GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 17 - September 2011

ent users with the best possible websites for them. They have access to massive amounts of data about how people inter- act with the web: Comparative page data among the 120 billion documents in their index Click and bounce rate data from about 3 billion searches per day On page engagement data from the 50 percent of sites that use Google Analytics Click and context data from the 12 bil- lion AdSense ads served each day Content is a part of the answer, but it is not everything. And understanding that there is more to recovering from Panda than just rewriting content provides a practical starting point for doing so. The first step in solving any Panda prob- lems is to take a very critical look at your site fromall angles and concentrate onwhat you can do to improve it for your users. Change 1: Content If you’ve spent the last five years paying barely literate people to produce thou- sands of pages of low-quality content for your website, then you have a problem. Take a look at each of your pages and ask yourself: Does this page answer a ques- tion, or just restate it again and again with the view to move the user on elsewhere? Get a good writer in place, and direct him or her to write the answer to the question so that your user is looked after. Then, take all of the other hundreds of similar pages on the same theme, and use a 301 redirect to push all of their accumulated value onto the main page. Change 2: Advertising If you’re running Google AdSense on your website and you have multiple ad-units in place, then you need to reduce them. This is actually a good tip for anyone. AdSense is based on an auction model: the fewer ads you display, the higher the bid that is required to appear on your page. There is plenty of evidence that websites with a lot of advertising on them have been disproportionately penalized by Panda. And it’s not just Google AdSense that has an impact. If you’re running a lot of affili- ate programs from each page, then cut back to the ones that make you the most money. • • • • Change 3: Design User experience has a massive impact on the stickiness of your website. If you want to reduce the bounce rate – the number of people who click through to your website and then click straight back to the search results – then you need to focus on your design. We’re not all great artists, so it’s important to get a designer who knows what he or she is doing to deliver some- thing that works. Think about what you would want to see as a user – it’s probably not a confusing mess of dense and poorly written text sandwiched between ads. Make it easy to navigate around the site, and encourage users to find out more. Change 4: Experience If you run a commercial website on a server that is shared with hundreds of other sites, then it will be slow. That makes for a poor user experience, andone that Google tracks. If your site is riddled with broken links or code that validates poorly, those too will make for poor user experiences, and are also things that Google tracks. If you offer a poor user experience, Google will not want to direct its users to your content. Look at ways to optimize site speed – invest in a dedicated server if you have lots of traffic, run regular error reports on your site to check whether content is still in place and make sure you have a proper, helpful error page in case something goes wrong. Change 5: Focus One of the reasons why people struggled with Panda is that it affectedwebsites where the publishers hadn’t necessarily interro- gated their data thoroughly enough on an ongoing basis to seewhether their siteswere great for users. By focusing on top-line data such as the number of visits or the number of ad clicks that their sites were generating, they lost sight of the way in which users were interacting with their sites. User satisfaction counts Google has had access to user satisfaction metrics for a long time. The fact that they have started to use this data more ag- gressively to rank websites is a big chal- lenge for people who put user satisfaction second to other factors. Google Panda is about more than content farms, but web- sites of that type are the ones that most prominently ignore user needs in favor of their own. If you look after your customers, they will look after you! “ “Overnight, publishers who had operated under a model in which they created millions of pages to capture users across a huge range of keywords found that their websites had disappeared from Google’s results – along with their traffic.” ” Google Panda – What it means, and what you can do! James Lowery is the Head of SEO and Affiliate Marketing at Latitude, a U.K.-based digital agency. He’s been working in search marketing for eight years, and has developed and implemented SEO and social media strategies for a diverse range of blue chip clients across the gaming, finance and retail industries. 10