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What Is Going On With Google Panda

Terry — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:59:55 +0000

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What Is Going On With Google Panda Updates?

Google has become the major player in the search pages used by the majority of the Western world. This has placed it in a significant position of power and changes lately make you wonder if that power is beginning to be missused, intentionally or otherwse. Since the first Panda updates back in the Spring websites have been hit left right and center. In many cases these are decent websites that desreve to appear in a decnt ranked position in the search results but good sites have been almost wiped out by the changes Google has made.

It is hard to see what the benefits are. There are many reports of scraped and copied content appearing in a much higher ranked position than the original authors content. It makes no sense.

The search engiines claim to always be looking for the most rellevent results for their customers and, I guess, for other reasons sometimes the copied content looks better to them. With a few additional keywords sprinkled around the page like fairy dust a copied article may seem to be a better result to the search engine bots. It is totally unfair on the original author though and arguably providing a less impressive website for the search engine user to visit.

Many people would claim that the whole debacle of the Panda updates has been a disaster for Google, for their customers and for the website owners who put a lot of effort into producing decent articles and information for their website visitors.

Hubpages is an example of a good site that has thousands of users who publish articles on the website and in exchange get a percentage of any advertising payments. There are a large number of excellent authors providing very good quality content. There are thousands of well researched and well written articles that any visitor would be delighted to discover and read.

The first Panda update decimated the traffic to the hubpages website. The further updates, and there have been several, have done little to help Googles users find the good quality sites that exist on Hubpages website. The reverse is true.

The owners of the Hubpages website have taken all sorts of steps to try to clean out any poor quality hubs. They have stopped people linking to anything that might be seen as poor quality site. The restricted sites include such established players as clickbank presumably due to the large numbers of make money today schemes offered there alongside the good quality ebooks, videos and CDs.

A recent move to using subdomains on Hubpages appeared to have turned things around but in the last week or so many of the good quality hubpages have disappeared from the search engine results. Who knows what the reason is this time. It may be that since the subdomains have all suddenly appeared Google have sandboxed them for a few months thinking their sudden appearanc is suspicious.

Who knows what is going on in the great google mind in the sky. Whatever their intentions when they introduced the Panda updates it seems that the effects have been a disaster for their search results and for thousands, and perhaps millions, of enthusiastic authors of webpages and articles all over the world.

It is depressing to find that putting the effort in to writing good quality articles is wasted. Google does not appear to want quality. Their robotic analysis appears to favor junk over quality. It is so disheartening to find that thanks to a damn computer the common sense decisions of what is good or not has been turned on its head. No longer is quality a good thing. Rubbish is now better just so long as it has the features that the google robots are looking for. It could be complete jibberish but that would not seem to matter in the eyes of Google.

None of us knows for sure what it is that causes Google to rate one page higher than another. It may be that the pages with videos from Youtube get a better ranking because Google owns youtube. It could be the number of keywords or the variety of similar keywords. Perhaps it is down to the percentage of keywords compared to the number of words on a page. We simply don't know but in my opinion, at the moment, Google is not doing a very good job for their customers. Maybe having poor search engine results means they get more adwords clicks on the search pages.

There are businesses that provided a perfectly good service for their visitors who have been decimated by these changes and many decent poeple are suffering thanks to Google and its whims. Such irresponsibility is to be expected. Google is a private company. They have no duty the the world other than their shareholders and it may be the changes have been very profitable but it has made the internet a less useful place for the users and has made producing good quality content a waste of time for website owners and authors. Let us hope that for the good of the internet Google changes their direction and begins to put quality first before we all disappear in a swamp of poor quality webpages that the intoduction of Adsense started.

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Which Is Best DoFollow Links Or NoFollow Links?

Terry — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:09:42 +0000

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It is important to get backlinks to your sites. If you have been following this blog you should know this by now. First it helps the search engines find your website and web pages but secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it adds importance to your site.

It makes a lot of sense that if a lot of different websites have a link pointing back to your site it would suggest your site is a valuable resource that is worth looking at. The search engines figure that if all these other websites rate your site enough to put a backlink to your site they should rank your site higher than others about the same subject that have fewer links pointing to them.

There is an important fact about ranking websites in the search engines hidden in that last paragraph and it is this... You do not have to make the best website in the world - you just have to make it better than your competitors sites. It is all about what the competition are doing and how they are able to convince search engines their site is better than yours and what you can do to change the 'opinion' of the search engines about the importance of your webpage.

So when it comes to links the search engines are always going to look at where the links are coming from and if there is anything odd about the number or the types of sites displaying those links.

Now, DOFOLLOW links are specifically saying to the search engine spiders, "follow this link because it matters" while NOFOLLOW links are saying here is a link but it is not so important to follow. The idea came from Google and it was to reduce the transfer of pagerank to only those links the webmaster considered important.

A lot of people worry that many of the links pointing to their site may be nofollow links which means they don't count with Google and other search engines. I believe they do count but in a different way.

What do you think they will make of a whole bunch of links that are all Do Follow links? I am pretty sure it would look odd to anyone, or any search engine autobot, to see ONLY DOFOLLOW links pointing at any site. The links will still count as links but they do not transfer any pagerank. You still get a credit for a link pointing to your site but perhaps more importantly it makes the linking look far more natural and organic.

If I were a search engine and I saw only dofollow links to a site I would think there was something odd about that because it is not likely to happen naturally from webmasters linking to your site. You would expect some to be dofollow and some to be nofollow. The conclusion must be that while dofollow links are best you should have a mixture of the two types of links pointing towards your site.

Most comments you leave on blogs are likely to use nofollow backlinks but many savvy webmasters use do follow links to encourage visitors to leave comments. You can find various software programs to help you find these sites but do remember to use other, no follow, sites as well so everything will appear natural to the search engines.

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Follow-up To Number One On Search Engines Post

Terry — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:18:27 +0000

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I just wanted to do a quick update to my previous post about getting to number one in google. The unusual phrase I used meant that It did in fact go straight to the number one position for a search on that phrase and it did that within a few minutes of being published on his blog.
It wa first out of no less than around 80,000,000 pages!

Now that does sound pretty impressive and it is exactly the sort of claim made by people who are selling courses and guides to building a successful online empire but you need to look a little more closely at what this result really means.

It actually means nothing. If you do a search on the same phrase but this time do the search with the phrase in quotes, which means the search is for that exact phrase with the words in that order, there are currently just two results and both refer to my page on this site.

What happened to the other 80 million results? They were pages that had some or all of the words I was searching for but not necessarily in the right order nor in one group. They were pages that had some of the words somewhere on the page.

So look carefully when you see claims made about how someone got to number one in the search engines and how they could do the same for you if you give them some money. Things are not always as they seem.

I don't want to give the impression that all guides to being successful are a sham because they are not but do take care to examine any claims of success with results in the search engines to see how much of a challenge they really are.

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Don’t You Love It When You Are Number One In Google?

Terry — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 06:00:21 +0000

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You may struggle to write posts every day, you may even write several posts every day in the hope that you get to number one in google but if you are targeting the wrong keywords you are probably wasting your time. Pick the right keywords and publish interesting and good quality content that attracts visitors and backlinks and you have cracked it and you will be able to boast to your Internet searching followers, "Don't you love it when you are number one in google?"

Finding the right keywords can make the difference between being number one and number one thousand in the search engines results. The phrase, don't you love it when you are number one in google, has no exact matches, though hopefully it will have this one now.

How many searches do you suppose there are for that phase? Why would anybody type that into a search? So this may prove to be a totally pointless post from the point of view of search engine results but it demonstrates the point that you must research the keywords you are attempting to rank for if you want to get any traffic.

I could comment on blogs, write articles and promote this post until I'm blue in the face but it won't do me a lot of good from a search engine results point of view. It might intrigue a few webmasters who would wonder why on earth anyone would bother trying to rank such a phrase but no normal person is going to search for that phrase.

Take the time to do keyword research before you waste your time working on content for your website that will do nothing except allow you to be able to say to your friends you got to the number one position in the search results. Don't you just love it when you are number one in google? No, not unless it is for something that people are searching for because being number 1 doesn't make you money. Getting real visitors who are looking for what you offer is what makes the effort worthwhile.

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