Panda Research

Over the past couple of weeks since the Google Panda update 2.5, I have been tweaking and testing. I had a few sites drop heavily in Google, several had rankings increase and some hardly moved at all.. Needless to say it was hard to see what was actually going on. Judging by some of the forum threads and emails I have been getting, it has left a lot of people very confused.

Anyway, a couple of weeks of tests, research and analysis and I believe I have a better grasp on what has happened and perhaps why it happened.. Here are the main points.

My worst affected site has seen several of its best performing pre-panda keywords drop and have hardly moved since then. However, many other keywords (long tails) that previously were not performing have either risen or are jumping around all over the place. At first this looked like very chaotic and illogical. So I decided to take a closer look at each of the keywords in turn and investigate why the changes have taken place..

I don’t profess to have all the answers but there are some very clear patterns emerging from this investigation. The site in question is an informational type site in a market where 80% or more of the sites that are performing on Google for many keywords are shopping portal type sites.

My pre-Panda best performing keyword was something like “foxtrot dance steps” (real keyword hidden for demonstration purposes). It is the sort of keyword that suits an informational type site and my web page that was performing well was basically an article explaining these “foxtrot dance steps” with a few images thrown in. This web page dropped like a stone and was replaced with 6 YouTube Videos (Yes SIX!!) and a few highly graphical article type web pages. It is very obvious that Google are looking at searcher intent a lot closer now and giving them the best quality results for that search. In this example, the searcher’s intent is to see all the foxtrot steps and in this example, what is better to show this, video or text? Obviously it is video and then images..

I have a few other keywords that also back this example up and there is little doubt in my mind that the Panda update is doing a better job at matching searcher intent with the content that will help them best.

To further back this up, some of the “buyer” type keywords my informational site was ranking for before have now been replaced by shopping portal type sites. It seems a web page with information and some affiliate links or Adsense does not cut it for these buyer type keywords.

I know there are a lot of contradictory results out there but you have to remember that Panda is a manual,incremental type of algo update. In other words it is being rolled out little by little and this probably explains why some people have seen changes in their web sites’ rankings and other people have not… yet.

The other interesting thing I have noticed is that my worst performing site has now seen a marked increase in the number of long tail keywords that it is now ranking for. These keywords tend to suit searcher’s intent, i.e. people looking for info on something. There are two interesting points about this..

• The long tails are low search volume but result in visitors spending more time on my site.
• My Adsense CTR as a result has doubled and the CPC has also increased slightly. The reason for this I believe is that because searcher’s intent is being matched a lot better. The upshot of this is more inclination to read the article and by the looks of it, click on an Adsense ad. The rise in CPC also indicates that these visitors are converting more for the advertisers meaning my Adsense account has improved in terms of smart pricing. I know it is still early days for this and I am speculating a bit but there is ceratinly a lot of consistency to this improved CTR and CPC.

In summary, after this last Panda update, there is a lot of evidence that demonstrates a vast improvement by Google in matching searcher’s intent with a better fit in terms of the type of content, i.e. video, images, text etc… Whether it is the best content available is open to speculation and this is where I believe the usual rules of on and off page SEO come into play still. There are still a lot of contradictions that can disprove this a bit but I put that down to the Panda roll out happening in the incremental way that it is. I am sure there are a gazillion other factors influencing the algo changes but none more so than this in my experience.

I believe we all need to look at the best performing keywords and analyse whether the content we are providing is the best match for the searcher based on the intent of that searcher. If your beautifully crafted article on  picture framing drops in ranking, maybe a video or more images might just help improve that ranking again.

I have just spent the best part of two days Umming And Arhhing over a list of potential domain names and the branding behind the site. I have just made my decision and I have to say, I am happy with the choice. I decided to go with a made up word for the domain that encompasses the brand idea I had. Basically it is sounds modern, gadgety and aimed at the man on the street with a hint of humour as well. At least that is what I hope it conveys! After this little exercise in branding, I can see why marketing executives make a lot of money from this sort of thing. The other thing I noticed was most of the best ideas I had for made up names were already registered as a domain. This means either I have a good eye for this sort of thing or I was just unlucky.

I will release the domain name eventually for everyone to see the site but for the purposes of this project I am going to keep  it secret for a while to preserve the integrity of the test. It would be silly to skew the visitor numbers with people following this challenge. I am sure some of you ‘super sleuths’ will do your best to uncover it, if so, well done but I would appreciate it if you kept it to yourself for now please.

I am now working on the look of the site but this is putting my design skills to the test. As I am freed from the shackles of SEO, at least I don’t have to worry about the SEO aspects of the theme. Here are my intentions for the look and feel..

• I want a magazine type style
• It has to look modern, techy, very accessible with a hint of humour as well

I may even go to the professionals for this design and see if they can come up with what I am looking for. If anyone can recommend a good WordPress theme designer, that would be great!

Tomorrow, I will also begin creating the content and trying to establish a presence on Twitter, Facebook and various relevant forums for the site. I know that I will have to start small and grow this site along with my presence on the social networks but that is fine and it feels like the right way to do it anyway. I already have a good idea for a couple of review videos and perhaps a small competition for visitors to enter. Hopefully this will drum up a bit of a buzz.

As for my budget for the site.. I am going to initially invest around £500 for various items to review and then resell them on ebay or use as a prize in a competition. At this stage, I am looking at low budget items to review. Like I said, as the site establishes, then I will go for higher ticket items.

Today, I have been thinking about branding mainly and also I have been considering how I am going to start this. I feel the best way is to start small with perhaps just one or two categories and then grow the site organically over time into more and more categories.

I have been considering starting the site by concentrating on IPhone’s, IPad’s and apps initially. Mainly because I own these already and it is easy to access the apps. I will then expand my categories and grow the site as my readership and following increase. This feels like the best way of approaching things to be honest and means I can invest more and more time and money as the site grows.

The branding has to reflect this organic growth as well and I don’t want to typecast the site if it just concentrates on Apple products.

Brainstorming for a brand name is hard and I am feeling slightly jaded as I plod through dozens of cheesy names that pop into my head. This part of the process might take a bit longer than I had envisaged, it is hard finding something professional, non-cheesy and that plagiarises an existing site. Oh well, back to the drawing board!

I have been conducting a bit of market research on the demographics of people who visit engadget.com. Although my site will be targeting the UK and these demographics are based in the US, it gives me a good idea of what I can expect. Unfortunately, Quantcast wont show demographics for the UK. Engadget.com are one of the biggest and most popular gadget websites in the US in case you don’t know. So the demographics will be very representative of the market as a whole.

If you look at the screenshot above, you will see the following..

• 63% of the visitors are male
• The majority of people are aged between 18 and 34
• They are mainly of Caucasian race
• 63% of the visitors do not have kids
• Most of the visitors earn $100,000+ (I like this one the best)
• There is an even split between college and no college educated.

This gives me a good idea of the sort of person I will need to target with my site and I will bear it in mind when I create the look and feel of the site and the content.

After looking at some gadget magazines and various websites and blogs, here are my notes on what to include on my site and some promotion channels.

• Create a facebook fan page
• Create a Twitter account for the site
• Create an IPAD version of the site
• Podcasts
• Weekly newsletter for sign ups
• Create an Awards feature (think stroking egos)
• Create a News section with the up to date news on up-coming gadgets. (In some ways this is bigger than gadgets on the market). People love the anticipation of new gadgets.
• Have top 10 lists of gadgets based on each category.
• Include a tutorials section with demonstrations of how to do certain things with certain gadgets.
• Include a forum
• Gift Idea feature
• Create a YouTube Channel.

That is the basis for my site and I am sure there will be additions and changes as I go through the process.

Time to think about the brand of the web site and also the domain name…

I woke up this morning and the first thing that popped into my head was gadgets! I have ideas burning in my head for this site which is incredibly refreshing to the normal SEO approach of doing things. This is what being a website publisher is really about.. The desire to actually create some valuable content!

Even though I have some great ideas already, the marketer inside me tells me that I need to assess the competition first for the following reasons..

• To see exactly what I am up against
• To glean more ideas for my site
• To look for areas which I can improve upon

I have already made some decisions and I based these on personal experience for when I am looking at buying a new gadget. The process I tend to go through first, is to look for honest and independent reviews. I love looking at the Amazon reviews because it gives me a good user experience of the product. However, I also temper that with a bit of mistrust of reviews from big branded corporate sites. I want the angle of this site to be from a man on the street aimed at the man and woman on the street. I want this to be exactly what it is.. A gadget freak who wants to show off gadgets (good and bad) for other gadget freaks out there to get an honest appraisal. I want my visitors to enjoy the honest opinion of various products. I guess there will be a slight contradiction though, presuming I use affiliate offers on the site. That will take some thought and care to get the right balance.

Right, I am off to the newsagent to buy some gadget mags and then I am going to look online at the competition. I will make notes as I go.

So, it is time to start making some decisions and get this site started! Before I do this though, I have recently been reading the trophy pigeon by Chris Munch. For those that have not read this book, it is about how most of the successful sites appeal to people’s egos at some level. The idea in the guide being that you can encourage backlinks from some big players by appealing to their ego. While I am not interested in gaining backlinks with this project for the sake of it, I do love the idea of making this site appealing to people’s egos at some level.. I believe this to be a great way of encouraging sharing of links and ultimately making the site viral.. I will explain more as I create the content.

Okay, decision time.. It is a toss up between English Football, gadgets and Internet marketing. Seeing as I already have a blog on Internet marketing I will skip that. English football holds some great appeal for me as I love talking about football with friends and anyone willing to listen.. I also have plenty of ideas for features. Gadgets also would bring me great pleasure to create a site around. I have some ideas for this also but I think to be credible I would need access to these gadgets for testing and such (could get very expensive). However, the thought of creating video reviews and tutorials with these gadgets would be very cool… Hmmm… I can’t decide!

I think I will have to toss a coin to decide.. Heads, it’s football, tails its gadgets.. [Flips Coin].. TAILS IT IS! So, I will be creating a site about technology and gadgets, could be a lot of potential for affiliate offers if I do this right!

More info later!

So here are the results of my brainstorming session…

1. English premier league football
2. Technology and gadgets
3. Movies
4. Internet marketing
5. Cooking
6. Performance cars
7. Golf
8. Computers
9. Photography
10. Nature

So that is the short-list of my passions and now I need to choose one to build the site around.. To be honest, they are all worthy candidates so I might just toss a coin!

Day 1 – The Plan of Action

So, it is now 6 am in the morning and my mind is buzzing with ideas about how to start this challenge. Unfortunately this means making a decision about how to start and what to do becomes increasingly difficult. I really do feel like I am entering uncharted territory with this. So from here on in, everything I do is me working on gut instincts and pure adrenaline. This is usually a potent mix in my experience and very refreshing from the usual process of having to consider the SEO benefits of everything I do. I think I am going to enjoy this even though I am sailing through uncharted seas.

With this new Utopian, hippy-like approach to site building I guess I need to start with a plan of some sort, so here goes..

1. This site has to be about something I am passionate about or it will just fall flat on its arse before its begun. There is no way I can get passionate about car insurance or something like that, and I think my motivation for creating interesting content would be severely limited. This has to be a passion of mine and therefore my first task will be to brainstorm my passions.

2. My gut is telling me that I need to make this site very news worthy, blog like and magaziney. I feel this is the best way for attracting visitors by whatever means. I want this to be a site people will bookmark and tell their friends about because this is where my traffic will grow. This reminds me that I am going to create a brand first and foremost. The viral nature of the brand will be the key to its success.

3. Once I have decided on the passion and created the brand and blog, I am going to see what my competitors are doing. I am not going to get sidetracked by keyword tools or anything as I don’t care about search numbers, competition in Google or anything like that. This is purely about seeing what people are already interested in on my competitor’s sites. I will make some notes as I go.

4. I am then going to just start creating content whether it be articles, videos, images, I will just do what I want with no care for optimising for any particular keyword or anything like that.

5. I will make my blog as attractive to visitors as possible and ensure it is easily navigable for them.

6. Getting visitors is going to be a mixture of posting on forums, discussion groups and utilizing social networks. I will make use of any service I can to promote the site but I must emphasize it is not about ranking highly in Google. Any backlinks I get will be because I am after the referral traffic and not for the SEO benefits. Any traffic I do get from the search engines will be because of what I have done so far and NOT because that is how I have engineered it. It will be purely up to the search engines if they want to rank my pages or not as I have done zero SEO.

7. Later down the line I will consider how I am going to monetize the site. For now, I am not bothered whether it is Adsense, affiliate, CPA or whatever. My goal is to turn this site into a money maker but the driving force is about great viral content for the people, pure and simple..

So, that is my general plan and I am feeling a burning desire to actually get started now! A new update will be posted shortly on my progress..

I am writing this because I have spent most of the day trying to fathom out why the latest Google Panda update 2.6 has caused such mass carnage for many top quality web publishers? Virtually every forum I have been reading tells the same story over and over. Quality Web sites that have spent years at the top of Google have fallen down the rankings. While big brands like Amazon, Youtube and such-like have taken their place. To rub salt into the wounds, many rag tag, poor quality sites have filled those top slots as well! If Google are looking to fill those top spots with quality, they appear to many, to be going the wrong way about it! Take a look at these threads for a mere taster of the carnage going on..

Warrior Forum…
WebmasterWorld Forum…
Digital Point Forum…

My gut instinct tells me that this latest algo update is an over correction and within a few weeks I suspect some normality will return. I believe the quality sites will rise back to the top spots where they belong. You can shake a bottle of milk, but the cream will always eventually rise to the top when it settles.

As I was reading the various SEO forum threads today, I noticed everyone had their opinion on what was happening but as usual zero proof. Some had axes to grind because they want to sell their SEO service and look at this as an opportunity. Some are just plain scared and others are trying to be analytical about it and believe they have the answer.

“Its the backlinks” , “its the amount of words you have on your page”, “you have too many words”, “you have too few words”, “you need more content”, “you need less content”, “Its all a Google conspiracy”, ” Its the end of SEO!”… Ahhh!

A Google Scientist at Work

All opinions and zero proof of what and why this is happening. I can tell one thing though that is 100% true. We all rely on Google for our livelihood far too much. All they have to do is flick a switch, pull a lever and laugh manically in their evil laboratory and a million online businesses will fail in an instant! Overly dramatic? Yes probably, but what this latest SEO carnage has shown me is that we spend far too much time trying to please Google in the hope they will reward us with top rankings.

It then dawned on me, what would it be like to build websites where we didn’t have to worry about things like search volume of keywords?, LSI?, keyword stuffing?, getting backlinks from web pages with PR?, Worried about our keyword in the title and description?, keywords in an H1 tag?… What would it be like to just build a site free from the shackles of SEO? Wow! How liberating would that be? This would be a place where black hat and white hat SEO didn’t exist. A place where competition for keywords was meaningless and backlinking for the sake of it, totally pointless. It then dawned on me, is it also possible to build an SEO free website and still pull in visitors and earn a decent income as a result? It is certainly something I have never consciously attempted and is entirely new ground for me.

I feel a challenge coming on…

So the first run of the Adsense 101 bootcamp is in full swing now on the 3rd week. I will be re-opening the doors again for a possible 50 or maybe 100 people depending on demand sometime next month. I will also probably make this a WSO on the warrior forum. If you want to stay tuned to the latest information about this then please sign up over on the left to the Bootcamp notification list. The first 50 places sold out within 6 hours of opening!