Panda 4.1 - Content Content Content

[JessicaRuth]

Great article about Panda's latest algorithm update and how it should change your content strategy.

Few excerpts:

To get a grip on the quality of your content and the experience your brand is creating site-wide:

1. Quality: Start with your most important pages – high-traffic, high-value web pages – and begin evaluating them against a set of criteria. Think about the set of criteria that Panda uses to evaluate sites (what we do know) along with the set of criteria that comes up often in the Google search quality guide.
2. User Experience: Prioritize the content development and user experience improvements needed (of course, you can use tools like Google Analytics for data that can help you prioritize next steps). When evaluating pages, think about the purpose of the page or set of pages, and create an approach to making those deliver on their promise.
3. Optimize Every Page: Do the same for the second- and third-tier types of pages on your site until the entire site has been evaluated, and action items have been assigned to each tier and type of page.

The great thing about Panda overall is that it’s elevating the quality of the search results on Google. And, websites can see improvements in ranking when the algorithm refreshes after they’ve taken steps to improve their content and user experience.

 

[craigh]

In my years of working with countless clients and websites in countless industries and verticals, I have never seen better success than following a few simple rules. These rules have shown increases in performance with almost every Google update and have consistently helped increase organic traffic in turn.

1. Write your content for users. Every Google update is trying to make search results better for humans, so writing for humans gets you to the same place they want to be. I believe everytime they get smarter we perform better because we're at the same end goal.
2. Cover the basics - meta tags, alt tags, no pages with only images, proper address markup, etc. No rocket science here, just cover the basics. Indifferent of what Google says, I've seen significant gains from just flipping these things around on a site that had no alt tags, improper meta tags, etc.
3. Focus on Authority. Using AdWords and other tools we can build a general consensus on what Google considers us to be an authority on and we can play to those strengths. For both SEO and SEM we build on what we're good at and then work on improving our weaknesses. We have found that if Google believes we are an authority on Ford Escape, maximizing our content and exposure on Ford Escape pages, VLPs, etc has a better result than doing identical work on a vehicle that Google considers us to have less authority on.

So far, so good. We've survived the updates and at this point these updates are a minor caution, but we certainly don't re-think our core strategy.

 

[joe.pistell]

What are you Best Price Ford Dealer talking about? I think SEO content Ford Service serving greater St Louis is out of the dark ages and readers find great value in it.

 

[craigh]

What are you Best Price Ford Dealer talking about? I think SEO content Ford Service serving greater St Louis is out of the dark ages and readers find great value in it.

A Used 2014 Toyota Highlander Hybrid in London Offers Space, Comfort, Fuel Economy

Discover the Family-Friendly Space and Fuel Economy Savings of a New or Used 2014 Toyota Highlander Hybrid SUV in London, Ontario

If you’re in the market for an SUV that offers an unrivaled amount of space, comfort, and fuel economy, check out the 2014 Toyota Highlander Hybrid in London, Ontario. When it comes to big room with small gas usage, the Highlander Hybrid has you covered.

I look forward to the day when this no longer performs well.

 

[joe.pistell]

I look forward to the day when this no longer performs well.

Craig, I'm with ya. There are a million things more complex that google can figure out, at some point, they'll cross this bridge (I bet we both agree that its a matter of when, not if)

 

[craigh]

Craig, I'm with ya. There are a million things more complex that google can figure out, at some point, they'll cross this bridge (I bet we both agree that its a matter of when, not if)

Absolutely 100%. That's why we place our bets on "human content" and we continue to improve each time.
Not saying that the other content falls flat on it's face, because it typically doesn't, but I like to maintain clean content that isn't spammy.