Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts recently announced two new Google algorithm updates that could affect your business. For SEO pros, updates to Google’s algorithms are commonplace, but for the busy small business owner, they can be a confusing mess of black and white animals (penguin, panda). Have no fear, we’ve broken down the announcements into layman’s terms. Now, let’s get down to business!
Update #1: Payday Loan 2.0
This is the second version of the Payday Loan Algorithm, and it takes action towards websites that contain spammy keywords like, “payday loans,” adult themed/pornographic keywords and other spammy keywords. Odds are, you won’t be affected by this update because it only impacted 0.2% of English queries.
Update #2: Panda 4.0
Find out what's happening in Brickfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
This latest update is big news in the SEO world, as there hasn’t been an announced Panda update in over a year. There are monthly unannounced data refreshes to Panda, but Panda 4.0 is a major update to the actual algorithm. Just as a reminder, the Panda Algorithm is designed to prevent websites with poor quality content from appearing at the top of Google’s search results. According to Cutts, this update impacts around 7.5% of English searches and will fully roll out over the next few days.
If your site has thin, similar, duplicate content, and/or any “SEO pages” you’re at a high risk for penalty this and future Panda updates. If you have duplicate content on your site, we recommend adding more value to it. No two pages should have similar content, but if they do, combine the pages into one high value page. It’s possible that you might have “trim the fat” so to speak and cut pages from your website.Panda is an update to google’s algorithm that was implemented to detect and penalize:
- Sites with Duplicate content
- Articles with short content (under 600 words)
- Create high quality original content for your website
- Don’t participate in keyword stuffing for the sake of rankings. Instead, build websites for human users
- Keep META data unique and relevant to the pages across whole website.
- Have the website properly geo-targeted to your physical location
- Avoid black-hat SEO tactics
- Focus on a great content strategy that gets you natural links from authority websites
- Increase your social media efforts as Google considers this to be a strong indicator of high quality content
We have performed a record number of SEO audits this week because local business owners have noticed drastic changes in their rank and traffic. Some have been very positive, for others they have virtually disappeared from search results.
Creative Click Media offers 100% FREE SEO AUDITS to small businesses. If your business is being adversely affected or if you are unsure of how you have been affected it is a good idea to have a professional assess the situation.
Give us a call today at (732) 861-1302 or email info@creativeclickmedia.com for more info
