In February 2012 we have many improvements to celebrate. With 40 changes reported, that marks a new record for our monthly series on search quality. Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow. We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.

Here’s the list for February:

•More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
•Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
•Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
•More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
•More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
•More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
•Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
•Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
•Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
•“Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
•Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
•Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
•Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
•Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
•More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
•Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
•Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
•Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
•Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
•Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
•International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”] Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
•Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
•Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
•Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
•Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
•Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
•Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
•Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
•Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
•Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
•Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
•Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
•Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
•SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
•Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
•Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

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The results of this research present a good news/bad news scenario for search marketers. The good news: If you have a credible, trusted domain name, you’ve got an advantage, as searchers really do pay attention to the URL in search results before deciding to click. And this is true regardless of the position of the URL on a search result page.

The bad news, of course, is that it’s more difficult these days to acquire “credible” domains now that most single or even double word domains are in use or reserved. Add confounding factors such as personalization, Google changing its core algorithm more than 500 times a year, and the fact that most searchers don’t move beyond the first or second page of results and you’ve got a major headache for most SEOs.

Nonetheless, the study is worth a close read for anyone wanting to understand more about how to capture the attention and clicks of searchers, thanks to its wealth of data generated by observing real people and their search behavior. Probably the most significant conclusion from the study:

Surprisingly, we find that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time.

In other words, even if search result rankings change due to factors like personalization or algorithmic tweaks, searchers don’t seem to care. They’re demonstrating a clear preference now for credibility and trustworthiness in a domain name now over simple ranking on a search result page. This is the strongest evidence yet that I’ve seen that an obsession with ranking is not only futile, it completely ignores the reality of how your site attracts users.

Key takeaway for bosses/clients: rank really doesn’t matter, if you’ve got a quality (trustworthy) domain name.

The study also has merit for anyone doing paid search, and considering what display URL is most appropriate for an ad. While advertisers are always limited to a display URL that corresponds with a top-level domain, the additional keywords shown in the display URL may be crucial in getting searchers to click. Also, even if searchers don’t have favorable “domain bias” for your main site, it may be possible to secure another more favorably-perceived domain for your paid search campaigns that serves as a microsite that ultimately funnels searchers into your main domain.

The report is thick with math and numerous citations to related work, but it well worth the effort for anyone involved in competitive search marketing

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1. What web analytics program do you use, and can we have access to it?

Web analytics are the key to measuring the current level of SEO success (or lack thereof). They’re also the key to determining whether any future SEO implementation is helping to bring more targeted traffic. Therefore, it’s critical for me to have access to this information regardless of the level of SEO service I’m providing. If you use Google Analytics (GoAn), it’s very simple to add new users to the account and in most cases it’s fine to provide report-only access (rather than admin). Along with GoAn, I also ask for access to the client’s Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) account. These days, if you have GoAn access, you can usually add the same website to your GWMT account as well, which makes the process easier.

2. What’s the purpose of your site and who is your target audience?

This is a seemingly simple question, yet it often stumps many clients. Some of them will cop out: “Well, the purpose of our site is to sell our product.” And your target audience? “Umm … anyone with a credit card?” Not very helpful. If you don’t have a good handle on who the people are who are buying your products, how will your SEO consultant help you bring those people to your website? An SEO consultant needs to have a clear picture of who you are because everything we do hinges upon this — from the keyword research to deciding what type of content needs to be written, to how you might want to attack social media marketing. If you’re an SEO consultant, I urge you to push for deep answers to this question.

3. Are there any other domains or sites that you own or control, or that you used to use instead of the current domain? (Please list them all.)

This information is important so I can assess any duplicate content issues. I need to know whether that other site I found that is using nearly the same content as yours is owned by you, or if someone scraped yours. I also need to know if you’re using multiple domains as an SEO strategy (so I can smack you!). I added this one to my questionnaire when I kept finding doorway domains or other sites that my clients *forgot* to tell me about. Even those who really do forget or who purposely don’t tell me about their additional domains aren’t getting away with anything. I usually end up finding them during my website audit process. So if you’re a client, do us both a favor and come clean from the start. This will save us all some time down the line! (And I was just kidding about smacking you !)

4. What have you done so far (if anything) about optimizing your site?

My favorite answer is to this is “nothing” because that means we’re starting with a clean slate and have nowhere to go but up! But most clients these days have done at least some rudimentary SEO. While I can usually spot any on-page optimization, it’s helpful to hear it from you. Sometimes, the things clients say they’ve done (e.g., created keyword-rich Title tags) don’t actually seem to be done when I look for them. That tells me that your idea of SEO and mine may be quite different, and it’s good to know this up front. It’s also good to know if you have already been through a string of SEOs and what each of them has done to the site during their tenure.

5. Is there anything that you may have done that the search engines may not have liked regarding previous optimization efforts for your site?

This one is sort of an addendum to the last one for those who may have *forgotten* to tell me any bad or spammy things they (or a previous SEO) may have done. While they may have not mentioned anything spammy in the last question, this gives them the opportunity to add anything that they weren’t quite sure was on the up-and-up. Very often, the client may think something was bad or caused problems, when it’s actually innocuous. Other times, there can be a big mess to sort out — e.g., all kinds of paid-for spammy-anchor-text links. As an SEO it’s helpful to know right away where to focus my efforts.

6. List the websites of your three biggest competitors. Why do you feel they compete with your site?

I like this question more for the second part than the first. It’s always interesting to see why people think another company or site is their competitor. Very often, the only reason people think it is that the other site shows up in the search results for the keyword phrase that the client wants to show up for! While that may make them your competitor, it also may not. It may simply mean that you’re shooting for the wrong keyword phrases. It’s also very helpful to look at competitor sites to see how they’re set up and whether they seem to have done much in the way of SEO or not.

7. What do you feel is your most unique selling proposition (USP)? Why would these clients come to you as opposed to anyone else who offers the same or similar products and services? What’s different or better about your product or service?

Hat tip to Karon Thackston for these questions, because they are ones she always asks before doing any copywriting for a website. Along with who your target audience is, these are some of the most important questions for any client to think about and answer. Sometimes a client will have a great grasp of this and provide lots of valuable information, but more often, the best they can come up with is that they are “more friendly” than their competitors. In today’s competitive marketplace and search results (especially since Google’s Panda Update), it’s critical to be able to differentiate your products and services from the rest. And even those who have an excellent grasp of this don’t always make it clear to the users of their website, which is something that will need to be fixed.

8. After a potential customer visits your site, what specifically do you want them to do?

This is a wonderful way to understand what the various conversion points of your website are. If your only answer is “Make a sale,” then you likely need to add some other smaller conversion points, such as signing up for a newsletter or updates, following you on social media, filling out a contact form, calling you, etc. As an SEO you need to know what all of these points are so that you can make sure that the client’s web analytics are set up to correctly capture all the conversions, and that the website is properly leading people to complete those conversions.

9. Do you have social media accounts (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Google+) and if so, what are your user names?

This is important to see if and how they’re using social media. If they’re not using it at all, as an SEO, you must determine whether they should be. If they are using it, a quick review of their accounts will show you exactly how they’re using it. For instance, you’d want to look at whether they are simply tweeting out links to their own content via an automated feed, or if they are also interacting with their audience. This will help you devise an appropriate social media marketing strategy for them down the line.

10. Is there anything else you may have that you think will provide a more complete picture of your site?

It’s always a good idea to have a final, open-ended question such as this in case the client forgot to tell you anything within their previous answers. You may learn all kinds of things that you would not have otherwise learned without asking this question.

Those are the most important ones that should get you started. While you can ask all these in person or on the phone, I find it extremely helpful to have it all in writing. It also provides the client with the opportunity to think about their answers and get additional input from others within the company, as necessary.

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One of my local supermarkets has a sushi bar, and they may even note that on their website, but the keyword phrase [sushi bar] is more often found upon and associated with documents associated with a category of “Japanese Restaurants” based upon how often that phrase tends to show up on Japanese Restaurant sites, and how frequently Japanese restaurant sites tend to show up in search results for that phrase.

Since Google can make a strong statistical association between the query [sushi bar] and documents that would fall into a category of “Japanese restaurants,” it’s possible that the search engine might boost pages that have been categorized as “Japanese restaurants” in search results on a search for [sushi bar]. My supermarket [sushi bar] page might not get the same boost.

That’s something that a Google patent granted earlier this week tells us.

The patent presents this idea of creating categories for sites and associating keywords with those categories to boost sites in rankings when they are both relevant for those query term and fall within those categories within the content of local search. But the patent tells us that it can use this process in other searches as well.

Keywords associated with document categories
Invented by Tomoyuki Nanno, Michael Riley, and Gaku Ueda
Assigned to Google
US Patent 7,996,393
Granted August 9, 2011
Filed: September 28, 2007

Abstract

A system extracts a pair that includes a keyword candidate and information associated with a document from multiple documents, and calculates a frequency that the keyword candidate appears in search queries and a frequency that the pair appears in the multiple documents. The system also determines whether the keyword candidate is a keyword for a category based on the calculated frequencies, and associates the keyword with the document if the keyword candidate is the keyword for the category.
If you have access to Google’s Webmaster Tools for a website, the section on “Keywords” shows you the “most common keywords Google found when crawling your site,” along with a warning that those should “reflect the subject matter of your site.” Another section of Webmaster Tools shows the queries that your site receives visitors for, how many impressions and clickthroughs from search results that your pages receive, and an average ranking for your pages in those results. An additional section of the Google tools shows the anchor text most often used to link to your site.

If you were to take all of that information that Google provides for your site, and try to guess at a category or categories that Google might assign for your site, could you? It’s possible that Google is using that kind of information, and more to determine how your site should be categorized. Of course, Google would also be looking at other sites as well for information such as the frequency of keywords used on their pages and queries they are found for to create those categories as well, and to see how well your site might fall into one or more of them.

Of course, if you verify your business in Google Maps, you can enter categories for your business, but Google may suggest and include other categories as well. For instance, Google insists on including “Website Designer” as a category for my site even though that’s not a category that I’ve ever submitted to them.

And it while this patent discusses how it might be applied to local search, it could just as easily be applied to Web search as well, and the patent provides a long list of different types of categories that it might apply to websites that expand well beyond business types.

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As the dust settles on these changes, it appears that while the content may have gone from view it is still being captured and used within Google’s local algorithm. So while this change is not as significant as first feared, it provides a sharp reminder of Google’s ability to change the rules of the game when and how it chooses.

And there will be more upheaval to come, of that we can be certain.

Google Places is the major driver of Web-originated local leads but it is by no means the only channel. So what do we need to do to ensure that our businesses, and clients’ businesses, survive future changes and even prosper from them?

Diversify & Conquer
Adopting a more diverse SEO strategy can bring greater and longer lasting rewards. The line between Google’s local & organic algo is blurring and the quick win tactics that have been exploited by many local SEOs no longer have the impact they once did.

Here are 5 tried and tested activities which will bring diversity to any local SEO campaign -

Content Is Still King
Most local business websites are static, unchanging and poorly optimized. It’s painful to admit, but it’s true. Unique and fresh content is one of the key building blocks for good SEO and it’s essential that local business owners understand the power of good content and have a clear and easy-to-implement content strategy.

Each local business website needs rich, keyword-optimized content on every page, not just the homepage. Keep Google coming back to your site by offering up new, fresh content once a week. Local business owners may need to blog regularly and showcase their latest posts on their homepage and interior pages.

Try adding a ‘news & offers’ section to the homepage and commit to spending just 30 minutes each week to update both the blog and this section.

Build Links As Well As Citations
Some SEOs have become overly focused on Citations. It’s been an effective strategy for boosting Places ranking but in the long term it is too limited a strategy. If Google reduces the value of Citations, where will that leave you?

Local businesses need to build as many inbound links as they do Citations, and where possible, do both together. Seek out sites which allow you to post both a physical addresses & a Web address – it’s a double hit.

Spreading your efforts across links and citations will enable you rank well in pure organic results, blended results and Places. So when Google does turn the dial on its algo, you’ve got all your bases covered.

Don’t Dismiss Yahoo & Bing
Yes, the scale and impact of these two search engines pales in comparison to Google but they still attract a large audience. They are often overlooked by local businesses which lowers the bar for SEO success.

In April, Bing released their revamped local offering, the Bing Business Portal, which gives you similar features and control over your listing as Google Places. A few extra hours spent here can yield some good returns.

Be Social & Be Creative
Another cast-iron certainty is that social media will impact search rankings more and more in future. Google dropped a massive hint in the blog post which accompanied the recent Google Places update.

The more sharing and interaction we can get our customers to do, the better it will aid our search rankings and drive more customers directly from Facebook, Twitter, et al.

Ensuring that you have a Facebook Page/Place Page, a Twitter Page and have claimed your Foursquare listing is the first step. Now you need to get your customers excited about your business so they share it with others.

I can hear local business owners saying, how the heck do I do that?

Well, you need to be creative. Here’s a great example of how a local Dry Cleaner (exciting right?) made themselves the talk of the town and won over 300 friends on Facebook in a single month.

Every month, this dry cleaner would take any uncollected garments and give them to a local charity store. Then one month they decided to change that routine and organized a auction for the garments with the money going to a spread of local charities.

The owner told all their customers about it and invited them to the auction on a Saturday morning at the local town hall. They offered to match every $1 spent with a $1 of their own. They also teamed up with a local bakery and offered free coffee and pastries for everyone. They had over 200 people turn up on the day and they raised $800 for charity (including $400 of their own). They handed out loyalty cards and prompted people to leave a review about the event on their local directory profiles.

It was a great success and the business owner now runs the auction every month.

Reviews Still Count…Don’t Let Good Service Go Unshared
I’m a big believer in the impact of positive reviews, not just on rankings but also on conversion. Building a critical mass of reviews across a number of important local directories and Places should still be high up your SEO to-do list.

It’s a cardinal sin for a local business to provide a great service and then fail to get their customers talking about it. It doesn’t take a lot to ask a happy customer to leave a review for you on a directory which you direct them to.

I experienced this myself this week. A plumber solved a long running issue with my boiler; they were polite, on-time and extremely professional. I was delighted and if they had asked me to review them, I would have left 5 different reviews on 5 different sites – that’s not spam, I’m just a seriously happy customer! But they didn’t ask me and I haven’t (yet) left them a review.

These are just 5 of the ways that you can and should diversify your SEO strategy. As any good SEO knows, getting your SEO right takes time, effort and know-how.

It’s a long term play and focusing on easy, quick win strategies will only ever get you so far and leave you prone to Google’s whim. Having a diverse approach ensures that your business is not only insulated against future changes but can actually benefit from.

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Thanks Rand for a this very controversial Google Panda update and help understanding it.  Readers enjoy!

Video Transcription

Panda, also known as Farmer, was this update that Google came out with in March of this year, of 2011, that rejiggered a bunch of search results and pushed a lot of websites down in the rankings, pushed some websites up in the rankings, and people have been concerned about it ever since. It has actually had several updates and new versions of that implementation and algorithm come out. A lot of people have all these questions like, “Ah, what’s going on around Panda?” There have been some great blog posts on SEOmoz talking about some of the technical aspects. But I want to discuss in this Whiteboard Friday some of the philosophical and theoretical aspects and how Google Panda really changes the way a lot of us need to approach SEO.

So let’s start with a little bit of Panda history. Google employs an engineer named Navneet Panda. The guy has done some awesome work. In fact, he was part of a patent application that Bill Slawski looked into where he found a great way to scale some machine learning algorithms. Now, machine learning algorithms, as you might be aware, are very computationally expensive and they take a long time to run, particularly if you have extremely large data sets, both of inputs and of outputs. If you want, you can research machine learning. It is an interesting fun tactic that computer scientists use and programmers use to find solutions to problems. But basically before Panda, machine learning scalability at Google was at level X, and after it was at the much higher level Y. So that was quite nice. Thanks to Navneet, right now they can scale up this machine learning.

What Google can do based on that is take a bunch of sites that people like more and a bunch of sites that people like less, and when I say like, what I mean is essentially what the quality raters, Google’s quality raters, tell them this site is very enjoyable. This is a good site. I’d like to see this high in the search results. Versus things where the quality raters say, “I don’t like to see this.” Google can say, “Hey, you know what? We can take the intelligence of this quality rating panel and scale it using this machine learning process.”

Here’s how it works. Basically, the idea is that the quality raters tell Googlers what they like. They answer all these questions, and you can see Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts were interviewed by Wired Magazine. They talked about some of the things that were asked of these quality raters, like, “Would you trust this site with your credit card? Would you trust the medical information that this site gives you with your children? Do you think the design of this site is good?” All sorts of questions around the site’s trustworthiness, credibility, quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the difference.

The sites that people like more, they put in one group. The sites that people like less, they put in another group. Then they look at tons of metrics. All these different metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that many SEOs suspect come from user and usage data metrics, which Google has not historically used as heavily. But they think that they use those in a machine learning process to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. Find the ones that people like more and the ones that people like less. Downgrade the ones they like less. Upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update.

So, Panda kind of means something new and different for SEO. As SEOs, for a long time you’ve been doing the same kind of classic things. You’ve been building good content, making it accessible to search engines, doing good keyword research, putting those keywords in there, and then trying to get some links to it. But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, “What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?” Now we kind of have to think about that.

It is almost like the job of SEO has been upgraded from SEO to web strategist. Virtually everything you do on the Internet with your website can impact SEO today. That is especially true following Panda. The things that they are measuring is not, oh, these sites have better links than these sites. Some of these sites, in fact, have much better links than these sites. Some of these sites have what you and I might regard, as SEOs, as better content, more unique, robust, quality content, and yet, people, quality raters in particular, like them less or the things, the signals that predict that quality raters like those sites less are present in those types of sites.

Let’s talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect. Now, it has a first order effect impact, a primary impact. If you can make your design absolutely beautiful, versus something like this where content is buffeted by advertising and you have to click next, next, next a lot. The content isn’t all in one page. You cannot view it in that single page format. Boy, the content blocks themselves aren’t that fun to read, even if it is not advertising that’s surrounding them, even if it is just internal messaging or the graphics don’t look very good. The site design feels like it was way back in the 1990s. All that stuff will impact the ability of this page, this site to perform. And don’t forget, Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site. So you should try and block those for us or take them down. Wow. Crazy, right? That’s what a machine learning algorithm, like Panda, will do. It will predicatively say, “Hey, you know what? We’re seeing these features here, these elements, push this guy down.”

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, “Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content.” Not enough. Sorry. It’s just not enough. There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough when it comes to content. If you say, “Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is.” You think to yourself, “Hey, I have good unique content.” No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I am like, “God, not only is this well written, it’s kind of funny. It’s humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It’s got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don’t care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I’d be tweeting about this, I’d share it. I’d send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page.” That’s what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that’s decent. That’s pretty good. If they’re browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, “Ew, I don’t know if I want to get myself involved in that. They’ve got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I’m not going to get involved.” Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.

They are going to be looking at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. Do lots of people from all around the world or all around your local region, your country, visit your website directly? They can measure this through Chrome. They can measure it through Android. They can measure it through the Google toolbar. They have all this user and usage metrics. They know where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on those pages. They know about what happens from the search results too. Do people click from a result and then go right back to the search results and perform another search? Clearly, they were unhappy with that. They can take all these metrics and put them into the machine learning algorithm and then have Panda essentially recalculate. This why you see essentially Google doesn’t issue updates every day or every week. It is about every 30 or 40 days that a new Panda update will come out because they are rejiggering all this stuff.

One of the things that people who get hit by Panda come up to me and say, “God, how are we ever going to get out of Panda? We’ve made all these changes. We haven’t gotten out yet.” I’m like, “Well, first off, you’re not going to get out of it until they rejigger the results, and then there is no way that you are going to get out of it unless you change the metrics around your site.” So if you go into your Analytics and you see that people are not spending longer on your pages, they are not enjoying them more, they are not sharing them more, they are not naturally linking to them more, your branded search traffic is not up, your direct type in traffic is not up, you see that none of these metrics are going up and yet you think you have somehow fixed the problems that Panda tries to solve for, you probably haven’t.

I know this is frustrating. I know it’s a tough issue. In fact, I think that there are sites that have been really unfairly hit. That sucks and they shouldn’t be and Google needs to work on this. But I also know that I don’t think Google is going to be making many changes. I think they are very happy with the way that Panda has gone from a search quality perspective and from a user happiness perspective. Their searchers are happier, and they are not seeing as much junk in the results. Google likes the way this is going. I think we are going to see more and more of this over time. It could even get more aggressive. I would urge you to work on this stuff, to optimize around these things, and to be ready for this new form of SEO.

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“Do you know anyone who got their rankings back after Update Panda trashed their site?

There may be some, and there may be some people who get their rankings back eventually, but the problem is a fundamental one:

If the Google dragon flicks her tail in your direction, and all you rely on is rankings, you’re screwed

That’s life in SEO. Google flicks her tail, and some webmasters may never be heard from again. The solution to this problem isn’t to hope and pray the dragon won’t target you. The solution is to acknowledge that the dragon has the power to make your life miserable, and figure out ways to avoid that pain in future.

Develop Real Networks, Not Just Link Networks
Links are the arteries of the web. Traffic flows via links, be they PPC, hyperlinks, or Facebook friend requests.

Of course, SEO’s worked out some time ago that hyperlinks have another value. Google uses links to “keep score”. To paraphrase, if you have a lot of “good quality” links pointing to your page, Google gives you a high score, and rewards you with a high ranking.

This way of thinking can cause problems.

If our link building strategies only relate to ranking, and not link traffic, then we’re vulnerable to changes in the way Google keeps score. If, however, we look at link building in terms of traffic, arriving via those links, then we’re less vulnerable to Google’s whims. If, for whatever reason, we are no longer ranked well, we’d still have traffic flows via the links.

This is not to say link building for the purposes of ranking is redundant. Google’s not that clever. Yet. However, if we’re overly focused on ranking, which is one form of traffic acquisition, and not spreading our traffic acquisition methods, then it leaves us vulnerable to Gogole’s ranking methodology, over which we have no control.

What Is A Link?
A link is a connection between people.

Remember the six degrees of separation? The idea that everyone is approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, “a friend of a friend” statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.

The connection on the web is more like one-to-one, especially when you can “friend” the President Of The United States on Facebook. Well, one of his staffers, but you get my drift

We’re not that far away from other people.

The ability to connect with anyone on the web, in one step, is profound and powerful. Once connections are made between people, stuff happens. The stronger the connection, the more great stuff can happen. But this doesn’t happen if we just view a link as a means to get a high ranking. We miss the opportunity to build something with greater staying power:

Real relationships.

And if you believe the pundits, Google will be looking more carefully at real relationships, as opposed to the…cough…”manufactured” kind, in future.

Techniques & Strategy
Here a few ideas on how to add another layer to your link building activities.

1. Identify The Top People In Your Niche
Who writes about what you do? Think reporters, bloggers, forums, industry leaders, pundits and conference organizers.

These people are also highly likely to link to you, if you give them a good enough reason. A good enough reason is unlikely to be “I’ve linked to you, so please link back”. Remember, our aim is not just to get links, it is to get links that produce traffic, too.

A good enough reason is that you interest them. In order to do that, you need to learn a bit about them, such as what they’ve linked to in the past, and why. What are the current hot topics? Industry talking points? Where is the industry heading? Make a list of the top ten ranking sites, trace their back-links back, and see who is talking about those sites, and why.

2. Give Forward
Link out to them.

Linking to someone is a great way to get on their radar. Do you follow your inbound links to see who is linking to your site, and why? Chances are, they do, too.

Don’t use any old link. Link to them from a well-considered, thoughtful, in-depth piece about a current industry talking point. Because when they follow the link back, they’re more likely to engage with you if you’ve given them something to interesting to engage with. They also may feel they owe you something, as you have done something for them.

Consider what might make this person engage. Perhaps you stroke their ego a little. If you make them look good, chances are they’ll want to highlight this fact to others. You could challenge their point of view, so they engage in a debate with you by responding back to you on their own site.

3. Start A Conversation
You could view #2 as one-off tactic, but it’s more lucrative if you see it as part of an on-going process.

The world of SEO could be likened to a conversation that’s been going on since 1995. The conversation now has many participants, many of whom cover exactly the same ground, however it’s the unique, authoritative voices that stand out.

Chances are, their “voice” didn’t just happen overnight. They participate constantly, and have done so for years. They get in-front of the industry, regularly, wherever the industry happens to be looking.

They also tend to lead it. If you want a lot of links that you never have to ask for, then it’s a good idea to first give people something really worth linking to, and talking about, on a regular basis.

4. Get A Story
But what happens to the people who run a sales catalog? A brochure website? No one links to such sites anymore!

The strategy I’m outlining is about networks of people, as opposed to link networks that have little value, besides ranking factors. Consider Zappos. Consider the founder, Nick Swinmurn. People talk about the company – and link to it. People talk about the founder and CEO – and link up.

Few people link to the shoes, and even if they did, that’s not a make or break for Zappos. The story is the interesting thing, and that resonates through different media, and results in links. Real links – the kind of links people travel down and end up customers.

Ok, so Zappos were very successful. Silicon Valley loves talking about successful tech companies. But this can happen in small, local niches, too. So long as you have a memorable, compelling story, that you hussle, links – real links – will follow. Do you give to local charities? Have you created interesting processes that small business sites may like to profile? It might not relate directly to what you’re trying to sell, but it does result in building up real networks of people.

5. Carry On The Conversation
Link building is a tactic. We can buy links. We can automate links. We can spam it up!

But when Google changes the game, as they often do, you’re not left with much if your entire strategy is based on technical hacks. Perhaps the richer, more secure long-term approach is to seek another level of value from your links. Go back to the original idea of a link, which was a connection between two people. Someone saying “hey this is interesting!”. Once someone does that, we can engage in a conversation, and it can build from there.”

Google can’t kill that.

If you’re interesting, and other people find you interesting, then ranking is no longer a make or break position.

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Local Seo

Showing off a variety of citation sources including Article Engines (be sure to include all of your location information on any articles you syndicate out about your business), Facebook and “Other” (a.k.a. SPAM).

In my experience, these relatively low value links do indeed seem to do the trick, but in the long run, you’ll want to supplement these kind of tactics with more solid citation sources, which of course are much harder to get.

David Mihm’s presentation had all sorts of good information with a focus on how to maintain a “geographic scent” for your website with the #1 recommendation being having a consistent name, address and phone number appear for your business across the Web and where possible have you address and phone number in the url certainly speeds things up.

1.Submit a KML sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. This helps send Google the “I am really located here” signal. Here’s an easy tool to help you do it GeoSitemapGenerator.

2.For multiple locations, claim all of your Google Place listings in a corporate Google account. If you are submitting a bulk feed, get it verified. Your Google Account must match the URLs of the Places you are submitting. Each location must have its own unique phone number or it won’t get approved.

3.If you want to generate reviews, find customers with Google and Yahoo email addresses. Since you know they have accounts with these sites, you can send them links asking them to write a review for you on them and they’ll likely already be signed in.

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Hey but they all clicked my facebook like button without being asked to!

What is everyone else finding???

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The markup links up authors to content, for example, this content would be linked up to my name and can be used to find all the stories I’ve written here and on my other sites.

It uses the rel attribute, so all you need to do is add the rel=”author” to your author’s hyperlink on the article page. For example:

Written by <a rel=”author” href=”../authors/mattcutts”>Matt Cutts</a>.

As Google explained, this tells search engines: “The linked person is an author of this linking page.” The rel=”author” link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page. For example, the page http://example.com/content/webmaster_tips could have a link to the author page at http://example.com/authors/mattcutts. Google uses a variety of algorithms to determine whether two URLs are part of the same site. For example, http://example.com/content, http://www.example.com/content, and http://news.example.com can all be considered as part of the same site, even though the hostnames are not identical.

Plus you can use the rel=”me” to communicate to the search engine that the links on an author page all represent the profile of the same person. Google gave an example:

Say that Matt is a frequent contributor to http://example.com. Here’s a link from his http://example.com author page to the page he maintains on http://mattcutts.com:

<a rel=”me” href=”http://mattcutts.com”>Read more about Matt</a>

In turn, Matt’s profile on http://mattcutts.com points back to his author page on http://example.com, like this:

Matt has also written <a rel=”me” href=”http://example.com/contributors/mattcutts”>lots of articles for the Foo Times</a>.

The reciprocal rel=”me” links tell Google that the profiles at http://mattcutts.com and http://example.com/contributors/mattcutts represent the same person.

I do not know if Google will just pick up the markup and trust it or if Google has to whitelist your site to be approved for this markup. You can test it using Google’s Rich Snippet testing tool.

Related Stories:

• Google’s Prayer Time Rich Snippets: The Good & Bad
• Schema.org: Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data
• New: Google Showing Recent Stories From News Sites With News Snippet
• Rich Snippets Finds Its Way To Google Places/Maps
• Google Search Now Supports Microformats and Adds “Rich Snippets” to Search Results
• Google Takes First Big Bite Into Rich Snippet Search With Recipes
• Google Adds Recipes To Rich Snippet Markup
• Google Now Showing Rich Snippets For Shopping Sites

Thanks to Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz

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