Penguin + Panda Survival Guide: Everything You Should Know and Do

Dear Readers,

I dropped by a G+ hangout last week to listen to some bloggers chat about how to blog now after Penguin and Panda. Boy were they mad.

These guys were talking about how Google has passed so many updates now it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

I scratched my head and wondered…

Is blogging ruined?

Not a chance! But there are certain terms and policies you need to be aware of today.

Let me show you the most important ones.

What’s inside this post for you?

This post should get you totally current on crucial terms and policies from Google.

I’d recommend you start by subscribing to Google’s Webmaster Central. I watch a few of their videos each morning as I get ready for the day and it helps keep me current on everything. It’s run by a cool guy named Matt Cutts.

Then, make sure to join my email club if you haven’t already. I’ll be releasing a lot more SEO tips for getting PageRank and getting your content high in the SERPs soon.

After you sign up, please leave a comment on this post telling me how you feel about SEO nowadays. Is there any particular part of SEO you need help on now?

Please let me know and we’ll discuss.

Ominous SEO clouds: Setting the stage for Panda and Penguin

Now for a brief version of the story behind Penguin/Panda…

As I mentioned in my blogging for money post, the SEO climate was once more lenient; it was easier for niche sites to rank well with relatively little work.

But as is usually the case, a few folks took things too far and ruined it for everyone else. The first example is pretty ridiculous, but I can see why they did it.

Back in 2010, Overstock.com, an online retailer of furniture, bedding, and men’s/women’s accessories decided to launch an SEO campaign where they offered nice discounts to the owners of college websites that posted dofollow links pointing back to their site.

Tricky, but Google saw this as a roundabout way of paying for links.

Moreoever, the .edu domains these links came from were valued highly by the SERPs, giving Overstock and nice position at #1 or #2 for certain common queries, like “laptop computers” and “cheap couches”.

You should read about the results here.

The next incident involved JCPenney for similar grey-hat practices. It’s unclear how many other companies were using similar strategies, but it became clear to Google that companies were figured out ways to manipulate Search results and Overstock, JCPenney, and others were slapped with hefty penalties. Then the college websites were asked to remove the links, which many of them did not, only angering Google more.

This is just a brief synopsis of the story – I’ll disclose more later on – but I wanted to give you a sense of some methods even well known companies used to outsmart Google.

Penguin + Panda: What happened, what you should know, and what I love about it

Now for a chronological list, oldest at the top, of the updates Google ran thru the web. Like we did in this post, let me know the letter of which item below you find most interesting.

a) Attribution errors – January 2011
Google released attribution penalties for sites with false ownership. Because “who’s it by” and “how credible is that person” were to two major criteria in the Search alogorithm, people of course had figure out how to abuse them.

b) Content farms and Panda 1.0 – February 2011
This marked a big time on the web as 12% of Search queries were affected in the first Panda update. Content farms, sites with lots of mass produced, overlapping content, really suffered.

c) +1 Button release – March 2011
It’s hard to believe that this button is over 2 years old, but Google originally released this as a social signal to influence search results by placing more relevance on what your network enjoyed.

d) Panda 2.0 begins – April 2011
Panda now covered all English queries (not limited to English) and the SERPs changed big time. Subsequent versions rolled out all 2011, including a “freshness” reward for blogs and websites with regular updates and “Panda-flux” period where Google rolled out updates frequently and without notice.

e) 30-pack – January 2012
In January 2012, Google introduced a loaded “pack” of updates including monitoring of landing page quality detection relevant site-links.

f) Search+ – January 2012
Google pushed Google+ social data and user profile data into SERPs, so faces started appearing in the results. This was a big one!

g) Above-the-fold – January 2012
January was a big month, with another update that devalued sites with too many ads above the fold line.

h) April 52-pack and May 39-pack
Lots of heavy updating outside of the main Search index…

i) Exact Match Update (EMD) – September 2012
Fast forward to September 2012, when Google rolled out a large-scale SERP devaluation that hit thousands of sites with exact match domains (like bestcarinsurance.com, or cheapcollegedegree.com). This one hit roughly 0.6% of queries.

j) Knowledge Graph Expansion – December 2012
Google expanded KGE to non-English queries, like those requested in Germany, Thailand, and France. Qu’est-ce que mon classement va?

k) Phantom – May 2013
Following about 114 more Penguin- and Panda-pack updates, something called Phantom emerged and it was basically just that. Exact nature of update unknown, though a wide variety of niche sites reported traffic loss.

l) Payday loan update – June 2013
The payday loan niche and porn niche, notorious for spam content, were hit hard.

m) Panda dance – June 2013
The latest update as of June 2013 was a warning of more Panda updates, which Cutts said at the recent SMX would “dance” around the web in an unpredictable manner.

Did I miss anything? Please drop a comment if you think so.

I know there’s not much to “love” here but there is a very thin silver lining: if you site stresses quality content, your rankings may have gone up, and I think that’s exciting.

One can look at all this as rules to avoid, or rules to focus on to improve SEO. That’s another reason watching Webmaster Central will help – you’ll know new rules right when they come out.

Post Panda and Penguin: What you should do about all the chaos

To understand how to tailor your own SEO efforts after this mess, first ask yourself these 5 questions:

• Are your articles too short or lacking in useful specifics?
• Do your articles have spelling or factual errors? Google knows!
• Does your site have duplicate articles with overlapping content?
• Are you mass-producing our outsourcing content?
• Generally, do you place attention to detail or just hit publish carelessly?

Then, make it a priority to do these tasks before you hit publish:

1. Write long, exhausting articles
   Videos, charts with proper titles, embedded tweets, and lots of rich, useful text will now help your SEO more than ever.
2. Use the Adwords Keyword tool
   Helps understand exact phrases people are Searching for, which you can insert into your posts and permalinks for more long-term traffic.
3. Get quality links
   One good link from a PR6-8 website now means a lot more than 10 links from thin sites or some garbage comment spam.
4. Updated: Slap “nofollows” on links
   If you have a page that you REALLY want to rank in Google, add a nofollow to each link on that page and you’ll see a pretty quick jump. Seriously. And pst: new video out soon on how to get this page into the Top 10 in the first place.

Updated: Use “nofollows” selectively, see the comments section for more.

5. Be clever
   One major take-away here is that Google loves original articles, with new ways of presenting information.
6. Added: Keep things fresh
   Updating regularly and updating old content will send good signals over to the SERPs.
7. Added: Keep your ad-to-content ratio healthy
   Given that Google owns Adsense, excessive adsense placement would be an easy one for them to spot. Note:Y I did start Adsense here, lots of folks may hate me but I’m running a bit of an experiment with it that I’ll talk about later. If you can’t stand these ads, please drop a note and tell me, ok?

Lastly, I want to bring up a controversial topic – selling links that pass PageRank.

Many niche sites and news publications still do sell text links and banner ads to earn, pay their staff, and stay afloat, but Google really frowns on this. This was a after all a huge trigger for the first Panda.

Is this bad? Given how Google collects our personal information and sells it to advertisers, do they really have an argument here?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Conclusion

You now know some valuable SEO terms and practices to beat heck out of the SERPs and make you sound like a bit more of an SEO “guru.”

I’ll leave you with two final pointers. Consider starting a new blog in a new niche; it’s a great way to weather traffic fluctuations and will expand your revenue portfolio. And, always build new links. Back-links are still #1 and guest-posting is the best way to produce them.

How do you feel about SEO changes? Were you affected? Please post a comment and let us know.

Thank you to:
searchmetrics.com – image 1, research
hongkiat.com) – image 2
Moz.com – research