So taking some of our advice from the Fiverr post the other day, we got a fun little commercial made up for our brand. While it isn’t a $5 million dollar ad agency job, we paid a measly $5 for this quick commercial about Google Panda. This is just one example of affordable and cool marketing you can get on a microjob site like Fiverr, I mean it can’t hurt right?
Panda is still causing a whirlwind of fun for people and I’m seeing a lot of noise about length of content and ad ratios being billed as a factor. Well, if you need one more reason to read Webmaster World on a daily basis, now’s the time to sign up or bookmark. I was cruising the Google section today when I came across this nifty piece of information talking about how there is no “golden” ad-to-text ratio, and that size doesn’t matter when it comes to the article. This was said by Google employee Susan Moskwa
Dude, it sounds like you’ve read too many tin foil hat “SEO” articles. As long as your site has worthwhile, original content on it (i.e. it’s not just made to put AdSense on it), there’s not a golden “text-to-ads ratio” or a word limit for ranking. I worry that you’re just looking at the trees and not seeing the forest. Optimizing your site for search isn’t about counting the words on a page, it’s about making sure that you have useful, usable content, and then making that content accessible to search engines.
I feel kind of bad for so many mis-lead site owners in the Google Webmaster Help area because so many people were saying this was a problem. It however doesn’t elude to the fact that terrible ad placement may be a problem, something that hinders usability for the reader. I can see how 3 giant ad blocks above the fold are not going to be a pleasant experience.
I have only seen major Panda problems with duplicate content for the most part, and have yet to have any clients with too many ads get a bump. I have been suspect of your link profile being a factor, but I’ve also been shot down for this idea. The sites I’ve seen get hit did have very unnatural link profiles, so it could be coincidence or just that too many companies suck at building links. Either way, I hope this bit of information helps you with your problem solving and getting passed this update and get back to making money.
While no one really knows how long it takes to recover from Panda, or even how to, I’ve just read something that might help. Tom Critchlow from Distilled got a few moments out of Matt Cutts via Twitter and asked him these few questions. Thanks to Webmaster World for catching this and sharing. I’ve been trying to break down what all is inclined for a recovery, and so far from testing there hasn’t been much in the way of a solution.
Ever since I posted our help with Google panda recovery service we’ve been getting an influx of emails from businesses all over. We’re seeing a whole whack of issues from ultra poor content, thin content backed by bad linking techniques and the odd site that has us stumped.
So for those wondering how long does it take to see some positive gains from your efforts, here’s a conversation on Twitter that should enlighten a little. While I’m sorry there’s not much more, this should elude to the fact that another round of updates could hit for the good….or for the worse!
If your company needs help recovering from a Google Panda issue then you’ll be glad to know we’re now offering help. We’ve been constantly helping websites via Google’s Webmaster Central, and now it’s time to offer a helping hand to those in dire need. There has been no clear signal from Google as to what has caused it for your site, nor how to fix it easily. There is a lot of information on recover, but where to start and how to go about it? We were happy to report that none of our clients got hit, nor did any of our own websites. That is something definitely we can take and learn from.
We’ve always made sure our clients had the right content, the right links and of course the right amount of social media marketing in place. Since the Panda update, we’ve had so many inquiries for help that we’ve hired on new team member just to handle the this problem.
From all the companies coming to us for help, there has definitely been a lot of things in common. First of all, a lot of in-house teams were to blind with rage that they weren’t seeing the big picture. It’s hard to admit sometimes that your website isn’t perfect, and believe you me, we’ll give you a tough and honest audit. Our team will be offering on the house audits to big brands and established companies needing serious help.
If you like what we have to say, then perhaps our panda solutions are the right choice for your company. All it takes is to get in touch with us via our contact form and you’ll here from us within 24 hours.
OneWayLinkBuilder.com has been scraping not only our blog content, but Vertical Measures blog as well. I’ve asked many times through many streams and nothing was done about it, well, not until Panda anywho. We’ve implemented Google’s original source meta tags, blocked the scrapers via .htaccess but that didn’t stop them there. They take our content fully, rip out the links and the images which is really down right rude. Since Panda is supposed to throw down thin, duplicate and weak content, I was glad to see it working so well for us.
Well I had to write about it since we weren’t getting anywhere trying to stop them from scraping. I even offered to let them take an excerpt but at least provide a link back to our original work. I filed a DMCA request with Google months ago and that did absolutely nothing, so it’s nice to see the Panda update doing its job. I know a lot of people think it’s done nothing but screw things up even worse, but here’s a real world example.
The original source implementation seemed to be doing an ok job, but not great. For the longest time we’d still see the scraped posts ranking within the top 10 search results. While it wasn’t hurting our rankings or image at all, it is just frustrating to see someone stealing your written words, and the links within them. I’d also hate to think a potential client would think it was their work, and end up wasting their time getting links that are most likely a waste of their money. With that in mind, just taking a look at the links they’ve built, you can see quickly this is not a consultant you want to deal with.
I am pleased to see that the blog results are now what they should be, something I’ve demonstrated in the picture below. This is exactly what Panda was intending to do, so we’re all pleased that something has worked in our favor. I know not everyone is pleased, and I’m very aware that a lot of scraper sites are still outranking original content producers out there. That has been very evident if you look at all the inquiries in Google Webmaster Central.
So there’s a bit of hope for our team and hopefully folks out there dealing with scraper sites. If you’re seeing the opposite still with your content, pipe up here in the comments and let’s get a discussion going. We’re always more than happy to offer our advice and hopefully that leads to some answers for your problems.
