Panda and Penguin. If you’re in any way connected to the world of SEO, these are two animals you need to know about. You’ll probably have heard about these cute, fuzzily-monikered Google algorithm updates (which change the way the search engine ranks websites) at some point. Especially since every time another algorithm update hits, online marketers everywhere descend into a frenzy. 

How new algorithms unfold can impact enormously on any online marketing you have in place. That’s why it’s important to have at least some understanding of what it all means for the SEO work connected to your business - so here’s a brief summary of what Panda and Penguin were all about, and what you need to be aware of...

About Google Panda

Panda first hit in February 2011 (US) with Panda 1.0 (also known as the ‘Farmer’s Update’) targeting websites with low quality content, in particular content farms and second rate article directories. Google had enough of these clogging up the search results so took action. It’s estimated that Panda 1.0 affected almost 12% of US search terms when it first emerged.

Following this initial rollout, Panda continued with updates every few months (we are currently on Panda version 25) , taking the update global and targeting spammy, low quality, thin content, as well as duplicate and keyword heavy content, in order to improve the experience for web users and to improve the search engine results.

Websites that were hit particularly hard were content aggregators. The way Google sees it, sites that gather and store articles from other sites don't add much value to the web, so were penalised for the heavy amount of duplicate content on them. When they launched Panda, Google said that they were: "evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content … attention has shifted to ‘content farms’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content".

Unfortunately for webmasters and online businesses the world over, there was a tonne of collateral damage. Ecommerce sites in particular, were hit too. The reason being that they often have the exact same product descriptions as other sites, often passed straight from the manufacturer and uploaded to the site. Google saw a lot of these Ecommerce sites as copying other content so they failed the Panda test and rankings plummeted.

About Google Penguin

Penguin waddled onto the scene and first caused waves in the SEO world in April 2012; Penguin made its entrance by penalising questionable SEO tactics and hitting sites that were violating Google’s Webmaster guidelines by using manipulative or ‘black hat’ SEO techniques to improve their rankings. Whereas Panda was about content and on-site SEO, Penguin zoned in on off-site SEO, in particular low quality links and over-optimised anchor text. It delivered a slap to any sites that appeared guilty, which at the time saw a large number of sites fall. 

Lots of businesses that had been outsourcing their SEO on the cheap (i.e. either by responding to one of those "We guarantee rankings. We build thousands of links for $99 a month" type emails or by using an agency that outsources to these people) got hit, even when they had been ranking well off these dodgy tactics for months or even years. The reality of Penguin is that it put many people out of business, as the rankings penalties were often so huge that sites would go from thousands of visitors a day to none.

How to stay out of trouble

If you want to stay on the right side of the Google Panda and Penguin updates and keep your site safely at the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), you need to understand what makes them tick and what they love. Adhere to their preferences and you shouldn’t have any problems.

Panda hates content thin pages, content farms, duplicate content and has set out to penalise these in order to increase the relevancy of pages and show users pages that have high quality, unique content. Therefore, you need to focus on producing strong, engaging content that is relevant and that your users will find useful. If you can ensure that your site copy is unique, of a high quality and provides useful information to your audience, then you will have one happy Panda!

Penguin is effectively a link filter and doesn’t like sites that try too hard to cheat the SERPs; it hates low quality links and too many keywords being used in the anchor text, so what makes Penguin happy? Well Penguin loves websites that appear to be naturally good without having to overdo it; it likes to see natural links based on quality, Panda-friendly content. If you are building links then you need to ensure you have a varied link profile, with hyperlinks pointing in from authoritative, relevant websites and when you have the option to choose anchor-text, make sure you vary it and don't always make it keyword focused.

Panda and Penguin check-list

Follow this quick check-list to ensure you’re not in the Panda or Penguin firing line:

• Keep content relevant and engaging - write for users, not for search engines
• Make sure your backlink profile is natural and doesn’t contain many spammy links, paid links or links from sites that Google would consider low quality
• Ensure that content is unique and not taken from other websites
• Don’t over-optimise your anchor text
• Avoid link building from rubbish websites that only exist for the purpose of manipulating search engines i.e. general directories with no quality control, article submission sites that publish any old thing, link farms, etc.

What’s coming next?

But don’t rest on your laurels: there are new updates every few months. Google changed over 500 times last year and there were many other changes on top of Panda and Penguin. The word on the web is that another major Penguin update is on the horizon; Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, revealed last month that they are working on Penguin 4, cryptically stating that the way Penguin works will be changed. So, while we all sit and wait for this next big Penguin update in anticipation, it’s worth clearing up that backlink profile, refining your content, and checking that you’re not currently stepping over the line!

There are rumblings of discontent amongst webmasters, online marketers and internet users. Has the search engine giant Google taken its eye of the ball and seen better days? By diversifying into multiple markets and trying to be so many different things to so many different people, and by changing its core product from a Search Engine to a Knowledge Engine, has Google lost its way?

With such a dominant market position and with so many pies to keep their fingers in, is it possible that Google have become complacent in their very comforable throne? This speculation is not questioning the scale of the role Google has played in making the internet an accessible, user friendly tool for the online shopper, browser and inquisitor. This is not a piece to dispute the positive influence Google has had; rather it is an attempt to interrogate the possibility that the quality of Google’s core activity has started to wane. 

Poor quality search results

Webmasterworld is a trusted and established discussion resource for search engine optimisation specialists the world over, and in recent months their forums have started to simmer with the hushed whisperings of a search engine revolt. The consensus of those in the industry is that the quality of Google’s search engine results has slipped to a place where results being served are the worst they have been for many years.         

This belief is probably best expressed by Brett Tabke, who runs Webmasterworld: “Right now I continue to receive some of the lowest Google results I have seen in years: Duplicate sites, irrelevant Google property spam, author images and squeeze page results. It just feels like Google is in the middle of a full scale panic.”

The SEO team at Liberty had a little dig around, and it didn’t take long before we came across an apt example for one of the internet’s most highly contested key phrases – ‘payday loans’.

Page one of Google’s search results last week can be seen above. Not only are none of the industry’s biggest, most trusted names included, but at least four of the results have nothing to do with payday loans whatsoever – they are hacked websites. Is this the new black-hat way to get on to the first page of Google - hack someone else’s website?

As yet there is no acknowledgement from Google of this problem, although concerns must be rife that the latest batch of algorithm updates and filters intended to improve user experience have had the opposite effect in many cases. However complacent Google may have become, it seems baffling that an organisation which has so shrewdly forged its place at the head of such an innovative industry can allow an obvious flaw in their core activity to remain unchecked for so long.

Flouting of privacy laws 

Aside from poor quality search engine results, internet users are feeling alienated by the Google brand, which is guilty of sending mixed messages to its customer base. Google’s ‘Do no evil’ mantra, which aims to portray the company as their ethical, trusted friend, has time and time again proved to be disingenuous or even dishonest at worst, as Google’s interpretation of privacy seems to differ from that of its users.

There is no shortage of events which have made it clear that privacy does not appear to be a priority for Google’s powers that be. This is in direct conflict with internet users and government officials, who see privacy as a central issue.

In March the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charged Google with unfair privacy practices, when it set the gmail contact details of users of its ‘Buzz’ social media service as public by default. The Google browsers Chrome and Android have also caused a stir by failing to offer users a ‘Do Not Track’ option, meaning that all of the movements and actions of browsers are tracked in a transparent attempt to digest all of the private information available.

There have also been much publicised investigations, particularly in the EU, into the collection of personal data via Google Street View. Following claims from Google that the collection of data (including emails, passwords and other personal information) from unprotected wireless networks was a simple mistake, fresh insight cast the complaints in a new light. The engineer responsible for the creation of the software claimed he had informed the Street View team that the software he had designed would collect this information, flouting EU laws, although during interviews with the Federal Communications Commission, the Street View team denied knowledge of the report. 

Perhaps the icing on this rather bitter-tasting cake is the recent scandal which clearly flies in the face of Google’s increasingly fragile ‘Do No Evil’ slogan. The company reached a $500 million legal settlement with the U.S. Justice Department to avoid prosecution on charges that it knowingly accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal ads from Canadian online pharmacies, which included illegal drugs and controlled substances.    

Possible alternatives

With these transgressions in mind, which competitors are best placed to gobble up the scraps from Google’s table if it continues to flagrantly contradict its ethical pledge?

Figures detailed in a recent search market share report from Compete.com show that in the last month Bing fielded 19.2 per cent of all search queries, which has led to an increase of 4.2 per cent since August 2011. With a fifth of the market, Bing is certainly no small fry and Microsoft are steadily gaining in confidence. The recent launch of Bing It On, a search engine comparison service, perfectly illustrates this point.

Bing It On allows users to enter five search queries, comparing the results side-by-side with those from Google. Although the test is only available in America, Bing claim that an independent study found that users preferred the results displayed by Bing to those produced by Google by nearly 2:1. Bing have clearly thrown down the gauntlet on this one.   

A more recent entrant to the market, Duck Duck Go, believes Google’s position has weakened to such an extent that they are actively targeting the growing anti-Google crowd. An illustrated guide by the newcomers, http://dontbubble.us, shows just how Duck Duck Go aim to capture a different breed of internet user by offering less presumptuous search results, which offer a more rounded range of information by breaking users out of the bubble that search engine tracking automatically imposes. 

The Future

So how do we expect these developments to impact on the future of online search?

If the Google decline is set to stay and Bing, along with other new entrants, continue to mop up their disillusioned users, the market will segment and SEOs will have to pander to the algorithms set by other search engines to keep achieving results. Until now, SEO strategies have been devised to follow Google best practice, but if Bing continue their surge, before long SEOs will find themselves moving to the beat of a new and slightly drum. Regardless, these developments bode well for the internet user. A more tightly fought market will drive innovation and increase the search for competitive advantage, which in our experience is never a bad thing.

Today Google announced an update to their webmaster tools guidelines. It’s been a while since they last updated their guidelines, which had become a little dated after a turbulent year with so many significant algorithm updates.

One important addition has been rich snippets.

What are rich snippets?

Rich snippets are designed to provide searchers with additional information on a site’s content prior to clicking through to it. An example that people will be familiar with is the star review snippet.

This allows searchers to form an opinion on the quality of a site before they even click through to the site.

Other rich snippets include

• music (listing songs, track durations),
• people (name, job titles, photo, Steve Jobs),
• products (pricing, ratings, availability),
• business organisations (name, telephone, website),
• recipes (name, reviews, photos)
• events (date, type, location, tickets, photos, Foo Fighters)
• consumer software such as mobile phone apps.

What are the benefits of rich snippets?

From the examples above, it’s pretty clear what the benefits are of well implemented rich snippets. If you can stand out from your competitors when that set of search results pops up, then you’re likely to experience increased click through rates.

Rich snippets are also a great way to position your brand by creating a sense of authority in the search results. When Google puts so much more emphasis on your listing over and above the competition searchers are more comfortable in clicking through to your site. The additional exposure and space that your listing takes up is also a great platform for getting your message across to prospective customers.

Rich snippets and social media

Rich snippets can also be used to distribute your social media content. Video mark up and Facebook share are recognised by Google and can be attached to your videos to encourage interaction. Marking up your video can also help Google show videos uploaded to YouTube in the search results.

As traditional link building moves more to a content centred approach there has been considerable interest in the author tag, an element of the people rich snippet. When interconnected with a blog and Google+ profile, Google can show details of an author alongside the content they have published in the search results. This can have a profound effect on personal brands as well as increase click through rates and social following.

For more information about the new Google rich snippet guidelines visit the Webmaster Central Blog.

In a move that’s sure to upset some of the big comparison brands, Google has launched a car insurance comparison service that appears during major keyword searches, right at the top of the organic results.

The new service appears between the traditional adverts and organic search results for popular terms such as car insurance, car insurance comparison and car insurance quotes – and has seen Google’s share of the market for car insurance-related searches soar.

This isn’t the first comparison service launched by Google: it already compares credit cards and bank accounts in a similar system, but the move is nevertheless sure to rattle car insurance comparison sites, which have already suffered a significant loss of organic traffic. Google appears to be using the system of the relatively unknown comparison site BeatThatQuote, which it acquired some 18 months ago in March 2011.

Google has pledged to offer greater privacy and transparency to drivers looking for car cover, saying that none of its featured insurers will sell personal details to third parties. However, Google may use any details provided during the quote to improve its targeting of advertising across the network. 

The service compares quotes from around 120 different insurers, which is comparable to major sites such as Confused.com and GoCompare.com, while early research shows that the service is also competitive in its rates.

How this will affect the fortunes of the comparison sites remains to be seen; many will probably have to amend their online marketing campaigns in order to remain visible and competitive. And although Google currently only compare car insurance, bank accounts and credit cards, this major step hints at further development into comparison sites – so watch this space!

It has emerged that Google has announced updates to its search ranking systems. From now on, websites who are gaining a false start on competitors by using pirated content are likely to be penalised. 

Google’s Amit Singhai said: 

"We will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.” 

But what does this mean for you? 

The good news is that if your site is chock-full of cracking content that’s yours and yours alone, then you’ve nothing to worry about. In fact, these updates could help your rankings if your competitors use content that infringes copyright law. 

But now more than ever, it’s clear that if you’re going to be ranking well in Google, you need to be featuring content that’s definitely yours. Make sure that your website uses copy, pictures and videos that are purely yours or used with permission. 

Help! I’ve been slapped by the updates and it’s not my fault! 

Fear not. Nice Mr Singhai will allow you to state your case, and any unjust removals will be reinstated:

“We’ll continue to provide ‘counter-notice‘ tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We’ll also continue to be transparent about copyright removals.”

Phew. 

If you are worried that your content may have been copied, or that the person who wrote it may have ‘lifted’ it from elsewhere, then one handy tool for checking duplication from Copyscape can be found here.

Would you like to make your business more visible on Google? Does your website need original, compelling content? Find out how we can help by contacting us today on 029 2076 6467 and have a chat with our friendly SEO and copywriting teams.

For Google Analytics novices, the amount of data you are presented with can seem daunting. With such a wide and overwhelming range of metrics available to you, it can sometimes feel like you can’t see the woods for the trees. Here’s our guide to making sense of some of the most important parts of Google Analytics...

A good place to start when determining the success of your SEO campaign is to take a look at the ‘Keywords’ and ‘Search Engines’ sections of the Traffic Sources tab. This will show you the search engines your traffic is coming from and for which search terms. If you’re running a paid search campaign (a.k.a. Pay Per Click) as well as organic SEO, then you should be sure to click the ‘Organic’ tab, which will ensure you are presented with the data derived solely from organic traffic. On this page you will be presented with the keywords that have brought you the most traffic, with the number of visitors decreasing as the list progresses.

In this list the keywords your website has been optimised for should appear. If the keyword research you carried out in the first instance was accurate then the key terms chosen for your homepage should be at the top, or certainly very close to it. This list will also show you variations of your key terms that brought in traffic, including those that have been entered in a different order or pluralised etc. There can be thousands of variations used, and as you’re not paying for each click as you would in a pay per click campaign, then the more the merrier!

An important method of measuring the success of an SEO campaign is to understand which of your pages are attracting the traffic. It may be that a product specific page which has not been optimised is bringing in a good proportion of your visitors. In most cases it will be the category pages or homepage that visitors are landing on. Firstly click on the ‘Content’ section, then under ‘Site Content’ you can choose to look at the landing pages and see those all important page specific stats. If the entrance pages are those that have been optimised, then your SEO strategy is showing signs of having an effect.

Blog posts are an excellent way of using long tail keywords to attract particular niches. This traffic can often have a high conversion rate as customers are specific about the product or service they are looking for and at a more advanced stage in the buying decision. It is important to see how much of an impact your blog posts are having. If they aren’t brining in traffic then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate the keywords being used when writing them, or time to build some deep-links that go straight to them.

On closer inspection you may find that guest blog posts you have written for external sites, industry specific links you have obtained or reciprocal links from related businesses are bringing in good quality traffic. This is a key side-effect to SEO work that is often overlooked in headline statistics.

Of course the primary aim of most websites is conversions. Conversions can vary widely from site to site; some will regard a purchase as a conversion, whilst others may ask customers to fill out a request form. So long as you have set-up your Goals, by clicking the ‘Conversions’ tab you will very quickly be able to ascertain which keywords have the highest conversion rates. As conversions will have a direct impact on your business’ bottom line, you may well decide to focus your SEO efforts on your best performing keywords, depending of course on the available budget.

For further information from a specialist and experienced online marketing team why not give us a call on +44 (0)29 2076 6467 or email info@libertymarketing.co.uk

Some of the team from Google, who have been running the recent Getting British Business Online campaign in and around Wales, have set-up a Juice Bar in the Liberty meeting room today.

The one-off event has been designed to advise small businesses on the various Google products, and how they can be used to promote a website. Business owners we have recently met and who had questions about search engine marketing were invited along to have a chat with the guys from Google.

At the Juice Bar, attendees are learning how to target local businesses with Google Places, how to use Google Analytics to understand the traffic on a site, and how Google AdWords and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising works.

It is great to be one of the few agencies that has been invited to put an event like this together with Google. As one of the first Google Engage agencies in the UK, we have long worked with the search engine to keep ourselves fully trained and able to best advise clients.

The advice sessions will be running for a few more hours, so if you are in the neighbourhood, pop in.

The world of SEO does not sit still for long. One of the biggest changes to the digital landscape and addition to the tools available to inbound marketers is the implementation of on-page data mark-up languages such as Schema.org.

The aim of on-page data mark-up is to increase the amount the search engines actually understand about the information they are categorising, ultimately leading to more accurate search results.

Thus back in 2011, as a result of collaboration between the search engine superpowers Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, Schema.org was created to improve the search engines ability to understand the web by creating a structured method of microdata mark-up. By sharing a microdata mark-up vocabulary, webmasters are able to ensure their efforts are properly rewarded.

As is often the case in the field of SEO, a simple process has been made to sound more complicated than it actually is. Hopefully an example will clear up any underlying confusion:

When using a search engine, people have a primary understanding of the information they are viewing. Until now it has been impossible for search engines to replicate such an understanding. For example, if as your header 1, you have the word ’Flipper’, there is no information to tell you what the text string actually means – Flipper could of course refer to the popular film about a 12 year old boy who befriended a dolphin, or the popular swimming aid. This can make it difficult for the search engines to display content relevant to the user.

By using the Schema.org vocabulary, it is possible to tell the search engines that this information describes a specific movie, place, person or video, helping to tidy up the search engines understanding of your content.

So, will Schema.org help your website to work its way up through the rankings? Well no; as yet mark-up is not used for ranking purposes. However, there is still a huge benefit to implementing Schema.org to your website.

Google has slowly begun to roll out rich snippets within the search results for those webpages that have used microdata such as Schema.org, to help display authorship, videos and review data.

There are many different kinds of snippets Google supports, and the number keeps growing. Rich snippets are having a tremendous impact on a visitors click through rate within the search results with some webmasters reporting a 30% increase in CTR after implementing rich snippets.

Applying the mark-up isn’t a difficult process on small sites and there is a great guide for getting started with Schema.org at: http://www.schema.org/docs/gs.html

Once you have implemented your microdata mark-up, use the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can read and extract your marked-up data, and enjoy your improved CTR.

Even with the best online marketing services to hand, rankings do have a horrible habit of fluctuating. You can spend huge amounts of money on strategy, but - if your online marketing agency isn't prepared for Google updates - it could all go out of the window very quickly indeed.

So what are Google updates and why do they cause such havoc with your place on the search engines? Above all, how can you make sure that you're investing in online marketing services that are future-proof and will withstand even the more radical change in Google's algorithm?

What are Google Updates?

In basic terms, a Google update occurs when the techie team at the search engine giant make changes to the way websites are viewed and ranked. Google uses an algorithm to work out where your website belongs in the rankings. There are hundreds of different factors, which Google's algorithm takes into consideration, some of the most crucial factors are:

• Internal links
• External links
• Anchor text
• Web copy (originality)
• Keywords
• Social metrics
• Site architecture

Agencies providing on-the-ball online marketing services will make sure that your site ticks all of the right boxes with regards to these factors. This will get your website ranking highly. Yet it isn't quite so simple because Google are constantly changing the goal posts. To paraphrase one person's remark at the recent Brighton SEO conference: "Google are the opposing team as well as the referee, plus they own the ball, the pitch and the goal posts!"

Every time Google updates their algorithm, the way they rank websites shifts. There are hundreds of updates every year and usually they are very subtle, but sometimes these updates are big news and can make a big impact. For example...

Google Panda

Many online marketing service providers will shudder at the mention of Google Panda. It was a huge update to the algorithm, which was designed to eliminate the use of unhelpful, duplicate and plagairised content and give priority to highly original, high quality websites. It hit the UK in April 2011 and dramatically impacted 11.8% of all search queries.

Many high profile websites took a real beating and many online marking agencies were left blinking in horror at the un-doing of all their hard work.

How to Get Google Update-proof

Google keep all their updates thoroughly under wraps, which means that online marketing agencies can't really do much except wait and then work with what they're given once changes hit. Even if they do hint at what changes have been made, they usually don't give too much away...

Although it's impossible to know which changes are going to happen, there are ways to help protect your website against any negative impact that updates might have. As the motivation of Google updates is to weed out low-quality, spammy webpages, an ethical online marketing strategy which places quality at the forefront of its approach is vital. If your online marketing agency or in-house team implement this sort of plan, Google is unlikely to make changes that majorly (and negatively) affect your site rankings. By creating the kind of content and links that Google likes, you're less likely to be penalised by an update.

To run a good, ethical, high-quality online marketing strategy the basics need to be covered:

• Good, unique, keyword-rich content,
• A large, varied in-bound link profile, with lots of domains, a variety of anchor text and a mixture of dofollow and nofollow links,
• A blog/news section will help keep the site seen as fresh,
• Social integration and social media work will be important in the months/years to come.

If you want to succeed online, you’ll need to work with an ethical SEO agency that provides quality-driven online marketing services. As staunchly white-hat SEO and PPC experts, Liberty Marketing can help you weather Google updates and make a big splash on the web.

It might sound a bit medieval but, as official Google Local Champions, Liberty Marketing will be riding in on their noble white steed to get small-to-medium Welsh businesses online, in touch and up to date with the internet! There won’t be any swords, shields or damsels in distress, instead we’ll be offering workshops and one-to-one support as part as the Google Juice Bar and GWBO (Getting Welsh Business Online) initiatives.

These programmes were masterminded by Google after a study found that Wales is lagging far behind its British neighbours when it comes to online business. Whilst the UK as a whole has the biggest online economy in the world, Wales is not receiving a proportional amount of this benefit. Here are a few interesting facts and figures that illustrate the problem:

• The UK online economy makes up at least 7% GDP
• That’s more that the construction, utilities and transport sectors
• The internet economy contributed more than £100bn to the UK market last year
• In Wales 25% of small-to-medium businesses don’t have a website
• Of the 75% that have a website, a mere 58% have a high web presence
• Welsh businesses with successful sites grew 7x to 8x faster than those without a well-performing website.

These statistics are the result of an in-depth, Google-commissioned study which showed a surprising backwardness in the Welsh online industry. With these stats in mind Google and the Welsh Assembly Government decided it was time to act.

Starting in March 2012, a year of online awareness will see the Google Juice Bar travelling across the country. After the launch event in Cardiff on March 6th, the Google Juice Bars and workshops will travel across the country, helping small-to-medium businesses to blossom and reach their full potential on the internet.

These workshops and Juice Bar sessions are free, friendly and don’t come with any added sales pitches! Best of all, they can cover the area of your choice. Whether you’re a total novice looking to set up a free website for your company, or want to learn how to market your existing website online – the Google Juice Bar experts are here to help.

As official Google Local Champions, the Liberty Marketing team are excited to be part of such a fantastic, worthwhile initiative. As the fastest growing online marketing agency in Wales we are passionate about promoting and boosting Welsh business online. If you would like to learn more about how to boost your business online, or would like to know more about the GWBO initiative, take a look at the following link or get in touch with the Liberty team today!