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Google Panda 2.5 Winners & Losers

Oct 5th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

No time for a detailed post, but I wanted to recommend this link partly so I can find it later when I update my own page on Hubpages, Squidoo and Panda:

Google Panda 2.5 Winners & Losers

Supposedly, Hubpages has regained a lot of its traffic. Quantcast shows it's still down from pre-Panda, and I have seen scattered complaints from some members that their traffic hasn't recovered.

There is the uncomfortable possibility that Google has decided their content as "shallow" and downgraded it on a subdomain-by-subdomain basis. That would account for overall traffic increase but still not to the levels there was before Panda started dinging shallow content.

Many of those who lost traffic feel their content is excellent, unique, and original, and it doesn't deserve to be penalized any more than Daniweb. Are they right, or... in the view of average web users, rather than those of us on the inside of the fishbowl, are those pages spammy, shallow or  just not something most of the web would be interested in reading?

It would be an interesting exercise to examine a sample of Hubages profiles: which members say their traffic has returned, which say theirs remains flatlined. Are there any particular features that the "winner" hubs have in common, or that the "losers" do?

Stay tuned for your next big bad Panda.

 

 

 

 

Subdomains: That Is the Question

Sep 20th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

Thanks to Hubpages' June 2011 experiment in subdomains as an attempt to get out from under Panda, Squidoo is in the beta testing stage of something similar. Hubpages' subdomain experiment picked up a lot of buzz when it landed in the Wall Street Journal, and I was one of many who was excited by the possibilities, since I thought it made sense. SearchEngineLand, one of the better SEO journals out there, made cautious noises and checked with Google (see that article for Google's response).

Based on Google's responses and Hubpage's traffic rebound (see below), I thought subdomains couldn't hurt and might help, and said so. However, after more pondering, I've joined the ranks of Squidoo members who are concerned. Apologies for the about-face. Let me explain.

(more...)

Claim Authorship of Your Content on Google

Sep 11th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

Claiming authorship of your unique, original content could help your content rank better in Google, if Google determines that you generally write good content. It also might help Google find your new content faster, since it will check your author profile (lensmaster profile) from time to time. Most importantly, if you establish yourself as the author of content in Google's eyes, it will privilege the original content above that of scrapers.

The downside is that while HTML has a mechanism for you to establish your content linked to any username, Google will only recognize your authorship if you link it to a Google profile including your real name and a photo. This is a serious problem for millions of web users who have privacy concerns, especially minors and women who are sometimes targets of stalkers.

But if you already have a Google+ account, and/or you're willing to take the risk, here's what to do:

How to claim authorship with
rel="author" and rel="me" : a Squidoo Tutorial

I did this at the beginning of September, and saw my traffic spike across most of my lenses. See my Squidoo Stats for the week of Sep 4-10, showing my weekly traffic jumping from about 12,500 to 15,000, and this chart of my top 25 lenses by lensrank:

 

Traffic increase a week and a half after implementing rel="author"

 

I wish I knew whether these traffic spikes were coincidence or significant. I did not see similar almost-across-the-board traffic increases from other search engines; some were up and some were down. If you're an established web author with a lot of good content on the web, I'm curious to know whether you've seen similar results after a week or two of hooking up your content to your Google profile with rel="author" and rel="me".

 

 

 

 

 

Panda 2.3, Hubpages, and a Suggestion for Zazzle Members

Sep 9th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

By the way, Google reran the Panda algorithm again on about July 25.

What this means is that every month or so, someone at Google pushes the "Panda button." Panda then reassesses the quality of content on each domain versus the amount of junk/spam on it, and gives that site, shall we say, a Panda Rating. That Panda Rating then becomes one of the factors Google's everyday search algorithm uses to decide how well to list a page in search engine results. Panda's rating is apparently a fairly strong factor, as traffic on each domain tends to rise or fall together, unless individual pages on that site have acquired enough other factors (say, backlinks from highly-respected sites) to offset the Panda factor.

Good news for Hubpages members: reorganizing Hubpages along subdomains has helped many of you, by partitioning off your content from spammy members' content. That helps convince Panda to judge your content on its own merits versus that by other authors on the Hubpages domain. So Hubpages is now slightly outperforming Squidoo, ezinearticles, suite101, and other open publishing sites (as opposed to those vetting content with an editorial board, which Panda is going to like better). We can clearly see Hubpages getting an uptick from Panda 2.3 at the end of July:

Now, wait, why did I put DeviantArt on there? A hunch. Just look at all that traffic! I think Zazzle members should have a DeviantArt account where you showcase some of your work and link to your Zazzle gallery and/or accounts on Squidoo and HP where you showcase more of your work.

DeviantArt has an advantage over sites like HP and Squidoo, as you see.   A social community that appeals to a large niche market (share your art! writing! photography!) gets tons of traffic if search engines didn't care diddly squat for it. Members market it by pointing friends, relatvies, and peers to their stuff. Search engine traffic, for DeviantArt, is a bonus on top of the social buzz it generates.

Now, don't all run out and create DeviantArt accounts for the purpose of spamming DA with backlinks. That won't help much for SEO purposes. DeviantArt does not let you link directly out to some other website. Instead, when you enter links on a DeviantArt page like your profile, it's stored in in a special in-house format, which is deciphered by a script only when a user clicks that link.

For instance, here's our friend Flynn the Cat on DeviantArt. Hover over that link in Flynn's sidebar and see what the URL is:

http://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.squidoo.com/flynn_the_cat

I bet that Google, at least, is clever enough to detect the hidden URL in there and crawl it for indexing purposes: "Aha, there's a webpage at http://www.squidoo.com/flynn_the_cat." But indexing is not the same as ranking. This link probably doesn't count as a backlink, when Google is checking backlinks as one of the factors it uses to decide how high up to list a page in search engine results.

So why bother with backlinks on DeviantArt, if they don't count for SEO? Pages on Hubpages, Squidoo, etc get indexed / crawled pretty quickly anyway.

Because links have two audiences: (a) search engines, which may use that link to rank your page better in search engine results and (b) humans, who will click on links that look interesting or useful to them.

In this case, your target audience is (b), people.

When writing backlinks for people, you have to give something they'll be interested in. On DeviantArt, if they see an excellent portfolio of art, photos, or other kinds of creativity, some visitors will follow your link to see more of your creative work hosted elsewhere. Note that just because DeviantArt itself has a huge amount of traffic doesn't mean your account will. As with Twitter, Facebook, or other social sites, you'll only get traffic if you participate in and/or post really good stuff that attracts a following.

But if you are an artistic person like Flynn here, and upload stuff regularly, you will attract a following. You could then direct some of that following to a Zazzle store, Squidoo gallery, or blog where you showcase your stuff.

By the way, Digg, StumbleUpon, and many social media sites create outlinks the same way as DeviantArt: they are stored in a non-standard, in-house format, and then a script untangles them and sends the user to the real link. So everyone measuring links from those social sites as backlinks is missing the boat. Those may help Google index a page, but they probably don't count much as far as helping a page rank better. As with DeviantArt, those links won't help much for traffic unless you're an active, contributing member of those communities who has gained a following by frequently posting good stuff of the kind that community tends to like.

Hubpages' subdomains approach is forward-thinking

Aug 31st, 2011
by Greekgeek.
No comments yet

This is another of my off-the-cuff observations not backed up by evidence, but I really like one approach Hubpages has taken to recover from Panda: establishing author-based subdomains.

On the one hand, this means backlink churn. They've got redirects in place, but any time you shift the URLs of part of a website, there are bound to be problems. They'll iron out over time.

But on the other hand, this makes it much, much clearer who's written what. Is everything in one subdomain scraped garbage? Fine, penalize it. But if another subdomain has unique, well-written content with sound links to related content, don't give it a penalty because of Jane Q. Scraper/Spammer in the next domain over. It's the same principle as web hosting from the last decade. There's quite a mix of websites on the hosting service where I'm posting this blog, and search engines don't judge us the same way.

There's one other piece of the puzzle that Hubpages and Squidoo are getting half right.

Both Hubpages and Squidoo have added a hidden rel=author link from individual articles (lenses, hubs) to the member's profile page. Good. That makes clear that the member is the author of all those pages.

But as Marisa Wright of the HP forums reminded me, there's something more to do. There needs to be a rel="me" field on our Squidoo and Hubpages profiles to link to our Google profile, or Google won't count the authorship, and our suite of articles, as our own work separate from the rest of the site, because the authorship won't be confirmed.

Update: Squidoo has now implemented this field. (And it didn't matter anyway, since we could add a rel="me" link manually, but still, the field makes it easier.)

Mormon Search Engine Optimization

Aug 20th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
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Wow. You learn something every day. This post got long, so I turned it into a Hub:

The Church of Latter-Day SEO

SEO basics and ethical questions raised by the Church of Latter-Day Saints' grass-roots SEO campaign.

Check Your Article in Google's Cache

Aug 9th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
2 comments

Do you know what Google knows of your article?

The result may surprise you.

Take the URL for your article, hub or lens and Google the following:

cache:http://www.squidoo.com/yourlens

If you see spinny "loading" icons, that means Google doesn't have that part of your page indexed. Google will only send search traffic based on the content it can see and index.

Other places you can check:

  • Webconfs' Spider Simulator, especially useful to see what links are crawlable on your page
  • The Internet Archive: does it have a copy of your page yet? If it does, search engines most certainly do.

SEO Tip: Is That the BEST You Can Do?

Jul 26th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
8 comments

For obscure reasons that Glen and Janet will understand, I'm going to call this the Potato Chip Challenge.

In the past, we've learned that adding "unique" to gift-related keywords captures long-tail searches. I have also observed that the word "stuff" can collect people who are searching vaguely for interesting, er, stuff. As in "stuff about volcanoes." "Review" gets people looking for "[product name] review" before making a purchase, and as I noted in a previous post, people often search for types of products, news, movies, etc by appending the year to the search ("lcd TVs 2011").

Well, here's another to add to the list. I'd been doing it already, for some topics where keyword research suggested a match, but I hadn't consciously added it to my toolbox of pointless yet useful qualifiers: "best."  I've got Best Books on Greek Mythology, for example.

Here's the Potato Chip Challenge: Take a lens where you're reviewing several of the same kind of thing -- or even one thing, if you're really sure it's a good one -- and open its traffic stats, the detailed stats where you've got all the keywords that have brought visits to your lens. Set the time span to "90 days."

Now, open another window to edit the lens. Add "Best" to the title. Work in "best" next to the main keyword in a few places on the lens where it sounds natural. IMPORTANT: As you edit, keep an eye on your traffic stats to make sure you don't accidentally delete/screw up a phrase that's bringing you traffic.

Publish and use SquidUtils' workshop add-on to ping the updated lens.

Wait! You're not done yet. Look at the traffic stats again. Open a text document, jot down the date, and record the weekly and monthly traffic totals. Copy and paste the complete list of keywords. Save the document as "potato chip" in your Squidoo projects folder.

Come back in a month and compare traffic stats (keeping in mind that shopping-related traffic often dips in summer and rises in the fall). Hopefully, "Best [thingie]" will now be part of your lens traffic.

I don't know how successful this will be, but based on observations, it looks like an experiment worth trying. Please report results one way or the other, if you give this a try!

Hubpages, Squidoo, and Panda 2.2

Jul 23rd, 2011
by Greekgeek.
3 comments

I was just checking to see how Hubpages and Squidoo are doing, following the latest tweak Panda algorithm, 2.2, which I reported on back in June. Unfortunately, Hubpages' traffic data has disappeared from Quantcast. [Update: It's back. Phew.]

Panda 2.2 rolled out back on June 21st. By now we've had enough traffic data that we should begin to see a bit of a before-and-after change from that. To my surprise, Hubpages has stopped letting Quantcast report its numbers. I would've expected a slight uptick from Panda 2.2, which may be the first chance Hubpages would've had to get back in Google's good graces after spam stomping. ( Panda is a special calculation done separately from ranking individual pages; it's ranking a whole domain, and that number is then applied as a boost or penalty to pages posted on the domain, like an extra ranking factor. Since the Panda calculation is only performed again when someone at Google manually punches a button, a domain has to wait to be reassessed).

So anyway. Hubpages has followed Mahalo's lead in hiding its data. A pity.

[UPDATE Aug 13: Hupbages is back on Quantcast! And I see a slight uptick after Panda 2.2. Pardon me for mentioning Mahalo and Hubpages in the same sentence; Hubpages tries to highlight quality content and stamp out spam, even if it sometimes has to mop up the mess created by unscrupulous people taking advantage of its free publishing platform. ]

So how's Squidoo holding up? I wish I could get a detailed breakdown of past years versus this year, since there's always a summertime drop. But here's the 3 year overview:

And here's the past 3 months.

Not much to tell us, but from what I can see, no drastic change from Panda 2.2.

Just as another interesting comparison, here's Suite101.com vs. Squidoo for the past six months:

Owie. Again, so far so good for the Squid, but not so happy for Suite 101, an old web 1.0 site that's got lots of good amidst the bad, from what I remember. (It probably depends on the neighborhood.)

Stay tuned for the next Panda Punch.

 

I realize some of the upheaval at Squidoo right now is, once again, Squidoo's attempt to be prepared for the next round. I think the newest layer of spam filters need some fine-tuning, and I'm anxious about the process for dealing with false positives, but I understand the need for even more aggressive spam/scraper filters.

Google Adsense on Squidoo Lenses

Jul 19th, 2011
by Greekgeek.
1 comment

Are your Google ads on Squidoo wildly inappropriate? Well, that sucks.

It would be worse on your own website, where clickthroughs directly impact earnings. On Squidoo, poorly-targeted ads don't impact you quite so directly, since you're not getting paid for individual clicks. (Otherwise people might game the system.) Instead, all Adsense revenue for Squidoo lenses gets put in the monthly Ad Pool -- which also includes other advertising -- and then distributed to the 85,000 top performing lenses via payout tiers.

However, there are three reasons poorly-targeted ads on Squidoo still matter to Jane Q. Lensmaster.

  • Highly inappropriate ads may turn off readers. "I'm an abuse survivor looking for tips on how to escape a stalking ex, and the ads are for people who want to hire private detectives to snoop on their spouses. UGH!"
  • Clickouts. You want clickouts, don't you?
  • Indirectly, of course, we all benefit from more effectively targeted ads.

So, er, how does Google pick the ads for Adsense anyway? Well, as usual, I was tinkering around under the hood of a Squidoo lens, and I think I may have found the answer:

<!-- adsense setup -->
<script>
[... blah blah blah ...]
GA_googleAddAttr("cont_tag", "computer history,brief history of the internet,cern,computer history,history of web,internet history,internet map,internet timeline,tim bernerslee,web,who invented the internet,who invented the web,world wide web,www");
[... blah blah blah ...]
</script><!-- /adsense setup -->

See that "cont_tag" stuff? That's the Squidoo tags for that lens. Assuming I'm understanding the code correctly, Google is using Squidoo tags to help it pick the ads on the page, as opposed to simply analyzing the page and deciding for itself what your page is about, as it does for search. (Alternatively, Adsense may be analyzing the text on your page and combining that data with what your keywords are to pick its ads.)

If you were really trying to maximize every click, you might want to poke around in Google's Keywords Tool to find strong related keywords that advertisers are bidding for (that's the competition) and that lots of people are searching for. That tool is what many of us use for SEO, but was actually designed to help you find and choose keywords for Google Adsense.

However, we've got other stuff to worry about besides optimizing our pages for Google ads. So it's not worth your time to do it on Squidoo... unless you're getting wildly inappropriate Adsense ads. In that case, it might be worth trying Google's keywords tool to find alternative keyword phrases whose related searches seem to be more in line with what your page is about.

Unfortunately, not all ads on Squidoo lenses are Adsense: a significant number are Chitika, and they're the ones that tend to be off-base. I see a bit of code that may imply the keyword tags are used by Chitika. But on the other hand, Chitika ads are often based on what people have searched to find your page, or on local advertisers in your reader's neck of the woods. So the Chitika advertising on a Squidoo lens may not have much to do with your topic, but at least, hopefully, they have something to do with your reader.

Since the dawn of the web, I've learned most of what I know about HTML, CSS, and webpage design by checking under the hood with "View Source" (or, alternatively, through my shareware web page editor...MacOSX only, sorry) found under the "view" menu of most web browsers. I've discovered a lot of things about Squidoo this way. I don't understand everything I see, but it's fun detective work.

 

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