Google Panda 4.1 Now Rolling Out; Aims To Help Smaller Web Sites

One of my fears was that Google would announce a big algorithm update while I was offline for Rosh Hashanah and they did just that - although the update was not Google Penguin, it was Google Panda related.

This one, Pierre Far has the privilege of announcing on his Google+ page. He wrote:

Panda update rolling out 

Earlier this week, we started a slow rollout of an improved Panda algorithm, and we expect to have everything done sometime next week.

Based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.

Depending on the locale, around 3-5% of queries are affected.

So the rollout began likely on Wednesday or Tuesday of last week. On Wednesday, I actually was thinking something was going on and asked some folks I know who track this closely on Twitter but was pretty much shot down by them. So I let it slide. :(

Anyway, Panda began rolling out and I suspect by now, it is fully rolled out. This is code named Panda 4.1, the previous official major Panda release was Panda 4.0 on May 20, 2014. Since then, Panda has continued to refresh fairly often on a monthly cycle and will continue to do that even with Panda 4.1.

This update, Panda 4.1, impacts 3-5% of search queries, so it is a pretty major one. But Pierre Far from Google said this is friendly to smaller sites, "greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher," he said. Is that true? Well, time will tell but many are not too confident.

Pierre also said the reason they are announcing it is because it is not a simple refresh but they added more signals to the algorithm. Pierre explained Google added a "few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely." 

I am a bit concerned this site was hit by Panda 4.1. Here is my traffic for the past few weeks, notice the huge decline from the previous two weekends to this one. It may be that I was offline, posting stale content, on Thursday and Friday but I rarely post new content on weekends (Saturday and Sunday).

This shows a ~30 drop in organic Google traffic from the previous weekends to this past weekend. The rest of the week is actually normal traffic, including the days I was offline for a Friday and Thursday with content that is not ground breaking.

There is a lot of analysis going on, which I will dig deeper into after the dust settles over this week. But if you want to dig now, here are those threads listed below.

Source:http://goo.gl/xE72zL

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Redesigning Your Website? Why You Need to Think About SEO From the Start

The following is an excerpt from 10 SEO Mistakes to Avoid During Your Next Website Redesign. To download the full guide, click here.

The glitz, the glam, the glorious design elements that make your website look like a million bucks. When contemplating a website redesign, it’s easy to focus only on those features that are appealing to the eye.

Unfortunately, redesigning a website isn’t simply an exercise in aesthetics. Sure, the purely visual elements of your newly designed website will likely get the most attention, but remember: a great website redesign also requires that you consider (and improve) what’s under the hood. 

A flashy exterior doesn’t help much if the actual machine fails to function. If people can’t find your website via search, or if they can’t intuitively navigate through your site’s pages and easily understand what information those pages contain, it doesn’t really matter how beautiful it looks. 

When it comes to your website redesign, form and function need to be a package deal. So while you should absolutely incorporate that new color scheme and add that big beautiful hero image to your homepage, don’t forget about what’s happening behind the scenes.

Why You Need to Think of SEO From the Start

To ensure your new site will truly resonate with your target audience -- and to save yourself from some major headaches down the road -- you need SEO to be ingrained in your redesign strategy from the very beginning.

"The most common SEO mistake that I see marketers make when redesigning their websites is not involving the SEO team early in the process," says Jeff Ferguson, CEO of Fang Digital Marketing. "All too often, when we’re brought in for SEO work on a redesign, it’s often late in the process, such as when the site is being coded or even totally complete ... The advice that usually needs to be passed on at this point will most likely cost the company much more in design, coding, and more."

Laura Hogan, marketing director at OverGo Studio, takes a similar view. "If you don’t have SEO in mind from the initial strategy session, you’re going to lose what you took so much time and effort to build. Everything from the structure of your website to the meta description of your website pages is important and should be taken into consideration."

Website Redesign & SEO: Your Major Action Items

So, how exactly do you make sure SEO is incorporated into your redesign strategy from the very beginning? Here are a few items to add to the to-do list:

Do an Audit of Your Existing Site

Before you bust out the wrecking ball and start demolishing your soon-to-be-forgotten site, make sure you take the time to examine it to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Here are some key metrics you may want to consider:

• Number of visits/visitors/unique visitors (monthly average)
  
• Top performing keywords (in terms of rank, traffic, and lead generation)
  
• Number of inbound linking domains
  
• Total number of total pages indexed
  
• Total number of pages that receive traffic
  

Armed with this knowledge of how your existing site is performing, you'll be able to make informed decisions about which of your pages should stay, which ones should go, and which ones should get revamped or reorganized during your redesign.

To keep track of all these metrics, you can download our free website redesign workbook. Here's a quick peek:

Identify (and Include) Commonly Used Keywords

It’s a new era for SEO, an era where you can no longer keyword-stuff your way to search ranking success. Nowadays, if Google finds out that you are blatantly overusing (or hiding) keywords on your site, your credibility (and rankings) could take a serious hit.

However, this doesn’t mean that keywords are totally irrelevant. In fact, if you’re doing what Google wants you to do (creating high-quality content), keywords will work there way naturally into your website’s pages. To quote from Google directly:

“In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.”

Consider Your URL Structure

If your site is littered with lengthy, indecipherable URLs that don’t align well with the actual content of your site pages, restructuring your URLs should definitely be a priority during your next website redesign.

Wondering where SEO comes into play here? Just like the searchers themselves, search engines prefer URLs that make it easy to understand what your page content is all about.

A general rule to follow when creating your new URLs: use dashes (-) between words instead of underscores (_). Google treats dashes as separators, which means it can return results when you search for a single word that appears in a URL and when you search for a group of words that appears in a URL. This means that Google sees the individual words in the URL inbound-marketing-tips.com, which means the website could show up in searches for terms like "inbound tips," "inbound marketing tips," "marketing tips," etc.

In contrast, Google treats underscores as connectors, which means it will only return results when you search for a group of connected words that appears in a URL. So Google reads the URL inbound_marketing_tips.com as inboundmarketingtips.com, which changes how often the site appears in search results. 

The bottom line: Using dashes creates more opportunities for your pages to be discovered. 

Opt for a Responsive Solution

As Google’s preferred configuration for mobile-optimized websites, responsive design is your best option for delivering a great search and browsing experience to mobile users.

With responsive design, all of your website’s URLs are the same across all devices, and they all serve up the same HTML code. This isn’t the case with other mobile configurations, like setting up a separate, mobile-only site (which requires a different set of URLs) or implementing dynamic serving (which uses the same URLs but serves up different HTML).

With responsive design, the only thing that changes across devices is the styling (which is controlled by CSS). This configuration makes it easier for Google to crawl your pages and retrieve your content. To quote Google, “This improvement in crawling efficiency can indirectly help Google index more of the site’s contents and keep it appropriately fresh.”

Source:http://goo.gl/voEe7A

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6 SEO Tools to Analyze Your Site Like Google Does

Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm -- just look at the history of Google's 2011 algorithm updates chronicled on this very blog to get a little snapshot. In fact, they announced 40 algorithm updates in February 2012 alone, followed by another 50 in March. And while Google freely talks about their overarching goals with these updates being to weed out lower-quality websites that don’t satisfy searchers with quality content, there is still some secrecy behind exactly how Google evaluates a website and ultimately determines which sites to show for which search queries.
That said, there are a number of tools out there -- some free, some paid -- that help you to look at your own site the way that Google sees it. These tools are critical to your organic search strategy because they allow you to focus on the elements of your site that Google deems important. In this post, we’ll walk through 6 such tools that all help you analyze your site like a marketer ... and a Google bot!

1) Webmaster Tools

Perhaps the best way to understand the way Google sees your site is to ask Google. Google’s Webmaster Tools is novice-friendly with robust resources explaining the fundamentals of Google search. Plus, it's free and works for mobile sites! For example, the Google Friendly Site is a great starting point for anyone needing a primer on how Google views pages. It succinctly explains a few of the basic parameters involved in Google’s search algorithms. Take a look:


With this tool, you're able to see exactly which keywords Google is seeing when it crawls your website -- the list you see above is just a snapshot. If you’re not seeing the keywords you anticipated, you know to start creating more quality content around the keywords you're targeting. You can also see how many search queries and click-throughs each of the keywords is receiving. If you're not seeing the rankings and CTR you were hoping for, this tool provides excellent tips to help you improve -- just don't expect them to reveal all their secrets.
Another great feature of Google Webmaster Tools is its breakdown of errors in its Diagnostics section. You can monitor your site for malware and crawl errors, both essential for conquering the SERPs. Malware can get your site blocked, and crawl errors will stop search spiders in their tracks, literally making parts of your website invisible to the search engines. This easy to read list allows publishers to see which links are not working as they should, giving them the opportunity to address the problem. This site, for example, has only one web crawler error found by Google:


Furthermore, Google’s Fetch as Google tool, allows you to see a particular URL as Google sees it, which is critical when troubleshooting for poor SEO performance. The information returned can help you modify the page in question for better optimization, and can even help you isolate problematic code when you believe your site's been hacked.

2) Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a search marketer's best friend. Designed specifically for the SEO-minded, this program crawls the websites you specify examining the URLs for common SEO issues in an attempt to make site optimization easier. This program simplifies and expedites an otherwise time consuming process -- especially for larger websites -- which would otherwise take hours or days to manually evaluate.
The Java program is fairly intuitive with easy to navigate tabs. Additionally, you can export any or all of the data into Excel for further analysis. So say you're using Optify, SEOmoz, or RavenSEO to monitor your links or rankings for specific keywords -- you could simply create a .csv file from your spreadsheet, make a few adjustments for the proper formatting, and upload it to those tools. You’ve just taken a few minutes to compile massive amounts of data that may otherwise have taken hours, or even days!


In the screenshot above, for example, you can see a handful of images that are missing alt text, which means that these images aren’t going to be recognized by Google. That means they’re serving no purpose other than adding aesthetic quality to the page. Adding appropriate ALT tags to each image not only enables visitors to understand what an image is meant to display in the event of a loading issue, but Google can now “see” the image . You can also filter images to see large files (over 100KB) and those with alt tags over 100 characters, which are not recognized as easily by Google.


Screaming Frog can also easily analyze titles throughout your site. The screenshot above shows three headlines which are longer than the suggested length for SEO purposes. If a website is filled with lengthy titles, it is more likely to be ignored by Google and other search engines. This quick snapshot gives a publisher or SEO manager a quick reference as to where changes can easily be made to help optimize the page.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider LITE version is available free, but with some limitations -- you can only scan 500 URLs per website, and you don't have full access to configuration options and source code features.

3) Check My Links Broken Link Checker

A link building campaign with a broken link is a huge bummer. Check My Links Broken Link Checker can help ensure the accuracy of links -- whether external or internal -- of a webpage, giving a publisher or editor the opportunity to make corrections before the page is live.
Think about a site like Wikipedia, for example -- they must have tons of links! Actually, through a combination of internal and external links , a single Wikipedia post on Kiefer Sutherland has 599 links. Within moments, Check My Links scanned all of the links, finding just five that were broken.


The site highlights all the good links in green, and those which are broken in red, making it easy to spot the ones that don’t work or are no longer active. Check My Links also takes it one step further with a quick keystroke so you can see the broken URL, making it easier to recognize the error. Being able to see the erroneous URL makes it easier to replace it with an active link.


Check My Links Broken Link Checker is not only a great tool to ensure the accuracy of your page, but it’s also free, so even the most budget-conscious startups can take advantage of this tool.

4) SEOmoz PRO Tools

SEOmoz PRO Tools is designed for small and large businesses alike and can help publishers better understand their Google rankings. Be forewarned that it can take up to 7 days to get the full report, though, so this isn't good for the SEO in a pinch.


With SEOmoz, you can see where each page ranks as well as see how Google crawls your site. The full web crawl report takes a look at a variety of components that are essential in Google search, including the URL, title, and meta descriptions. It also looks at a list of common SEO errors. The Excel report helps you quickly recognize where errors or missing elements are stumping Google.


The crawl diagnostics added to the dashboard help you to visualize exactly which errors are critical. It also tracks all changes that are made, helping you keep track of what needs to be done to help Google find your site. The critical areas can then be broken down into smaller, targeted areas. Each of these warnings can easily be fixed to help Google find the URLs.


Additionally, you’re able to link up to three competitors in order to see how they compare in their optimization efforts. The side by side comparison gives great insight into your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your competitors’. It’s like snagging a rival team’s playbook, giving you inside information on where opportunities lie!
SEOmoz PRO Tools offers a free 30-day trial, but subscription fees are $99 a month afterwards. SEOmoz also provides its subscribers with a vast array of resources including access to webinars, videos, and guides.

5) HubSpot's Page Grader

A paid tool that comes with a HubSpot marketing software subscription, the Pages tool helps you, well, measure how effective the pages on your website are. The tool both evaluates the SEO performance of each page on your website, and provides actionable advice to improve underperforming pages. On this page, for example, we would know that our meta description needs to be fixed so the correct information is being pulled into the SERPs, but the rest of our meta data is a-okay.


Along with evaluating on-page optimization, the Pages tool tells helps you track inbound links and keywords -- you can see not only what keywords each individual page is ranking for in Google, but also what other external or internal pages link to that page. This helps paint a more robust picture of how well your off-page SEO is faring, and how your link campaigns contribute to an individual page's ranking in the SERPs.

The Pages tool even goes one step further, letting you drill down into each individual link on a page so you can learn which ones are helping your SEO and overall marketing strategy the most. For example, this tool not only gives you an overall link grade, but even tells you which links are sending traffic your way -- because inbound links are important for both SEO and lead generation !

6) HubSpot's Marketing Grader

If you’re wondering if your website and social media efforts are making the grade, HubSpot’s Marketing Grader is an excellent free tool. As its name implies, this tool gives your website and up to two of your competitors a grade based upon how Google views the site. It allows you to differentiate between B2B and B2C, and take a look at your social media activity, as well.  It’s a pretty cool tool that also offers tips on how to improve your score -- and thus, your website and marketing.
In addition to looking at how you are using analytics to measure your marketing success , Marketing Grader gives you a grade based upon 2 key areas of the sales funnel:
The Top of the Funnel (TOFU): The top of the sales funnel examines the efforts made to bring visitors to the website. It looks at content creation, optimization, and promotion skills.
The Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): The middle of the sales funnel takes a look at how well your conversion tactics are working. It looks at landing pages, conversion forms, email marketing, and social media.
You can see here that these two competing websites are nearly identical, except in one very important aspect: One is failing to bring visitors to its site. Neither is overly adept at converting visitors, and both are doing a fair job at measuring their success (or lack thereof).


One of the best features of Grader is its top tips to help increase scores. It’s like getting a math tutor to help with your calculus homework. Not only does it provide you with easy (sometimes no-brainer) ways to increase traffic, but it also offers credible evidence as to why it’s important to do so.


With Google’s increasing focus on building keywords into robust, quality content, it's important to understand where how your page content is performing. As you can see based on the results Marketing Grader returns, this website needs to ramp up its content to improve SEO. Likewise, it needs to be savvier when it comes to adding alt tags to images to help Google recognize what the image is about.


Another epic fail can be seen below, as this website doesn’t include unique page descriptions. Although Google doesn’t recognize page descriptions as part of its search algorithms, they are important in helping drive traffic. The content placed in the page descriptions is what Google uses to populate the brief summaries you see under URLs on SERPs. If you don’t provide page descriptions, it defaults to the first few sentences of the page content -- which can be either good or bad depending on your page design. Google reads HTML code from the top down, so if you’re using a column-based layout, for instance, content appearing in a sidebar may come before the main content area, leaving you with a random list of words as your page description in the SERPs. Yikes.


Marketing Grader uses its own algorithm to rank sites, and this one only got 3 out of 10 -- an indication that it needs to work much harder to get Google to recognize it, drive traffic, and ultimately increase conversions. Luckily, this tool not only identifies your site's problems, but gives you tips on how to improve it. HubSpot’s Marketing Grader app is also free and ridiculously easy to use, whether you're an SEO newbie or veteran.
While you'll never get a look behind the Google curtain to learn everything they know (or don't know) about your site, by leveraging SEO best practices and getting the most out of tools like those listed here, you can greatly increase the chances that your website will show up in response to the right search queries.

Source:http://goo.gl/SSc2wK

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