Global Strategies For Google's Panda Update

If all your global sites have low quality links, duplicate content, and are on a subdirectory, then Google's Panda update will likely cause you problems. But don't give up and throw in the towel. You can still get your act together.

This article will give you some insight on some things you can do to mitigate any risk you might be facing and provide some ideas on how to improve your global pages now that up to 20 percent of your competitors may have disappeared.

Assessing Your Pain

Any global search engine optimization (SEO) doctor will first ask you where you feel the most pain. Identifying rank/traffic loss per country is a key strategy. Your site may have lost ranking because of something other than what you initially thought.

Panda's significance is how it views content and links, specifically similar or duplicate content and poor quality links. A thorough assessment of each one of your global sites will give you some insight into where to start and what to start with.

Reviving Your Content

If you've lost positioning with pages that share the same language but didn't lose positioning from your pages that have their own languages, then chances are you got bit by the Panda due to duplicate content.

Remember, duplicate content isn't only because of your English pages. It could also be a conflict between other languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese vs. Portugal's Portuguese or even between Austrian German and German spoken in Germany.

Deduplication will be necessary. Have a content transcriber in your target country re-write the content in your source country. It's time consuming, but well worth it.

Mapping the same keyword to the content is fine, however you might want to de-duplicate your URLs, reduce the amount of AdSense ads you have placed within the content (if any), and while you're at it, make sure to visit Google Webmaster Tools. Google's tools now do a pretty good job geotargeting your URL structures, so if you have a UK subdirectory, telling Google where it's at will help its spiders understand that the UK site is a local standalone site and not part of a content scheme.

Resuscitating Your Link Building Strategy

On the other hand, if you lost positioning and traffic from all of your global sites, it could be due to your link building tactics, especially if you use a subdirectory structure instead of ccTLDs.

A subdirectory structure (e.g., www.example.com/FR/) can face a number of different issues. If you had a link farm in just one country for example, and that link farm pointed to one of your pages, it's likely your whole site would be affected. If you have low quality links pointing to your duplicate UK pages, your U.S. site may suffer.

A ccTLD structure, if you can do it, would help you out a lot at this point. A URL structure like www.example.fr improves trust and engagement with your target audience, and also helps legitimate local link builders point directly to the "correct" site rather than a folder. If you have a subdirectory, make sure to tell Google about it through Webmaster Tools.

The key to it all is planning on making each site useful, relevant and as local as possible to your target market. The days of creating useless duplicated content and participating in link farms are now over.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642047

Mahalo, Business.com, Article Aggregators Hardest Hit By Google Update

The impact of Google's latest search ranking algorithm update is starting to show. While Mahalo is getting a bunch of the press, the ezine article aggregators seem to be the ones most heavily hit -- along with some of the business directory sites.
And apparently, eHow is a high-quality site in Google's eyes. For now, anyway. Early data suggests Demand Media's much maligned eHow property has benefited the most.

Here's a look at the biggest losers and winners, and some early thoughts on what it all means.

Google Algorithm Change Losers
Johannes Beus of Sistrix reports:
"The first conclusion is quite straightforward: the number of keywords these domains are ranking for dropped dramatically. Looking at mahalo.com as an example, it went from 33,875 keywords before the update to just 9,740 keywords after the update went public - a decrease of more than 70%. These were keywords like "zealand air" (3), "digg" (8) or "tax check" (4) where the domain fell out of the top 100 results. The second outcome deals with the remaining keywords," Beus said.

Sistrix also provided a visual showing how mahalo.com was impacted:

However, it must be noted that the comparison is based on 1 million keywords comparing two different days of the same week. It seems as though Thursday was compared against Friday -- and Thursday is usually a higher-traffic day for many sites. This sort of comparison isn't conclusive, but nonetheless interesting.
The ezine article sites appear to have been hit bad -- this had been a white hat method of SEO so the shakeout has yet to be fully seen. The Alexa numbers for the top aggregators ezinearticles.com and associatedcontent.com are below, how this continues once other sites get that share of searches lost should shake a lot of web activity.

Both have had serious losses in rank, search percentage and pageviews, much harsher than Mahalo.

Dan Abbamont also reported seeing Mahalo and EzineArticles taking damage. Also taking hits: hubpages.com; squidoo.com; articlesbase.com; buzzle.com; associatedcontent.com; suite101.com. However, the comparison methodology here is a bit questionable, as the writer compared Google.com results vs. Google.ca results.
SEOClarity also put together a report listing the top 10 sites that suffered the worst losses, based on ~60,000 keywords, comparing Feb. 22 to Feb. 24 (Tuesday vs. Thursday):

Google Algorithm Change Winners
Here's a look at eHow's rankings before and after Google's algorithm update, via Sistrix:

Sistrix reports that it doesn't appear Google tried to downrank ehow.com at all.
SEOClarity also looked at the top 10 domains that saw greatest gains of top 10 rankings:

Aaron Wall at SEO Book.com also put together a list of competing eHow sites that saw traffic gains (noted in green), via SEMRush stats.

Sites in red took major hits. Yellow sites are Demand Media sites that were impacted.


Early Analysis
The change announcement by Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal included "Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking--a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries--and we wanted to let people know what's going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites--sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites--sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on".
And as Aaron Wall notes Mahalo is not that bad. What happens to AllTops and sites of that ilk?
While the "write an article" niche seems to be hit, no doubt the value of being a guest blogger has gone up considerably. Sadly, the white hat SEO list of legitimate link building processes has gone. How quickly this drop in link values and keyword authority should launch a huge reorganization of the SERPs soon. Meanwhile, I am thinking a lot of sites have yet to be touched by the impact of this.
What happens when a link to me is downplayed because a link to it had been given lift from the dropped content and no longer passes this along -- well on record and filtered through all the Google data centers.

Business.com and allbusiness.com are both in the top 25 -- one has to wonder how the new buyers of business.com are feeling about their investment right now. Possibly not as bad as others, but not happy.

UK SEO David Naylor noted the changes have yet to reach the UK, but is expecting them and waves of changes in the general metrics he monitors.
The short term impact is being seen right now -- a month from now the SERPs will be very different in many, many cases.

Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110226-184951