It is very common knowledge in the SEO industry that “for SEO purposes content is king“. The more content you have contained within your site, the more potential keyword combinations a search engine is going to see. Imagine how much content an article site with 10,000+ pages of 500+ word articles has. Now think of all the keyword combinations a search engine is going to see. And now, on top of that think about the potential if all of that content that is well optimised around particular keyword combinations or subject matter? This is a lot of potential traffic from search referrals. If the pages are well optimised around high traffic relevant niche related topics there is a good chance they are going to be found for a wide range of different keyword searches.

Not every website can have this much content, nor should they all. But as a professional SEO I cannot stress how important it is to ensure your website has a good amount of relevant content contained within it. A simple sales page with limited amount of content and lots of flashy images may perform well for a small range of keywords, but the key to SEO is to capture as much traffic as possible that is relevant to the topics, products or services you are trying to promote via your website. There are a lot of people out there who do not understand how SEO and search engines work and they tend to ask “natural” questions via search engines. A couple of good examples of this is “where can I register a domain name?” or “where do I buy a new Apple computer?”.  As person who is inexperienced with SEO the only keywords you would be looking at directly targeting for high traffic referrals would more than likely be “domain registration” and “buy Apple computer” but not everybody out there thinks in these robotic terms and there is a good chance they would type in the queries as if they were saying them. Do a search for these different terms and they will see what I mean. I guarantee you they are going to return different results in the first page of Google. A simple rule that I like to tell my clients when considering content and page creation is to include terms within your content that your mother or grandmother might use when describing the products you are offering. They probably don’t think in the shortened form that most keyword research tools are going to provide to you. Yes, keyword research tools are a great way to get an overall idea of the potential traffic within your niche, but including descriptive long form content and actual words within your page content is going to increase the potential keyword combinations that your site is returned for.

Now, having a blog contained within your site is going to be one of the simplest way of being able to continually introduce new keyword combinations around your topics, products or services and is going to allow you to gradually build on your traffic as well as communicate with your potential customers and to spread your knowledge and experience around what you are discussing.  I have this conversation with people day after day and I will continue to teach this belief until there is a better method of getting great content into your site.  A blog is a great addition to any site and a great way to increase niche related referral traffic. If you do not think you can write blog content, get it written for you. It is not hard to find people who are willing and able to do the research and write article content for you. Do some research and list the subjects that matter to the industry you are in. Keep building on this and always be thinking about how to build on the content that is contained within your site. Not every page within your site needs to be a sales page, but including links to the pages which are sales pages throughout your site structure is going to maximise the chances of referring people to the pages which are selling something. The theory behind blogs is the more content you have,  the more content search engines can see, and the more potential traffic you are going to receive. Again, I think this is very easy to understand. And as I have said, if you either don’t have the experience or knowledge in your niche, don’t have the ability or time to create blog content, or could not be bothered even trying to create this sort of content, pay for somebody to do it for you. A blog is simply one of the best ways to continually increase keyword combinations and traffic and is invaluable for SEO purposes.

There is nothing that will increase your SEO performance for you in the same way as well written content that has the keyword elements in the right parts of the page. Whether is is well written sales pages with a good selection of descriptive keywords or blog or article content that is attracting traffic, content is simply the best method of increasing traffic. No matter how you do it, having content contained within your pages is going to be the best thing you can do for the long term performance of your website. Getting traffic is what you need to do to get sales. Without people visiting your site there are more than likely not going to be any sales. I see it time and time again where people are entering sites via “long tailed keywords” that are not directly targeted for link building but generate sales from those searches anyway. People do not think like a search engine. People think like they are having conversations. And the more your pages can talk back to these people (and to search engines), the better they are going to perform for SEO. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and create some nice, juicy, keyword rich content that is relevant to your niche and then keep checking in here and I will give you more tips on how to actually optimise that content to get it ranking well!

Do you have a website for your business or for any reason at all but are getting no traffic to it? Are you looking to grow your business and really get the exposure you need to succeed now and into the future? Quite simply put,  increasing traffic to your website with SEO is the answer for you.

SEO is the process of making your website more visible to search engines. Google is the biggest single index of information anywhere in the world and optimising your website correctly allows Google to “categorise” the content contained within your site and make it appear and be available for relevant searches. The better your website is optimised for appropriate and relevant niche related keywords the higher it will appear within the search results. The higher you appear within search results, the more likely you are to get people who are looking for your products and services to actually find your website.

Think about it like this. How many times have you personally performed a Google search and selected the result that appears at the top of the Iist? More that 60% of all clicks that occur after a search is performed go to the first website in the rankings.  Close to 80% of all clicks go to the top 3 results that appear after a search. Now, what would this potential traffic do for your business if you website was to appear within these top 3 results? How much exposure would that provide for your products and services? From my experience I can tell you that it is worth potentially millions in revenue for your business depending on what niche market your business exists in. The exposure SEO can give to your website will have people talking about your products or services now and long into the future.

There is no other type of marketing that provides the returns on investment (ROI) like SEO. Search engine optimisation can make your business and website compete on the worldwide market and allows it to be found by people anywhere in the world. SEO can transform your website into the equivalent of a shopfront that is open 24 hours a day / 7 days a week.  Positioning your website on the front page of Google for high traffic niche related keywords is the equivalent of having a storefront in the heart of the busiest cities in the world that never closes it’s doors. Optimising your website will allow people to find your content easily and keep people streaming into your “storefront” all day, every day.

How much would it cost for you to run a television or radio marketing campaign in every market in the world or within your own country or even your local area? What would it cost for you to get product brochures printed and positioned in places where you are likely to receive “targeted” foot traffic? How much would it cost for you to run advertising in major newspapers or other forms of print media? If done correctly, SEO will be far more cost effective than any of these forms of media and communication and will allow you to receive targeted traffic which is more valuable than just broadcasting messages to everybody in the hope of getting the right people to hear, see or read your messages.

SEO can transform the way you do business, the way you are found and how your business and products or services are perceived. To succeed in business you need to not only get your business online but ensure it is able to be found easily as well. The internet is the future. Make the most of it and not only will your business exist, but it will thrive as well. Increasing traffic to your website with SEO is what we specialise in. Contact us today on 1300663969 and start the transformation and growth of your business online now.

What are the Google Panda updates?

Google Panda is essentially a quality filter that is being applied to search results from Google. This filter has been developed in part due to a survey or questionnaire that was issued to what Google have assessed as normal web users. This survey contained a lot of questions which all related to the user experience that was delivered by the websites they were asked to visit. Some of the questions that were asked are -

• Would you trust the information from this website?
• Would you trust this website with your credit card details?
• Are there too many advertisements displayed on this website?
• Do you think this site is an authority within this particular niche?
• Does this website contain orignal, insightful content?
• Is this website easy to navigate?
• Do you feel as if this website is only trying to sell you something?

These are some of the questions and there were many more. But these will cover the needs of this article and will cover what most people will need answered to be able to start fixing any ranking drops that were caused by any of the Google Panda updates.

Panda is designed to essentially bring websites that give a good user experience and good quality content to the top of the rankings and drop websites that do not deliver a good user experience lower. Now, to continue reading this article I highly suggest you try to remove yourself from the equation when looking at your own site and remember that the Panda algorithm is based on statistical calculations. These calculations are not necessarily perfect. You also need to remember that having your website listed in Google’s index is not a god given right. Google is a company and it’s purpose is to make money. The fact that it helps many other websites and businesses to get exposure and in turn make money themselves is awesome, but it is not their main aim. Google make a lot of money delivering advertising on top of all of the services that they offer for “free”. They are not primarily there to help you make money. If you want to perform well on Google’s search index you need to know how they look at sites and play by their rules. The sooner you can get his into your head, the sooner you will be able to look at the changes that need to be made to regain your sites former ranking positions, traffic and potentially cashflow.

Diagnosing a Google Panda “quality” penalty and how to fix it.

Google’s Panda updates have been rolling out at regular times since February 2011. The first algorithm updates were released for US results only and then extended to all English Google platforms. The dates of the updates are listed below -

• February 24, 2011
• April 11, 2011
• May 10, 2011
• June 16, 2011
• July 23, 2011
• August 11, 2011
• September 28, 2011
• October 5, 2011
• October 13, 2011
• October 19, 2011
• November 18, 2011

Now the simplest way to know if you have suffered a rankings drop due to the Panda update is to analyse your Google Analytics or other traffic data. If you are suffering traffic drops on or around the dates listed above you have potentially suffered from the new algorithms. Now, I will also point out that just because you have dropped in your rankings does not mean to say that your site is necessarily suffering massively as some sites have. If you have only dropped a few positions for particular keywords it is more than likely because Google’s new algorithms have deemed that the other sites around you are slightly better optimised for their new formulas, or essentially this means these formulas have determined that those sites give a slightly better user experience as defined by the survey that is discussed above. It is also important to remember that it is very possible that the Panda algorithm may only be affecting some keywords you have been ranking for and not others. Identifying these keywords is very important in diagnosing the exact reason any performance penalties have occured.

I need to point out that the Panda updates are also pushed out manually by Google. If you have suffered a “quality” penalty you will not see a performance increase until the problems have been resolved and until Google “presses” the button on their next update. Because each algorithm update is still in testing they are releasing them manually in stages so that they can track and continue to improve their algorithms. The key to ensuring you come out of the penalty is to make the necessary changes and continue building “quality” links as you always should have been. If you make the changes that are needed to fix the problems you are going to come out of it with potentially higher rankings and more traffic than ever before. You need to continue working on your site and try to forget that you have had a rankings drop as much as you can. The work that you perform just needs to be slightly different. If you have been thinking about a site redesign, now is the time to do it. If you need to make minor changes, now is the time to act on it because your site and your business will continue to suffer if you do not do this. Also, to keep track of when the updates are actually released subscribe to Google’s Twitter account @google and watch out for what they are calling “weather reports” which announce when the updates are released. Also, follow my Twitter account @seoaustralia4u and I will keep you up to date on the updates as well.

Once you have determined whether it is specific keywords that have been penalised by Panda or essentially which keywords are now sending less traffic you can move forward. If it is a lot of keywords that you have been penalised for and you have lost nearly all of your traffic then this becomes a far more complex subject and is something I suggest you contact me about. If you have really noticed a rankings drop for specific keywords, chances are they are more than likely your major keywords which have previously sent a lot of traffic. These are keywords which were previously well optimised for but are now not so well optimised for. I will suggest a few things to look at -

• Keyword density – This is the single biggest factor that I have come across in determining a Panda keyword penalty is a high keyword density. Too many keywords stuffed into the content or entire page is not good. It makes it look as if you page has been written purely for search engine algorithms and not for your readers. If a reader knows what sort of website they are on they do not need to be constantly reminded of this. They do not need to be reminded about what types of products they are looking at by continually using the product categories underneath every single product listed on your page. It presents a bad user experience and whether you like it or not this is exaclty what Panda is designed to filter out. Remember it is real people who were surveyed by Google to help create it’s new rankings formulas. It is these people that you now need to be writing for and just filling a page full of your major keywords does not provide for engaging or quality content. It is also important to remember that keyword density is considered across your entire website and not just any single page. It is very possible that you have been penalised due to a page deep in your site which receives traffic or ranks well. A keyword density of 0.5% to 1.5% is now the typical range for any page for sites listed in the top 3 results for any keyword. Again, this is not a perfect formula and I have proven this wrong myself on several occasions by comparing separate sites on a page level only. But this is what you should be aiming for. There are other factors to consider and if you need advice on this, contact me. A simple tool to determine keyword density is SEO Quake.
• Duplicate content – Whether it be from content you are reposting after finding it elsewhere on the internet, or whether it be from content which you are displaying on multiple places throughout your site dynamically or deliberately, Google does not want to see duplicate content. Remember, Google have the biggest single index of information anywhere on this earth. If content has been found during it’s crawling process elsewhere on the internet is can easily identify this. A quick point I have to make is if you are selling a product and the description is not written specifically for your website this is a very common way to introduce duplicate content. If the product is sold by multiple websites and the default product description issued by the manufacturer is being used by yourself and others, this is duplicate content. This will be found. You cannot hide from Google’s robots. If you have the same information displayed on your site as is also displayed on other sites you will more than likely be penalised for this. Write your own product descriptions. Make sure your content is unique and original. You really need to consider whether your “tags” on CMS platforms such as WordPress are causing duplicate content to be introduced dynamically. It is now a good idea to create “noindex” properties on these tags so that Google no longer takes them into account when indexing your content. These points are something that is very important to consider if you want to survive moving forward. There are systems such as Copyscape which can be used to determine uniqueness of any content. Also, ensure your Title and Meta description elements are unique for every page within your site.
• Linking techniques – If your website has previously survived because of a bulk link building strategy and the sites that your links are hosted on have been deemed as low quality, your links are no longer going to be worth as much as they once were. In the past is has been too easy to create a lot of incoming links, have them noticed by Google and then have your ranking increase depending on your anchor text structure. As much as linking is still very effective in helping you increase your rankings, the focus on quality links is becoming far more important. Stop focussing on getting thousands of forum profile links and really put your efforts into getting contextual links from high PageRank, high domain authority sites with low out bound links and that are of a good age. These links are far harder to get and Google sees them as far more important. As time goes on low quality forum profile links and blog comments are going to be valued far less. And if those sites have been penalised in any way from the recent updates, chances are their links are nowhere near as strong as the once were. Tools such as SEO Spyglass are great for analysing incoming links.
• Page structure and usage metrics – Your pages need to be easy to navigate. Interlinking of pages not only makes it easy for search engines to navigate your site, but also make it easy for readers to dive further into your site. Google is now looking at site metrics such as average page loads, time spent on site, bounce rate and return rate to determine a quality site. Think about it this way. A quality site will encourage people to spend more time reading it, will make people want to open more pages and will have people returning to it. This is very simple to understand. Now, Google operate Google Analytics and until recently have seriously undervalued it for their own statistical purposes. They have more information than anyone on around 80% of all websites that are live on the internet. It makes simple sense for them to use this information to determine some simple values of reader usage. They have now introduced this into their ranking algorithms and if you have no idea of what users are doing on your site,or how long they are actually looking at pages or how many visitors you are actually receiving you are not running your site properly. Start to think about how to increase these average figures and how to reduce your bounce rate. The simplest way is to introduce quality content and stop seeming as if the only reason your site exists is to sell products. People want to be engaged in the information they are receiving, and the more engaged they are the more time they will spend on your site. Remove some of your sales content from your predominant pages and introduce content that people want to read. Reduce the amount of products that are displayed in one hit and add some quality descriptions. And most of all, make it easy to navigate to other pages of your site so that readers dive deeper and receive more information. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools are the best tools for analysing these figures but I also use Statcounter on all of my own sites.

Now this is just the start. This is going to be an ever changing subject and is something even seasoned and experienced SEO professionals are finding it hard to adjust to. Google is changing the shape of the internet and making it harder and harder to “game” their system. Traditional bulk link building efforts are no longer as effective as they once were. Link building is just as important, if not more important than ever. It is just the quality of the links that have changed and the techniques that are used to get them. Content should now be a major focus. If your pages are obviously just set up to purely to sell a product or to display advertising such as Google Adsense, you will more than likely be penalised by Panda. If you have duplicate content or are using content scrapers or auto-blogging tools, you will more than likely get “punished”. If users are not spending much time on your site, you will more than likely be suffering in the rankings index. As I have already said, the new algorithms are based on the results of questionnaires issued to real people, so shifting your focus to what real people want to see and not just what search engines have previously wanted to see is going to be imperative in moving forward. These algorithms are designed to determine quality. Get used to it.

Now, you can sit back and continue to think your once high performing, high ranking website deserves to be on top still if you like. But I suggest you stop living in denial. If your website has suffered a rankings drop due to Panda and you do not fix the issues that have caused this, you will not regain those top positions again. Google are only going to get stricter and what we are seeing is just the beginning of them rethinking the way they deliver quality content within their search results. If you do not adapt and move forward, your website and business are going to suffer as a result. This may seem harsh but as a full time SEO consultant I am in a position where I see the results of these changes every single day and if I do not tell you, then there is a chance that no one will. Swallow your pride, rethink your strategies and focus on delivering what real people want to see and I am sure you will survive what is going to be a very, very bumpy ride for those who cannot adapt. Focus on delivering a quality user experience and your site is going to really benefit now and in the long term.

SEO is all about increasing the visibility for your site in the search engines and particularly in Google. Getting your website to rank well for high traffic keywords can make all the difference between you receiving a good amount of traffic and making a lot of money, or having a site that is just not worth operating. The majority of traffic received by most websites are from referrals from search engines and if you are not visible to the search engines your site is more than likely not going to be found. If you are getting this traffic and cruising along knowing you are ranking well for niche specific keywords, the worst thing that could happen is for you to either experience a sudden unexpected major rankings drop or for you to be de-indexed altogether. I cannot think of too many worse feelings when you are operating an online business than this. SEO is a financial investment as well as a major investment in the time taken to perform the work and knowing that all of your hard work and effort has just been reduced to being worthless is something I do not wish on anybody.

So what are the reasons for this to happen? Why would Google seemingly punish us and send our websites into the depths of oblivion? Well, Google is a company that make a huge amount of profit by providing us with the search platform millions of people use every day. It is not a given right for us to have our websites listed within their search index and there are rules which we have to follow to be able to have our sites visible within their search results. SEO is sometimes about pushing those rules and boundaries to be able to make our sites as visible as possible. There are a lot of different methods we can use to lift our ranking for those valuable keywords and some of them are just plain and simply against Google’s rules and guidelines. If Google catch you breaking their rules they will not give you any warning and your keyword rankings will suffer because of it. There have been several high profile instances of this happening recently, none more so than J.C Penny and Overstock.com. Both of these companies were caught increasing their rankings by utilising links which they had paid for or encouraged people to place in exchage for discounts to increase the rankings for very valuable keywords, therefore placing their sites at the top of the rankings and receiving a lot of traffic because of it.

Now, the unfortunate thing about this is there are many millions of websites out there that do exactly this. There are online marketplaces which specialise in selling backlinks which will help increase the performance of your website. Google are well aware of the practise of buying and selling backlinks but their guidelines specifically state that you cannot do this for the purpose of increasing or artificially inflating your PageRank. There are certain attributes (rel=”nofollow”) that Google want to see on links that are bought and sold and if they are not in place it could potentially cause you to be penalised with a very sudden rankings drop or even to be removed from their index altogether.

Google have 2 different types of penalties, These are algorithmic and manual penalties. Algorithmic penalties are something that has been picked up automatically by its systems and flagged during the crawling and indexing stages. Manual penalties are slapped onto your site by the google Web Spam team and are quite often as a result of someone reporting your site as a spam site or as hosting inappropriate content or off topic content such as porn on a website that does not directly advertise as hosting porn. Determining which of these has hit your site is quite difficult and it is best to check firstly in Google Webmaster to see if there are any messages being displayed showing you what the problem may be.

An example of reduced traffic caused by a Google penalty

There are a few reasons which could cause you to suffer a dreaded Google Penalty and I have listed a few of them for you below -

1 Cloaking – This is probably one of the worst things you could do to your website in Google’s eyes and is something that will not be forgiven very easily at all. Cloaking is the practice of serving up a different set of information to the Googlebot than to normal viewers of your website. This is done by essentially identifying the Googlebot via either it’s IP address or Agent type and displaying different information purely to to manipulate your search rankings. Google wants to see the exact same information that is being seen by anyone else that is viewing your website and if it doesn’t you will be punished by having your website completely de-indexed. It is not worth running the risk of doing this and is something which I highly recommend you never ever do.

2 Keyword Stuffing – This is a technique which is as old as the search engines themselves and is again something which should be avoided altogether. By increasing the effective keyword density for a particular set of keywords you are trying to tell Google that those keywords are very important to your website and should be noticed. There is a lot of differing opinions about what a proper keyword density is, but the rule of thumb is is that you should be writing for your readers and not for the search engines. Google looks at the title, meta description, header tags, bold text, body text, image titles and image alt attributes and take all of these things into consideration when determining keyword density. You cannot have too many instances of your targeted keywords throughout these elements in the page otherwise you will suffer a penalty. The punishment for this is more than likely going to be a -30 or -40 demotion in your rankings for the keywords you are deliberately targeting.

3 Hidden Text – Placing text which is not visible to your readers but is designed to be found by the Googlebot is a another punishable offence in Google’s eyes. It is too easy to again increase the efective keyword density on your pages by hiding some of the text so it cannot be seen by your readers. This can be done by creating minute pixel sized pieces of text or by hiding your text behind different elements in your CSS layouts. It can also be done by making the text the same colour as the background or somehow blending it with other parts of your webpage. Google have become extremely good at being able to identify if this is happening and you are going to suffer if you get caught. The penalty for this will be at least a -30 demotion for either the page it is discovered on or possible your entire site.

4 Bad Neighbourhood Links – If Google determine that a particular website is no good and you happen to be linking to it, this can cause a Google penalty to be incurred. You need to be extremely careful of which sites you decide to link to from within your own site. If you are linking to something that is determined to be illegal or even to a porn site and you are not running a porn site yourself Google could determine you to be doing the wrong thing. If a site has been de-indexed from within the Google index it is not a good idea to be linking to it. Sometimes it s extremely difficult to control this and it is one of the harder penalties to pick up on straight away. But it is very important that you be proactive in making sure the sites that you link to are suitable in Google’s eyes. Check on the links that you are giving often and make sure the content is really suited to the niche market you are in is the best piece of advice I can give you.

5 Duplicate Content – This has become even more important in recent times particularly since the Google Panda update. Google does not like duplicate content and it is always best to have fresh, unique content on your site. Auto-blogs and scraped content are getting severely punished within Google’s index and they can determine who the original source of the content is via timestamps within their own index. Copying other people’s content is not going to get you very far at all and could land you in trouble with the original author as well. You are very likely to receive a major Google Penalty either on a page level or for your entire site if you are caught by Google.

6 Anchor Text Optimisation – Having too many of the one anchor text pointed to any page within your site is commonly known as an over optimisation penalty. It is very important to mix up the particular anchor texts which are pointed to any page and they need to look as natural as possible. You really need to ensure that the anchor texts seem as natural as possible and the best way to consider this is by looking at your page as someone who knows nothing about SEO or anchor texts and seeing how they would describe your pages. Try different variations and mix the words around in different order to configure them differently.

7 Link Farms – Using networks of websites which are purely set up for the purpose of passing on PageRank is going to land you in some deep trouble with Google. If you are luck you may only get a -50 penalty for the keywords you are caught targeting and at worst your entire site is either going to receive a -950 penalty or be de-indexed altogether. Google do not allow PageRank to be manipulated in any way and you will be punished if you are caught. This is fair warning. Don’t come back to me crying because all I am going to say is “I told you so”!!

An example of a keyword penalty imposed by Google

Diagnosing a Google Penalty

There are quite a few things you can do to actually diagnose whether you have really been given a penalty or if you are just suffering from a decrease in rankings because of your SEO strategies. Using Google to actually do this is the best way and here a few things which you can do -

1 Site:domain.com search – This is a very common method of discovering which of your pages have actually been indexed by Google. By performing a site:yourdomain.com search you will see if the pages that are in question are actually within Google’s index. If this command returns no results your website has either been de-indexed or had never actually been within the index before.

2 Domain Search – If your domain is blahblah.com just do a serch for this in the Google search page. Your website should return as the number 1 result and if it doesn’t you have certainly been penalised for something. You then need to dig deeper to find out exactly what the issue it.

3 Brand Search – Remove the .com or .net or whatever TLD you are in and just do a search for your domain brand. You should appear at the top of the results and a tell tale sign of a Google penalty is that you will appear far down the results, typically on page 3 or 4.

4 Safe Browsing – Google can detect any malware which may be hosted on your site. Use the http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=domain.com URL to check to see if they have flagged any inappropriate content on your site.

5 PageRank check – use a tool suck as SEO Quake to determine if your site has lost any PageRank as this is a tell tale sign that Google has issued a penalty of some sort.

6 Recent Changes – Have you recently made any changes to your website such as modifying or adding “alt=” tags to any of your images or modifying the <h1> or <h2> tags? Have you changes any of the body text or title elements to increase the effective keyword density of any of your targeted keywords? If you have and these are the only changes to your site I suggest changing them back and waiting for Google to re-index your site. If this is the fault you will return back to your normal rankings quite quickly. Use social bookmarks or other forms of high authority sites to get your site reindexed as quickly as possible.

7 Paid Links – If you are utilising paid links to boost the PageRank of your site or to deliberately increase the keyword placement I suggest removing these links from whatever sites you have them placed on. This can be extremely time consuming and quite difficult to do but unless you do this the algorithms that Google uses are going to continue to flag your site and nothing will change until they are removed. If you are hosting them on your site remove them as quickly as possible or add the “rel=nofollow” tags to them so they do not pass on any SERP or PageRank benefits. Use the link:domain.com command to see what sites are linking to your website or use a tool such as RankTracker to determine what backlinks you have pointing to your site.

There has been a lot of discussion as to what penalty will actually be applied to each of the above problems and quite often it will actually depend on how bad the actually problem is and if it is the first offence for the website in question. The penalties are going to range anywhere from a -30/-40 penalty to -50 for paid links all the way to -950 or de-indexing for cloaking. There are also more than likely going to be “timeout” period applied to each of these penalties and this means your site is not going to recover for a certain amount of time after the problems have been fixed. These are typically going to be 30 days or 90 days but there are reports of penalties lasting for up to 2 years.

No matter what the penalty none of them are good and all will result in a substantial loss in traffic and performance for your website. The easiest and quickest way to really fix the problem is going to be to file for a reconsideration request under the Google Webmaster tools and wait for a reply. If you haven’t fixed the issue there is a good chance that you will get an answer within a few weeks as to why you have been penalised and if it is an algorithmic or manual penalty. Either way, you are not going to return to your past rankings unless the changes are made so it is best to admit to your faults during your reconsideration requests and just use it as a learning experience. Remember, Google do not have to answer to anyone and your website only “deserves” to be in their index if they deem it as suitable. Without the traffic you receive from them there is a good chance your website is not going to perform as well as it should.

For too long now many search results have been dominated by older, more established websites. This is due to the way Google has established “relevance” for content through a combination of off and on page factors. It is very hard to compete against established websites that have had years of SEO work performed on them and quite often the information that is being returned within the searches is no longer relevant. The new changes really emphasise the need for webmasters and SEO professionals to be continually creating content based around their subject matter and maintaining and updating their websites regularly. It is going to become far more difficult to dominate search rankings by publishing stagnant content and just throwing a whole heap of backlinks at it. Domain authority, traffic and fresh content  will play a big part in which sites are returned at the top of the search results for a fair portion of search terms.

Amit Singhal, Google Fellow explains it like this – “If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favorite sport, cricket, was played). Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type [olympics] without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for.”

The image below shows results from a search for “Occupy Oakland Protests” and as you can see the information at the top of the search results is only minutes old.

Occupy Oakland Protest Search Results after Google Algorithm Update

The new updates take advantage of Google’s Caffeine indexing system which was completed last year and allows them to index new content at a much faster rate than was previously occurring.  This is combination with Google’s recent “Panda” update which penalises duplicate content really puts truth into the old saying that “content is king”. Fresh, recent and unique content that is. This update could prove to be one of the best updates Google has ever released to their algorithm and should mean a positive shift in strategies for the SEO industry as a whole.

We need to consider the impact of the new “social” features that Google has introduced with Google+. For a long time now Google has been playing catch up with the new wave and methods of sharing information which Facebook has managed to thrive off. Thanks to Facebook’s “like” feature, they have manage to penetrate the internet a major way and have captured as much information on it’s users as possible. Facebook have also made it worth the user staying logged into their Facebook account as they have added personalisation features based on the information they capture. This information is extremely valuable to them and has allowed for extremely highly targeted advertising which is extremely lucrative to their revenue. Google are now playing catch up with this and are also trying to make it worthwhile for users to stayed logged in to their Google accounts, and a the same time capture as much individualised data as they can on each of their users. To do this they need to ensure that the data users are sharing with them is secure and encrypted, and this is the reason they are offering for the changes to search result referral data.

Whatever their reasoning for the changes, the SEO industry as a whole is going to have to adjust to this and figure out ways adapt. The more information a SEO professional receives, the easier our job becomes. Stripping out the actual keywords references that are used to find our websites is going to affect us but is not going to be the end of the industry. Matt Cutts from Google has publicly stated that these changes are only going to affect a “single digit %” of search referrals, but if Google have their way we will all be using our Google accounts a lot more and this percentage is sure to increase.