that around 150,000 people today on Gmail lost their accounts plus all of their emails, attachments, contacts, chat logs and anything else in their accounts. The Google forums today exploded with people complaining in a panic that all of their information was gone.
While 150,000 accounts sounds like a lot, and it's definitely a lot when you are one of them, Google says that is only 0.08% of the Gmail user base. After investigating for 5 hours, Google said they were aware of the problem, but still have not fixed it. During the time they are investigating it might not allow you to log in.
There are programs out there to backup your Google Mail. I think Gmail backup would be a good idea, and I haven't used any of these services myself, but I think this might be a bit extreme. If anyone has Gmail backups, it would be Google. If there is a temporary problem, as inconvenient as it may be, I would wait, and 100% sure that Google would restore everything back to normal.
Was your account compromised?
Google “Farmer” Update Hurts Many Online Businesses
It looks like Google outdid itself this time. Google announced that they released an update to combat spam by changing their algorithm to detect if a website is a "content farm". A content farm would be a website that releases a lot of content that is identical to content already out there (duplicate content), or slightly changed. It's also a bunch of duplicate content put together to make the content look original in nature. One such site that comes to mind is eHow, which is owned by Demand Media. These guys literally have thousands of writers take other people's content and simply rewrite it into their own words. Google claims these kids of sites fill their result pages with useless junk, and many of their users are complaining.
Many people are also saying that this is targeting Made for Adsense (MFA) sites, since they are usually spam sites that are made to get people from search engines to come to the site and click on the ad. I guess it's relatively safe to say that most content farm sites are designed to make money from Adsense or other types of PPC advertising.
So here's the thing... this algorithm gets changed all of the time, so much so that usually there is no announcement about it, and usually no one gets in a stink about it. However, this one is affecting nearly 12% (11.8% per Google) of all search results. So here is how it works:
Let's say for example the popular article submission site ArticlesBase. Let's say you submitted articles here, and included a link for a link back to your site. After this update from Google, they now determine that ArticlesBase is a content farm and their website is no longer authority, and is now borderline "spam". Once this filter goes into effect, every article you submitted before in the past now doesn't pass as much, or any, link juice PR to your site. Any SERP ranking your site had in the past from ArticlesBase is now gone or severly diminished. If you have an eCommerce site, and released a bunch of articles of products you sell, you can expect that likely your sales will drop off and those pages will now rank lower in Google as well. Bummer huh?
This update is so big, even CNN has released a story about it. Webmaster Forums are blowing up with anger over this update, and I don't blame them one bit. Instead of releasing an algorithm to combat this, Google needs to use their own data and do manual filters.
They have analytics data, adsense data, bounce rate data, SERP data, CTR data and more that they can use to determine this more efficiently. There is even an extension for Google Chrome that lets you submit spam sites. However, Google claims this update didn't take that info effect.
If your site is one of those currently affected, take a breather. I know it's easier said than done, but sit back, relax, and give the update a few days to settle. Google is notorious for releasing overly critical updates that settle over the next few days or few weeks, and loosens their filters.
Here is data from various sources on the top 10 sites that actually gained from this update:
1. Amazon.com
2. eHow.com
3. NexTag.com
4. Wikipedia.com
5. Walmart.com
6. Target.com
7. Etsy.com
8. Answers.Yahoo.com
9. Sears.com
10. bestonlinecoupons.com
Here are the top 10 losers:
1.TheFind.com
2.BizRate.com
3.ShopWiki.com
4.EzineArticles.com
5.HubPages.com
6.Buzzillions.com
7.Shopping.com
8.Suite101.com
9.Kaboodle.com
10.AssociatedContent.com
Has your site been affected by this update? Many people who have original content and all white hat SEO are saying they are going to get together and do mass reinclusion requests to Google for manual reviews of their site. If you do this, please update us and let us know how it goes.