Archive for the ‘Site Promotion Techniques’ Category

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To further back this up, some of the “buyer” type keywords my informational site was ranking for before have now been replaced by shopping portal type sites.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.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Contrary to what a lot of people think social bookmarking was not invented as a tool for internet marketers to get backlinks and increase rankings in the search engines. Social bookmarking is in reality a way for internet users to bookmark sites that they love for other people to see and click on. The extension to this is sites like stumble upon and Digg who actually get you to vote for the best bookmarked sites. In it’s purist form this is a great way for people with a common interest to share links to good sites with each other.

Social Bookmarking and Internet Marketing

So, as always us Internet marketers see this as a great opportunity to get visitors to our sites by submitting links to all our sites to the multitude of social bookmarking sites and hopefully people and search engines will see the bookmarks and visit our sites. Simple! Well, the theory is simple but unfortunately as always happens with technologies like this, they get abused. Internet marketers will mass submit all their site’s URL’s in one fail swoop to the same social bookmarking accounts and this results in social bookmarking accounts getting banned.

The Correct Way To Social Bookmark For Maximum Benefit To Our Sites

There is however a right way to social bookmark our blogs and sites and here are the steps below.

1. Open multiple accounts with all the best social bookmarking sites (see list below) by using different email addresses each time. Create some yahoo acounts, GMail etc for these email accounts.
2. Get a list of all your site’s URL’s that you would like to bookmark.
3. Mix that list up with as many URL’s from sites that do not belong to you about 50-50 share, (sites preferably that you like).
4. Split this list up into as many accounts that you have with the social bookmarking sites. (If you have 50 different accounts, create 50 lists of URL’s)
5. Submit 1 list to 1 social bookmarking account.

This is a big task to perform manually and thankfully there are some excellent tools on the market that can do this for you. The best tool out of all of them has to be Bookmarking Demon as it not only bookmarks all the URL’s you feed it but will go out and create all of those multiple accounts with the best social bookmarking sites. You will honestly be very thankful for this. A lot of the tools are monthly charges but this is a one off payment and offers a lot more than many of these monthly fee programs. You can even ping the sites once you have done the bookmarking to get search engine spiders interested. Add to this, the software is continually updated and has a different user interface for both beginners and advanced users. I use it all the time and have seen a lot of success with getting sites indexed using it, take a look for yourself here.

The Benefits Of Social Bookmarking

So what is all the fuss about social bookmarking and how can it really help our sites? Quite simply, social bookmarking works on two fronts. You can get direct traffic as a result of posting your bookmarks to these sites. Many people see those links and follow them to your site. The reality is that I do get traffic as a direct result from the bookmarks but the traffic is more difficult to convert into buyers or clickers on your site. The main benefit of social bookmarking is that you are recieving some high PR backlinks to your sites that get the search engine spiders visiting your sites incredibly quickly, sometimes within minutes. I have had sites/posts indexed in google within 4 minutes before as a direct result of social bookmarking. For some reason google loves social bookmarks probably because they see it as a user’s vote of confidence in a site. This is why it is very important not to overdo it and mix it up with plenty of other sites that don’t belong to you, keep it natural looking and you will stay under the radar and enjoy all the benefits that social bookmarking has to offer.

List Of My Top 10 Social Bookmark Sites

http://www.reddit.com/

http://furl.net/

http://www.clipmarks.com/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://ma.gnolia.com/

http://www.mixx.com/

http://www.fark.com/

http://www.propeller.com

http://delicious.com/

http://digg.com/