So What Is This Panda Update?

For some time now, many webmasters and those just using search have complained about content farms and websites that just exist to publish low quality content. So a few months ago, we saw part 1 of what is now known as the Panda update. This algorithm change was designed to identify poor content sites (all automated at Google), leaving only the better stuff, or at lease specialised sites in place.

The first round of results had a mixed response (don’t they always, normally depending on whether their sites lost rankings or gained), however our results pretty much stayed constant throughout.  It was sites such as ezine-articles and other article based sites, where the members were not screen well enough, or where content was rewritten just for the benefit of link building.

Just last week, saw part two of the Panda update, this time with some more serious results and some real losers. The Guardian reported on winners and losers of this update with some real shocking information that really could decide the financial future of some of these websites. Our experience on this update, saw a few sites drops quiet badly, but there was a common link. The sites that dropped had not been updated, or changed for a very long time, or had been put together very quickly.

Our excuse had been, “if its not broke don’t fix it”, in better words these sites had been working well, and we did not want to update or change content in case it lost the rankings it had gained. The good news is, we know what to do , but as I write this in Easter week, I am still finding very slow indexing, so it is possible there are still changes afoot.

There are many other opinions out there to what needs to be done to get sites back up there, with one or two people suggesting it is not a content thing at all, because they can still see low quality sites out there. There is also a debate to what constitutes low quality, after all we are not all experts at grammar, but that does not mean that the information, maybe badly written does not have real value to the reader.

It is times like this where the good SEO companies stand out from the rest, who merely buy, rent to steal links and think, this all there is to search.  No, the quality SEO company will be doing experiments,. to find what survived, what went up and what went down. We have done this, as we said before, it was the sites we put the lest effort into, or was out of date that suffered. The results also only seemed to affect larges sites, certainly our normal sized creations all survived well.

Pub Con 2009 in Vegas Is Nearly Finished

Get ready for the feedback from what is one of if not the best places in the world to get informed on the world of SEO. There are 90 workshops of professionals all waiting to share their learning’s and experiences, form Google to Yahoo to huge corporations that use SEO to market their business. But often the biggest benefit is who you meet during the event. It is a great place to network, but mixing with the right people who have been and done that is a huge positive to learning about the real search engine optimisation techniques that worked will all the search engines and without the risk of being banned pr a penalty put against your site.

I have not been able to get to the Vegas Pub Con this year, as I have some huge projects that are already behind schedule, but even now I am looking to buy my airfare for Dallas 2010 where is looks like another brilliant schedule. But I know that seo companies like mine all over the world will have sold everything to be there.

Can’t wait for the forums to fill with information from Webmasterworld who organise the event, let’s see if there is some newer than social networking that seems to be dominating everything at the moment.

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