GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 22 - October 2012

User behavior We know this has been a growing factor for a while, and with Google keeping people logged into their products and effectively spying on their online behavior more than ever before, they will be able to use this data more effectively and will probably assign it more weight in coming updates. Now this is in many cases going to be bad for affiliates, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise as a few recent updates (such as the Penguin update, just discussed) seem to be aimed at punishing affiliate sites that have little in the way of valuable content and are just looking to move their traffic on to their promoted product as quickly as possible. The fact is that if this affects rankings in the way we expect, then odds are sites with high bounce rates and short-staying visitors and those which are generally not user friendly (slow loading speeds, too many banners, etc.) are going to be hit even harder. Pandering to the Google Panda update will not be enough; you will need to add unique selling points to get users coming back to your site and interacting with it (I know Google says that they don’t use analytics data, but what about all their other products?). Building communities may seem like the best route to go about this, but that is of course something that the part-time affiliate is probably not going to be able to manage. So going forward affiliates need to focus on making great content (not just well formatted, well written, long, with any old image thrown in), as well as making their sites easily navigable and only placing banners where absolutely necessary. Also make sure to properly make use of rich snippets; for those of you that have large sites, focus on images and ratings as they will boost your clickthrough rates the most. Social Integration into the SERPs This is something that we’ve all been seeing. Google is paying closer attention to the behavior of the general public than ever before and with things like G+ impacting the SERPs in such an obvious manner it would be foolish not to anticipate that this is going to become increasingly prevalent. While the uptake of G+ has been relatively slow, the value of social mentions cannot be disputed; the only problem is that you have to continue to produce socially viral content to continue to hold your places gained with it. There is also the creation of the Rel Author tag, which ties in with G+ with authors being able to claim their content – furthering an old promise that Google will be able to associate content with the writer and give content written by notable authors a higher priority. This was already the case in some circumstances, with high-quality profiles having more value than weak ones in terms of article directories, social bookmarks, forums and other low-level links. This is simply evolution. Although this idea could be hampered by a lack of take-up it stands to reason that those creating quality social profiles and guest posting can make themselves power authors and reap the inevitable benefits. It is possible that the whole concept could come to nothing; however, if you implement a strategy now and become an authority early then it will be a great deal easier than trying to establish yourself later when you are competing against hundreds if not thousands more webmasters. It is already becoming an increasingly competitive landscape, so don’t miss out. “ Are lots of bold tags and italics around your keywords helpful to the user? Probably not. On the other hand, are a lot of social shares, references to relevant, high- quality sources and well-written content a good indicator of whether or not a user will find this useful? Probably yes.”