When you talk to a Search Engine Optimization Company the conversation will very quickly gravitate towards keywords. These are the words that potential customers will type into search engines when looking for the products or services you provide.
Back in the early days of SEO, unscrupulous marketers quickly learned that repeating their primary keywords over and over within the keywords tag, or within the page content, would improve rankings. Search engines didn’t want their results to be gamed so easily and viewed keyword stuffing as a means to lower the quality of their results. In response algorithms were updated so that keyword stuffing became ineffectual and “false positives” were removed from their results. Search engines have continued to evolve in order to beat spammers and deliver accurate and relevant results.
Today, search engine algorithms have evolved and take account of many signals when evaluating relevancy, authority and trust. Keywords remain an important part of SEO, however, techniques like keyword stuffing will probably see your rankings fall rather than increase. Search engines regularly make small tweaks to their algorithms and most of these go unnoticed. Some, like the recent Panda update, are much more significant.
Panda was a major update with the goal of demoting low quality and duplicate content and promoting original, high quality content. This has caused, what might be described as collateral damage, where legitimate sites have seen their traffic tumble by as much as 70 or 80%. Most affected were affiliate and ecommerce sites.
For these types of sites, there is a new set of ground rules. While it was once acceptable to use manufacturers product descriptions Google now devalues pages that simply repeat what can be found elsewhere. The end goal is to increase the choice open to searchers – rather than just provide a bunch of search results that basically regurgitate the same information over and over.
A second problem common to many ecommerce sites is actual content. A new term has been added to the SEO vocabulary following the Panda update and that is “Thin Content”. Thin content describes the lack of any real content being present on a website. Other than product descriptions, many ecommerce sites have little or no supportive content. This makes it difficult for visitors and search engines to differentiate one retailer from another.
A good content strategy has always been important, and post Panda it’s proving to be even more so. If you feel that your site has been dealt an unfair slap from Google’s Panda update Contact Canada’s Web Shop and together we will work out a content strategy that will put you back on top.
Tags: Duplicate Content, Google Algorithm, seo, Update Panda
I have read the official affirmation from Google which says that Panda 2 algorithm will go live soon, that’ll furthermore impact different than English ‘languages’ and will go globality. Since March, I gained far more top 10 Google search positions, as top positions become better and do not contain numerous web directories, auto-blogs and redundant articles. I do believe thats why, all around webmaster’s and SEO discussion boards it had been known as “farmer update”.