Your SEO and the Google Zoo
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Donna Fisher
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August 17th, 2016
I learned my SEO back in the dark ages of “keyword stuffing.” Silly me, I thought that when I lost my job in the Great Recession, I could “write for the internet” and monetize my writing ability. That’s when I learned about spinning articles. If you have been in the business for more than 5 years, then your SEO strategy probably involved keyword stuffing.
According to my research, the updates in action during 2009, when I started writing for the webs, were Caffeine and Real-time Search. I don’t know much about them, except that all of my clients wanted at least a 7% keyword saturation rate. SOME of them wanted the keyword mentioned in EVERY, SINGLE SENTENCE.
Ok, so some things bear repeating.
As a neophyte, I didn’t know anything about content farms, but I was a one-woman content farm.
Then, one day, ALL of those clients disappeared. What the heck? And, that is when I was introduced to what I call the Google Zoo.
Panda. Google Panda is what happened. For the first time in – well, ever – the content would matter in your SEO. I was dancing with joy because now I could truly write interesting content. I nearly starved to death during the adaptation, but gone was the spinning {rewriting/word changing/bulls***ing} required in the past.
So, here is the roundup of the most active animals in the Google Zoo. Your SEO is determined by 3 different animals in the Zoo: panda, penguin, and hummingbird. Here is what Panda has done to SEO writing, and how you can best rank with its algorithms.
Google Panda and Your SEO
No SEO for YOU!
When Google rolled out Panda, a lot of bosses on the internet got pwned. That’s because Panda ranks actual content. To do so, Panda has to, somehow, read the content to determine whether it is of high quality. With the old algorithms, the age and amount of content on a website affected its ranking. Now, the content had to be of high quality, and no one cared about the age.
Panda and Keywords
If Panda reads too many keywords in your content, you actually score lower in rankings – which is bad. Search engines conclude that your content is only spam and that humans would have no practical use for it. Which, in my experience, is true. The convulsions of writing that I had to produce to get a keyword in every phrase produced gibberish.
Now, Panda looks for keywords in 4 particular places: the title, the first paragraph, one of the subheadings, and in the concluding paragraph. You might be able to approach 5% saturation rate, but going beyond that could get you labeled as spam.
Also, the pages on your website need some variety in the names. To put the keyword as the title of every page won’t impress the spiders that gather up info for the search engines.
Panda now rolls across the internet, investigating sites for junk content. Users used to be warned when Panda was going to hit their site, but now there is no warning. This helps to reduce black hat operations.
Panda and User-Generated Content
User generated content is still valuable.
One of the most surprising features of Panda is that it does NOT target user-generated content. This is good news for sites that have forums or that post blogs and articles from users. These comments and this traffic actually can increase your SEO, rather than damaging it. The sites most affected are those with a lot of low-quality spam.
Content and Word Count
Before Panda, it was far more common to follow a link to a site totally unrelated to your query. This was most often used by operators for sites that featured sex- or drug-related content. You would follow a promising lead for “roofers in Tulsa” and end up on “roofies in Tulsa.” Well, not really, but you get the picture.
As for word count, the most prominent idea is that each page of content must be at least 250 words. That might be a good guideline, but you can actually rank pretty well with a “snippet” of information. On the whole, though, you need to fully answer a query to rank, and 250 words is a general minimum for that.
Content
You may question whether or not your content is of high enough quality to satisfy Panda. If you are trying to rank with Google, use Google Analytics to study the page. This should tell you whether or not Google is sending people to your page. If it is, then your content is deemed to be of high quality, and you’re fine.
Analyze traffic flow to your site.
If Analytics shows that you are not getting Google traffic, it could simply mean that it is new content and hasn’t been ranked yet. Otherwise, proof the content and make sure you have the keywords in the right places. You might want to edit content to improve the way it reads.
Remember that other search engines send traffic to your content. Check out your success with them. If your poor rankings are universal, a major change may be necessary. But, if Bing and the others rank you pretty well, it would be a mistake to pull the content.
Above all, avoid spinning content. Panda is able to recognize patterns of words that are reused from previous content. If it looks like you are using cut/paste, your site will be penalized. Many of my clients have run into this when trying to rank in numerous cities. For example, Heritage for the Blind hired me to write a blurb about each of the cities in which they accept used cars for charitable donations. Each blurb had to be different because Panda would label them as plagiarized if I just changed the city name.
In later articles, we’ll take a look at how Penguin and Hummingbird affect your SEO. In the meantime, feel free to write great, informative content!