When it comes to SEO, there’s no denying it can
be pretty hard to keep up – especially when you have a busy e-commerce site to
run – and just lately it’s been harder than ever to stay up to date.There are
some things that are essential for ensuring that your company is enhanced for
search engines, like SEO hosting on a dedicated web server. Without that, following all of these tips
won’t make a difference if you share a server with a lower quality site.
In the last 12-18 months Google has introduced a number of major updates which
have all but flipped traditional SEO values on their head. For those of you
that aren’t in the know, Google has pretty much thrown out the rule book when
it comes to web spam and content, leaving lots of website owners clambering for
alternative traffic sources. If your website traffic has been up and down more
times than a yo-yo and your rankings have pretty much nose-dived over the last
year or so, there’s a strong possibility you have been hit by Google’s latest
updates; Panda and Penguin. Google Panda Originally released in the US
in February 2011, the Google Panda update was designed to combat the issue of
low quality, duplicate content on websites. Also known as the Farmer Update,
the update affected around 12% of all web searches and was focused on lowering
the rankings of ‘low quality’ sites and boosting the rankings of ‘high quality’
sites.
So what makes a ‘low quality’ site?
A site is classified as ‘low quality’ if it
features lots of spammy, duplicate content which isn’t classed as useful or
informative. Spammy content can be defined as any content which doesn’t make
sense – i.e. it doesn’t flow and is only there to catch searches. In the past
it’s been about quantity over quality when it comes to content, but now that’s
all changed. Gone are the days when you could just write a few paragraphs and
then spread them across every page on your site, simply changing a few words to
make them seem ‘unique’ – thanks to Panda it’s now all about having quality,
unique, useful content on every page of your website. Have lots of duplicate
manufacturer product descriptions on your site? You might want to think about
rewriting them to ensure you’re not penalised by Panda! Since the
initial launch, the Panda update has been tweaked and re-launched a number of
times, with the most recent update taking place on June 8th – Panda 3.7 is
thought to have affected around 1% of all web searches – so if your traffic or
rankings took a dip around this time, it may be time to take a closer look at
your site content! Google Penguin Only released on April 24th, the
Penguin update is Google’s latest attempt to crack down on web spam in the form
of keyword-stuffing, spammy inbound links and hidden text. Also known as the
Over-Optimization penalty, Google Penguin has been designed to punish
‘black-hat’ SEO techniques which have previously been used to achieve high
rankings. In the past if you stuffed a page with keywords and bought tons and
tons of links which all linked back to your site with keyword anchor text, you
were destined for rankings success but now that’s no longer the case.
So what are
‘spam links’?
Spam links are any links which have been bought
or acquired specifically to push up your rankings. From article marketing
(writing lots of articles with links back to your site and publishing them on
every article site going) to buying high PR links to boost your own site’s PR,
in the past it’s been very much about both quality AND quantity when it comes
to inbound links (the more, the better!) but now the focus is very much on
quality and quality alone. Rather than simply taking your link profile at face
value, Google is now taking a closer look and taking the decision to penalise
sites which it believes have an unnatural, spammy link profile – in their eyes,
you should earn links, not actively go out and acquire them! As with any
other update, Google keeps tweaking Penguin (the latest update was May 26th) so
if your site has been punished by Penguin, there is a chance it will recover at
some point if you clean up your link profile, reduce the keyword density of
your pages and delete any sneaky hidden text you may have had hiding on your
site to try and catch searches!
So what’s the answer?
Unfortunately because Google’s still such a
dominant player in the search engine industry (although Bing and Yahoo! are
gaining ground every day!), there’s no ‘quick-fix’ solution. To succeed in the
rankings these days you need to focus on creating a high quality site which is
easy to use and features useful, unique content – oh, and driving traffic to
your site via alternative platforms like social media and email marketing isn’t
a bad idea either!
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