Everyone who drives a car thinks they could successfully race a car around a track if required. Everyone with a blackbelt thinks they can win a fight if push came to shove. And everyone who knows how to string a few words together, thinks they know how to write. But just being able to drive without crashing into things, throw a few kicks if cornered, or write an email while at work, does not mean you are an expert at it. It just means you have a functional level of ability. Which is great to have, don't get me wrong. One might even say, essential. But if you want to really drive fast, you hire a formula 1 driver. If you want to protect yourself from a bully, you stand behind a UFC fighter. And if you want content for your business website that Google not only loves, but that human beings respond to...you hire an experienced SEO Copywriter. 

Because time was pretty words were all it took to rank in Google. But with Google's Panda algorithm ruling the roost since 2012, an understanding of tone, voice, syntax, grammar et al, is now just the beginning. Write badly and you'll get penalised by Google. Write well and you'll get prioritised by Google. 

'A picture is worth a thousand words' is an idiom we all know. But when it comes to ranking your website in Google search, give me a thousand words every time.

Google have just announced that they have this week started rolling out the new and improved Panda algorithm. The roll out is expected to take a week to two weeks to totally proliferate the internet.  

This Google Panda update is influenced by webmaster and user feedback, which has allowed Google to eek out a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content. This will result in a higher percentage and greater diversity in search results, and will enable high-quality small and medium-sized sites to rank higher against larger and traditionally more powerful sites.

This is a nice touch from Google, as the quality of the content should be the ultimate deciding factor in a page's worth, not the overarching power of the TLD it comes from. Sure, great content doesn't exist in a vacuum, but just like each individual page has its own page rank, so does each individual page have its own on-page ranking factors, with how great the content is being by far the most important.

It is expected that approximately 3-5% of all queries will be impacted.

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Looking for SEO Sydney for your website? Then you've come to right place. Simply call 0425 204 887, today. The first page of Google is only one click away!

Google has today announced that it is rolling out the Panda 4.0 update. While other SEO companies, who try to 'game' the system to get their clients better search results will be negatively impacted by this, SEO North Sydney clients, who are all run on a white hat content mapping strategy, will greatly benefit.

Bring it on I say, bring it on! This has the potential to be HUGE!

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Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

Enjoy this free article? Great! Don't forget to Like it, Tweet it and LINK to it from your blog or website. Your sharing of the page with your friends is greatly appreciated! :)

There are literally thousands of algorithmic factors that Google weighs when working out who goes where in a particular search. Trying to get your head around what algorithm affects what outcome is a little like chasing the rainbow looking for a pot of gold. Because by the time you’ve got to where the end of the rainbow was…it has already moved on. Or - in SEO speak - by the time you work out what Google algorithm affects what short or long tail searches you’re trying to rank for in the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions), Google up and changes the algorithms* and you’re back to square one.

*Google on average rolls out between 500 to 600 algorithmic updates every year. Or just over one and a half algorithm updates every single day…

However, notwithstanding the continuously changing slings and arrows of outrageous Google fortune, there are some factors that are pretty much constant. How important they are can change (and have changed) over time, but they are still with us so are worth mentioning here. There are many, many others factors of course. And if you want to know the Top 50 Google Ranking Factors (IN ORDER) that Google uses to rank websites, you might wish to book yourself or your staff into our one day SYDNEY SEO TRAINING COURSE (where this, and every other piece of ‘Must Know’ information about Google is revealed IN DETAIL).

1.      Age of the Domain as a Factor in Search Engine Trust.

Age of the domain is important because the older a domain is, the more times the Google spider has crawled it and thus the more it is inherently ‘trusted’ by Google.

Newer websites are at a distinct disadvantage when compared to older websites for just this reason. There are ways to get around this problem (which will be discussed in a different blog entry at a later date), but make no mistake, if your website is still wet behind the ears, Google will know it, and it’s much harder for your site to rank in the SERPs.

Note: despite what you may have read, every page on the web is its own ‘website’, and has its own ‘Trust Value’ in Google’s eyes. So if your site has 1,000 pages, that equates in a very real sense, to 1,000 websites in Google’s eyes. Of course Google knows that all the pages belong to the main TLD (Top Level Domain), but every page is viewed as a separate entity with its own ranking signals as well as a part of the entire domain. Which means that, on rare occasions, a page in a website can actually have a higher PR (Page Rank) than the home page it belongs to (though this is highly unusual, as most links go to a site’s home page).

2.      Page Rank / PR.

Every page on the web has a Page Rank (PR). Page Rank goes from 0 to 10. The higher the Page Rank the more innate trust value that page has in Google’s eyes. Page Rank is an algorithm created by Larry Page, who with Sergey Brin was one of the two co-founders of Google in 1997 / 1998. Page Rank is not only a clever play on Larry’s surname, but is an algorithm that exists to rank websites based on the trust value given to that site’s content, by other websites.

In times past Page Rank was the huge elephant in the room in Search Engine Optimisation and played a major factor in where you ranked in the SERPs. How could it not as it was the very algorithm that changed the landscape of search as we know it (for everyone – including Yahoo and what we now know as Bing). As such the Page Rank algorithm would update every 3 months or so because of it. But in the last few years Google has been downplaying Page Rank, at least publicly. They don’t offer a Page Rank toolbar for Chrome and they stopped supporting the Page Rank Toolbar for Firefox back in 2011, which many in the SEO community took to mean the death of Page Rank.

Indeed, as far back as 2009, Google’s Amit Singal said in a Bloomberg Interview:

“No one should feel, if I dismantle the current search system, someone will get upset. That’s the wrong environment. When I came, I dismantled [Google cofounders] Larry and Sergey’s whole ranking system. That was the whole idea. I just said, That’s how I think it should be done, and Sergey said, Great!”

However reports of the demise of Page Rank have been vastly overstated. Page Rank is still important (for indexing and search reasons) today, and is still the cornerstone of how Google prioritises their search results. It’s just that Google now has (post the Panda and Penguin updates particularly) many hundreds of ranking factors that they use in concert with Page Rank, to work out where a website should appear in the SERPs, and so are much less reliant on the time honoured ‘how many links you have pointing at your website’ metric than they were back in the day.

3.      On-Page SEO Factors.

On page factors are vitally important in ranking a website, with the quality of the written content, post Panda, being the single most important factor in search today.

Other on-page factors such as how fast a page loads, meta tags and description, et al, combine to give Google an idea of the quality and relevancy of your website’s content. But now, in 2014, it all starts with HOW WELL THE CONTENT IS WRITTEN.

Which, let’s face it, is exactly how it should be. Because Google search is ultimately only interested in two things: 1) relevancy of the content to the search, and 2) the quality of the content itself. Everything else is window dressing to put those two factors together.

4.      Off-Page SEO Factors.

Off page factors such as the type of links, number of links, anchor text, etc are less important now than they were before Google released the Penguin and Panda algorithms. But make no mistake they’re still very important. Though if the current trend toward content being king, continues (as I assure you it will), Google will, over time I believe, phase out their reliance on links all together*.

*And it’s only at THIS point that Page Rank will be retired.

In 2014 however a targeted (rather than an aggressive) off-page strategy is still vital to a website getting on the first page of Google.

Think of it this way, if you put up a new website Google says, ‘The only people who think the content on this website is any good, are the people who put it there’, so Google is more or less ‘Content Neutral’ at the time the website is launched. But when other websites (that Google trusts) link to a page on your website, then you receive a tacit endorsement of the quality of your content (on that page) by a third party. And the more third party websites that give your content the ‘thumbs up’ via a link, and the more relevant that third party is to what you do and where you are, the higher up the search rankings that particular page goes.

Note: whatever you do though, do NOT hire an SEO company in India (or similar) or an SEO company in Australia who outsources link building to India (ASK THIS QUESTION!). Because one in three calls SEO North Sydney gets each day, is from a business whose website is suffering from a Penguin penalty (either algorithmic or manual) due to toxic links. And ‘recovering’ a site from toxic links is an expensive and time consuming process, with no guaranteed end result.* Many clients in fact choose to dump their old domain completely when they get a penguin penalty because it will cost too much and take too long to fix, and thus are forced to start again from scratch. And as I’ve mentioned above, new sites have no innate trust value in Google’s eyes, so a company doing this finds themselves back to square one due to being forced to pick the lesser of two evils.

*it can take anywhere between 3 and 9 months for a site to recover from a Penguin penalty on average.

5.      Number of Pages in Relation to Search Engine Optimization.

Post the Panda algorithm, this is more important than ever. It's what I dubbed, 'The Wikipedia Principle'. Because the more pages you have, and the greater the depth of knowledge you express on a given topic, the more likely Google will think you're an 'authority' on the subject you're discussing.  But don’t think that having hundreds of pages by and of itself will rank your site. Because, due to Google’s Panda algorithm now being able to use a sub-section of Machine Learning known as Support Vector Networks to gauge the quality of a site’s content and practically read the page like a human being (it can now literally tell great content from good content and good content from bad content), if you’ve just got dozens or hundreds of pages of poorly written or duplicate or ‘thin’ content on your website, having more pages will actually harm your site’s performance in the SERPs not help it. But if you want to rank for something, having more ‘supporting pages’ on a given topic and then using those supporting pages cleverly in your IA (Information Architecture) allows you to push page rank around your site to the places that need it most. This is known as page rank sculpting, which of late has got a bad rep (due to affiliate marketers and dodgy SEO companies abusing the practice for many years) but when used judiciously, this – plus the additional pages of original, brilliantly written ‘supporting’ content - can help you enormously. But again, done incorrectly, or by the untrained, this too can damage your site more than help it. But in the hands of trained (and ethical) SEO professionals like SEO North Sydney, this technique can produce exceptional results and a great deal of ‘quick wins’ in the SERPs.

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Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

Enjoy this free article? Great! Don't forget to Like it, Tweet it and LINK to it from your blog or website. Your sharing of the page with your friends is greatly appreciated! :)

It seems like only yesterday that the High Lords of Google, in their infinite wisdom, released Panda on an unsuspecting world. But in reality Panda has been roaming free in the wilds of the internet jungle and mauling websites for several years (since February 2011 in fact). And, while many website owners (and a lot of SEO companies) would no doubt disagree, I for one applaud every new Panda update that Google releases, and damn near stand up and dance a jig every time it rolls out.

"Why?" I hear the people in the cheap seats cry! Doesn't Panda make the job of an SEO copywriter or an SEO company that much harder, and cause you to wail and gnash your teeth every time Google announce a new Panda update?

Err...well, no actually. No it doesn't. Because for a specialist SEO guy / SEO copywriter like me - and I hasten to add: FOR SMALL BUSINESS AND SME OWNERS LIKE YOU - Panda is actually a Godsend.

In English this means that if Panda thinks you have GOOD content on a particular topic on a page on your website, that particular page of content will have a higher SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) when somebody searches for that subject in Google. And if Panda thinks your website has BAD or ‘thin’ content on the particular topic being searched for, that page will have a lower SERP. Sounds simple? That's because, if you're doing a top-level view of how Panda works, it actually is. People (as in human beings) value and want to read good quality, original content on the internet. People (as in human beings) value and want to have an enjoyable and rewarding interaction with the websites they visit. Panda exists to help people find this good quality original content by giving it a higher SERP. And, conversely, by burying bad quality content, thus making it much harder for anyone to locate it. The more ‘good’ content you have on your website, the higher your website SERP in your particular business vertical or niche.

Of course while the top-level view of how Panda works is deceptively simple, how Google algorithmically decides ‘good’ quality content from ‘bad’ quality content (which let’s face it is often subjective) is an infinitely more complicated matrix of mathematical madness, and is as closely guarded a secret as the Colonel's 12 secret herbs and spices, so nobody outside of the Googleplex, really knows. But before we try to get our head around the technobabble, let’s find out a little bit more about the tech who came up with it.

Before I get into why you should join me in being a card-carrying fan of Panda, let's get the bite-sized, easily digestible explanation of exactly what Panda is all about, out of the way:

Navneet Panda – after whom the Panda update is named -  is a Google software engineer / guru / programming genius who is originally from India. Navneet did his five year undergraduate study (M. Sc. Mathematics and Computing) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Department of Mathematics. He then got his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California in Santa Barbara, Department of Computer Science.

Navneet specializes in Machine Learning and Data Mining, and has published numerous papers in the field, including such technical wizardry as:

•          Efficient Top-k Hyperplane Query Processing for Multimedia Information Retrieval.
•          Formulating Context-dependent Similarity.
•          Concept Boundary Detection for Speeding up SVMs.
•          Improving Accuracy of SVMs by Allowing Support Vector Control.
•          KDX: An Indexer for Support Vector Machines.
•          Exploiting Geometry for Support Vector Machine Indexing.
•          Hypersphere Indexing.
•          Active Learning in Very Large Databases.
•          Speeding up Approximate SVM Classification for Data Streams.
•          Formulating Distance Functions via the Kernel Trick.

Back in 2009, Google became victims of their own ingenuity when ‘Caffeine’ (a major update on their indexing process) allowed them to crawl the internet so quickly that their silos of servers were suddenly full to the brim with more new daily content than they could poke a stick at. However the problem with indexing the internet faster than Superman makes love, is that most of the new pages indexed are so appallingly bad, they don’t deserve to be on page one thousand of Google, let alone on page one.

Up until this point, you have to remember that ‘bad’ pages were largely thought of by Google as ‘random gibberish’, which Google’s kick-ass Spam Team handled quite nicely, thank you very much. But the problem they now realized they were facing was one of qualitative subjectivity. Not relevancy, you understand, but SUBJECTIVITY. Google had been great at working out relevancy for years, thanks to on page factors such as Title Tags, H1s, H2s, key word density, et al. But how, they now wondered, could they algorithmically work out what written content on the web was actually ‘good', versus what what was inherently ‘bad’? A website such as ‘CheapViagraOnlineBuyNowCheckOutMyWoody!’ was easy for the Google Spam Team to classify and downgrade. But how could they work out which of those hundred websites legitimately selling Internet Marketing Widgets, actually knew what they were talking about? None of them were spam, not in the traditional sense, so which websites should end up on page one of Google, and which should be banished to Matt Cutts’ nine circles of Google Hell (page 2 and beyond)?

That’s where our good friend, Navneet Panda, comes in. Because Navneet was heading up a team of Google software engineers tasked with solving just this problem. And, in late 2009, after one too many late nights hopped up on, ironically enough, too much caffeine, Navneet came up with the breakthrough that would cause SEO companies and affiliate marketers to scream blue murder and reach for the nearest available bottle of hard liquor. A breakthrough that involved ‘Machine Learning’, and in particular a sub-section of machine learning, known as Support Vector Machines (SVM) or Support Vector Networks.

Machine Learning - despite what you’re probably thinking - is not that point in Google’s evolution when Skynet becomes self-aware and launches the nukes (no doubt at Microsoft, Apple and Facebook!), but is actually a networked series of supervised models with associated learning algorithms that interpret and analyze large banks of data in an effort to recognize and classify patterns within the data so as to run intensive regression analysis on it.

A standard SVM takes a predefined set of input data and predicts and forms the output (prediction) points, turning them into probabilistic binary linear classifiers for computational analysis.

Another technique Google is (rumoured) to utilise in the Panda algorithm is 'Latent Semantic Indexing' (LSI), which is an algorithmic approach that utilizes a mathematical technique known as 'Singular Value Decomposition' (SVD) to perform a taxonomy on predefined banks of data, to identify patterns and relationships inherent within unstructured text.

While nobody outside of Google knows the exact number of Panda updates that have rolled out across the web, below is a 'best guess' list of updates:

• Panda Update 1, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
• Panda Update 2, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
  
• Panda Update 3, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
  
• Panda Update 4, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
  
• Panda Update 5, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
  
• Panda Update 6, Aug. 12, 2011 (6-9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
  
• Panda Update 7, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
  
• Panda Update 8, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
  
• Panda Update 9, Nov. 18, 2011: (less than 1% of queries; announced)
  
• Panda Update 10, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
  
• Panda Update 11, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
  
• Panda Update 12, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
  
• Panda Update 13, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
  
• Panda Update 14, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
  
• Panda Update 15, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
  
• Panda Update 16, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
  
• Panda Update 17, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
  
• Panda Update 18, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
  
• Panda Update 19, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)
  
• Panda Update 20 , Sept. 27, 2012 (2.4% English queries, impacted, belatedly announced
  
• Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English-language queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)
  
• Panda Update 22, Nov. 21, 2012 (0.8% of English queries were affected; confirmed, not announced)
  
• Panda Update 23, Dec. 21, 2012 (1.3% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
  
• Panda Update 24, Jan. 22, 2013 (1.2% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
  
• Panda Update 25, March 15, 2013 (confirmed as coming; not confirmed as having happened)
  
• Panda Update 26, July 18, 2013 (confirmed)
  
• Panda 4.0 Released, 20 May, 2014 (confirmed)

• Panda Update 28, September 23, 2014 (confirmed)
  
• Panda Update 29, October 24, 2014 (confirmed)
• Panda 4.2 Released, 8 September, 2015 (confirmed)

Okay, now we've got through the tech stuff, let's get stuck into disseminating what we've learned into an actionable format.

For this example I’ll keep the discussion to a fictional article page you’ve come across via a Google search for ‘Internet Marketing Widgets’ (but of course the rules presented hold true for content on any subject).

1. Ask yourself – objectively – if you’d just stumbled across the article on Internet Marketing Widgets (via Google) and read it, would you personally trust the information presented in it? If the answer is yes, then chances are Panda will feel the same way.
2. Does the article have a bare minimum of 500-1000 words of copy on it (but ideally a whole lot more)? SEO / copywriting research done by the always erudite Neil Patel suggests the new Google content sweet spot may actually be north of 1,500 words of copy per page. So if this Internet Marketing Widgets page has well written copy galore, then Panda will think it has something to say on the subject. If it doesn't, then Panda will think the content is ‘thin’ and will downgrade it accordingly. After all, thinks Panda, if they know so much about Internet Marketing Widgets…why on earth is the article so short? 
3. Does this article read like it was written by an expert on Internet Marketing Widgets, or does it read like the person who wrote it wouldn’t know a widget from a wet willie? 
4. Is the article 100% original content, fresh to the web, and steaming with factual goodness, or is it just re-heated slops served up on a clean plate? Because if the content is original and actually adds something to the web’s discussion on Internet Marketing Widgets, Panda will love it, and rank it accordingly. But if the article is full of duplicate or thinly veiled ‘spun’ content, Panda will bring out its claws and tear it to pieces (and rightly so). 
5. If, after reading the article, you were asked to input your credit card to purchase a box of Internet Marketing Widgets from this company, would you feel comfortable doing so, given what you’ve just read? If the answer is no, then Panda will pounce because the trust value engendered by the content was obviously low. And if you – a person actively looking for Internet Marketing Widgets – don’t feel comfortable buying them from a company that sells them, then something is obviously wrong with the content. 
6. Does the article have spelling, grammatical or factual errors? Because if it does, it deserves to be penalized by Panda, because this sort of ‘Writing 101’ is the simplest of all the on-page content issues to get right; and not getting it right is just plain lazy. 
7. Is the article of genuine interest to people who want to find out more about Internet Marketing Widgets? Or is it just so many words on a page trying to trick the search engines and con you out of your hard earned money? 
8. How does the article compare to other articles about Internet Marketing Widgets you’ve read on-line? Does it offer any new insights into the subject? Any new data? Anything that hasn’t been said before? If the answer is yes, then all is good. If no, then chances are you wasted your time reading it, and Panda will feel the same way. 
9. Does the article discuss the topic fairly, giving the pros and the cons of using Internet Marketing Widgets? Or is it all just a one sided, ‘Our Widgets are Great – Buy Buy Buy!’ sales blurb that makes your eyes glaze over with the banality of it all? 
10. Is the article unique to this page, this website? Or is it viewable on other places across the web? Because if it’s not a one-shot deal, Panda will know it and act accordingly.
11. Is this website a recognized authority on Internet Marketing Widgets? Or is this page just a token bit of non sequitur content tacked on to the website to try to trick the search engines into giving the site a bit more traffic, and make the website owner a few more dollars?
12. Does this article contain any insightful analysis or interesting tidbits of information beyond the obvious? Did you learn anything new when you read it?
13. Is the article on this page good enough to like, tweet or bookmark? If not, why not?
14. Is the page the article is on crammed with ads that distract from or interfere with, reading it? Because trust me when I tell you that Panda hates this!
15. Is this article well enough written that you could rightfully expect to see it in a reputable printed magazine, book or encyclopedia?
16. Would you visit this page again or recommend it to your friends? Because if you wouldn’t chances are the page won’t get many visitors. And how many visitors a page gets is taken into account by Panda, as is average time spent reading the page and whether or not people interact with it, etc (think the benefits of having a low ‘Bounce Rate’ and a high ‘Average Time on Page’ ranking in Google Analytics).
17. Does the article have internal links to other, Internet Marketing Widget related pages? Because if it does, this suggests to Panda that this site is an authority on the subject, while also going a long way to improving visitor engagement (and deeper Google indexation).
18. Does the article have pictures and / or videos as well as words? Panda understands that a page with visual content such as pictures, videos, audio AND words, offers a far more rewarding and enjoyable user experience than words alone (though the words are by far the most important).
19. Do readers have the ability to comment on the page? Comments are a great way to promote interactivity. And Panda knows this.
20. Does the author of the article appear in SERP snippets? If they do, then it will improve the page’s click through rate as well as help users find their content. AuthorRank may not be a huge ranking signal yet, but trust me when I tell you that IT WILL BE, because people like reading content from people they acknowledge as experts in the field being searched for. In this case, Internet Marketing Widgets!

So there you have it. Everything you ever wanted to know about Google Panda, with the bonus of 20 sure fire ways to get Panda to love your content, thrown in for good measure. So now, whether your content is about widgets, or waveriders, wallets or wet willies, if you follow the above rules you can rest assured that Panda will notice what you've written and Google will turbo-charge your website content up the SERPs quicker than you can say, "Matt Cutts made me do it!"

Oh, and if by chance you have trouble remembering all 20 of these rules, just remind yourself of this, and you'll be fine:

Write for Humans. Optimise for Google.

Want to master SEO? Then book in yourself or your staff for some SEO Training Sydney today! Sydney's #1 SEO Trainer Brian M Logan shows you everything you need to get your company website on the first page of Google. SEO Training can be in-house (we come to you) or classroom based (you come to us).

Or you can always call us on 0425 204 887 if you want to leave your SEO Sydney requirements to the experts. Your website's 1st Page of Google results are guaranteed in writing in the contract.

Enjoy this free article? Great! Don't forget to Like it, Tweet it and LINK to it from your blog or website. Your sharing of the page with your friends is greatly appreciated! :)