SEO, Google's Panda & Penguin Updates Bite

When Google shook the World with two major updates in 2012 and 2013, it was sending a message to marketers everywhere: Play by the rules, or you will be punished! The Panda & Penguin updates which have been implemented gradually over the last 15 months or so have reduced search traffic to some web sites by as much as 80%. Google now move web sites that use what they term web spam(unnatural content that contains repetitive words), duplicate content or take part in link schemes (swapping, buying or selling links that pass page rank) to the supplemental index or removes them from their index completely.

Matt Cutts, a senior developer at Google recently used the term "unnatural links" on the Google webmaster blog. SEO professionals now know that Google reads the page containing the link & the recipient page and if they are not about similar topics or the page has too many links, flags it as an unnatural link. When search engines were young and surfers less web savvy Google introduced keywords as the search methodology. Google made an official announcement some time ago that they no longer used the HTML meta-tag "Keywords" and now they have gone one step further and demoted the status of keywords to obscurity.

Users no longer type in keywords, they type in phrases and they refine their search if they don't find what they are looking for on page one. These phrases are known as "queries" by Google and with the introduction of the Panda update, they use sophisticated techniques based upon their dynamic translation software, click data and heuristics, to determine the intent of the user from the queries and match that intent to give richer and more relevant intent-based search results.

So where does your web site stand? Since the Panda & Penguin search engine updates, your web site needs to align around targeted customer intent and not keywords. Focus on tactics that will play to Google's more complex side, mapping queries to actions, intent research and more aligned content creation. It needs good, informative text content that's related to your company expertise, each topic on a separate page with one clear message. Avoid Flash Player App's or animation that displays text as images which Google can't read. Creative design wins awards - creative thinking wins business.