Google Panda Overview

What is Google Panda

As you might have noticed there has been a lot of talking about Google Panda and what it actually means for your online business. There are many internet marketers who were hit by it and thousands of websites were either de-indexed or significantly dropped in ranking. We know a lot of people who are struggling today as their websites dropped from the top of SERP to the very bottom of it. Their income was swiped overnight.

So, what is that magic ‘Panda’ word means for us. As we all know, Google is really trying to make search results cleaner and more useful for people who use their search engine. We do not really like this monopoly of Google and hoping that other search engines will come into play soon. But this is a different story. Let’s get back to Google Panda algorithm. The purpose of it is to get rid of low quality websites, which do not bring any benefits to their readers. From here, we have one of the main rules of it, which is content.

Website Content Rules

Everybody heard that content is the King in the Internet marketing world. But it actually was not really true until new algorithm updates. People still were able to earn money with low quality contend and syndicated websites with tons of duplicate content. And now that time has gone. Most of the websites, which were penalized, are those with duplicated or low quality content. Today, to rank high, you need to have a lot of great content, which is really beneficial for readers of the site. Also, content should not be too short and designed only for SEO purpose. Users should stay on your website and you cannot achieve this without quality content, but we will discuss it later in this article. For now, let’s summarize some main requirements for the content of your website:

  1. Content should be unique. Avoid content duplication.
  2. There should be enough content in each article as days of 300-500 words articles are over
  3. Content should be informative and useful for readers.
  4. There should be a lot of content on your website. This is not the main rule, but it definitely helps.
  5. Unnatural usage of keywords. This is not really new requirement, but we wanted to mention it here again as it became more important for us too.

 

User Interaction

We mentioned before that user experience is very important for new Google Panda. This means that users should be willing to visit your websites, to stay on it and to come back. Also, it is very important, how many users are clicking on your website in search engine results. Today, all these things are more important than ever before. Let’s briefly discuss these requirements separately.

  1. There should be low bounce rate. This means, that once on your site, users should stay there. If they do, than, this will show to the search engine that this site is important for the user. This brings us back to the high quality content.
  2.   Returning visitors are monitored. All visitors to your website are carefully monitored and if a lot of visitors come back to your site, this shows Google that it is really useful for them, hence it should bring you higher in the results. To get your visitors come back, brings us back to the content. You should update your website regularly and with top notch content, which visitors will want to read.
  3. Click through rate. This parameter is very important for Google and it actually has been for a while. This means a percentage of people clicking on your website in the search results. It does not make sense for any search engine to show your website if no one is clicking on it. So, you should be very specific with the title and description of your web pages.

 

Domain Requirements

We all know that some time ago it was quite important to have a keyword in your domain name. It has not really been the case for quite some time now. The only benefit of having a keyword in your domain name would be when somebody is linking to your website, using your domain name. We would not recommend to bet on that and not to spend a lot of time, searching for domains with a particular keyword in it.

Another change, which has been recently introduced, is that now whole domains are being evaluated, but not single web pages. With the Panda changes, an entire domain is evaluated rather than each page of it. To get higher ranking in Google your domain should have a very high authority, which is calculated on a summarized authority of each page of the website. This means that each page is important and deserves to be promoted the same way as you promote your home page. Also, this means that all your pages should have good value for your visitors. Again, think about content of each and every page. If you have just a couple of webpages, which bring great value to your website and other pages, which do not have any value at all, those low quality pages will drug your site down.

Testing SEO Strategies

Everybody knows that testing and especially split testing is very important in the search engine optimization process. Unfortunately, we have quite bad news here as with Panda update, it is more difficult to do this. We are not saying it is impossible. It just became a little bit harder as it cannot be done as quickly as before. The reason behind it is that, because of the complexity of new algorithms, it takes much longer for Google to analyze and rate our websites. As of now new updates do not happen more often than once every 30 days. So, if you have made a change, you should wait at least one month to see some results. And as the logic of the search engine becoming more complex, we believe that this process will be taking longer in the future.

Summary

To summarize our short overview of the Google Panda update we would recommend you to spend more of your time on writing quality content and updating your website regularly.

One area, which we have not covered in our overview, is link building.

This is another very important part of search engine optimization. Google wants to see backlinks to grow naturally, but you can still use legit methods like article marketing. You can even purchase backlinks if you do it in a right way. If you decide to do this, we would recommend you to get either site-wide backlinks or content text links. It does not meant that usual text links are not important, as they are, but site-wide and especially content backlinks bring more value. If you take a look in our inventory, you can even find site-wide content backlinks, which means you will have a text link to your website surrounded by relevant text on each and every page of a website you select. Please remember that you should try to get backlinks from high authority pages as low quality links can harm your website.

Register today and stat ranking higher.

Why Link Building?

As the search engines crawl through the web, we have these links that are like streets to these search engines. Search engines analyze the popularity of a page or site through the number of links connected to them. Although trusted sites tend to link to other trusted sites, spammy sites rarely get links from trusted sites. If you want your site or page links to matter to the search engines then you will have to make your site important and famous.

There are tons and tons of websites that offer their visitors the chance to create links through comments on blogs, user profiles, signing in to these sites etc. Although the links created by these websites do not have very high value they do have the capacity to make quite an impact. Not to forget though that the automated method of link creation and the links created are very likely spams also many site owners and search engines do not prefer the manually made ones either. Organizations these days are hiring SEO’s that can assist in making their websites search friendly, however, a weak and soft backlink profile is an open invitation to high competition. There is also another option for back links that most people go for, to buy backlinks cheap! Although bought backlinks may have some impact on your website, they still come with risks like being discovered and getting banned by Google etc.

One may ask, if link building is such a hassle then why do it? Well, link building has more advantages than you think it does. No matter what people say, there is no question that link building is one of the best ways to make your site popular. First off, link building helps in getting your website or link popular! Link popularity basically refers to an overall number of sites or pages that link to your website, hence, resulting in you getting more inbound links. Just incase you don’t know what inbound links are, it means other websites linking to your website. The second good link building does to your website is that it increases your page rank. As stated earlier the more inbound links the better, and when these inbound links are of high PR search engines will easily detect your website and will put it among ranking sites. However, if your inbound links are of low PR then the whole process can backfire on you and this usually happens when you buy backlinks cheap, as these links tend to have really low PR.

Moving on, once you have experienced the first two benefits of link building the rest just keep coming forming a chain of benefits. After getting your page rank increased, it will get really easy for your website to get links in the future. You have to make sure that the PR of your inbound links are high because the future links only depend on the high PR of the links connecting with your website, as other websites will then be sure of the authenticity of your site. Getting the top position in the search engines result page is all that matters and the previously mentioned benefits will get you here, increased search engine ranking. This depends highly on link popularity and page rank.

Want to know what more Link Building does? It gets you quality traffic from relevant sites which means increase in sales if anything. The site will be seen as a valuable resource when there will be high quality incoming links. Link Building also helps massively in creating awareness of your site along with credibility and visibility. Not just that but it’s one of the best ways to advertise about your website as well as you will appear on other websites for free! What more could you want for your website? So get to work and make your website or page successful through link building.

What Backlinks Can Do For Your Site

When you run a business or a service and the main way you reach people is through the Internet, then you will want the best web site as possible. Being the best means that the content needs to be unique, the search terms needs to be in place and the backlinks need to be set up properly. Why do you need all of those pieces to your website to be the best? All of those parts help to get your website to the top of the search rankings, where it will become more visible to a broader audience. And having people see your webpage is why you went in to business, right?

What are Backlinks?

There are some components of the website that you might not understand how they operate or exactly why they are important. Backlinks might be one of those pieces you don’t exactly understand what it is, but your web developer assured you is important in order to keep your page near the top of the search results for your specific niche or industry. Backlinks are ones directed to your site from other sites. The more backlinks you have to your site, the more popular the search engines feel that your site is.

The more backlinks you have that are from valid sources, the better the web spiders will rank your page. And web spiders will check to make sure the backlinks are valid, because their validity will increase or decrease your search engine ranking. Google is becoming more picky on the type of backlinks used, so you will only want to get your from reputable sources. Being able to buy backlinks cheap is a way to keep your site on top of the search engine rankings without spending a fortune.

The links could be from sites within the same industry or they could be to complementary industries or services that would work with your business. As long as the backlinks are valid and working, they will help the SEO of your site to remain towards the top of search engine rankings. Skipping out on having backlinks is not recommended as they help the overall placement of your site on search engines just as much as articles and META information does.

To keep your site fresh and from being penalized by search engines, you will want the backlinks to keep adding on. When you buy backlinks cheap, then the links will be connected to your site and then the web spiders can keep searching it and increasing your page ranking. The more quality the link is, the more relevance is placed to your site. That is why valid backlinks are important to use.

Life Without Backlinks

One can always go without having backlinks on their site. However, when there are no links, then the search spiders will not give it as high of a ranking as another site that does have the proper backlinks. Why? When links don’t come in and out from your site, spiders don’t believe it is relevant as a site and will penalize it by not letting it climb to the top of the rankings. Imagine how well your business will do if it never rises to the top of the search engines on the major pages like Google or Yahoo. Not very well. Businesses thrive and survive when they get moved up to the top of the search listings.

Backlinks are an easy way to add credibility to your site. And if spending a few minutes or even hours can make your page jump from the fifth page to the first page, the difference could be in thousands of new customers or hundreds of new items ordered from your pages. Being higher in the search engine rankings can be the difference in your business thriving and your business struggling for years and then going out of business because the website could never really launch and make it higher on the search page. Backlinks could have been one tool used to effectively bolster your site rankings and keep you in business and thriving.

Backlinks are just one piece of the SEO puzzle used to determine page rankings by the major sites like Google, Yahoo and others. While it is just one piece, it is important to have or else your page rankings will be affected in a negative way. Lower page rankings is never a term that someone wants to hear, especially when it is something they can control by altering what comes in and out of the webpage. Keep all of the pieces of your SEO puzzle in place and use quality backlinks to keep the site relevant and near the top of search engine pages and your business will have success on the Internet for years to come.

It is Possible to Change Price for Backlinks Now

We have been receiving a lot of requests from our publishers to add a possibility to change a price for backlinks. Previously, it was possible to change the price by sending a request to our support, which was very inconvenient. The reason behind this was to prevent fraud. As we transfer money from advertisers to publishers on a daily basis, having this feature available, could result to ‘bad’ publishers to change the price e.g. from $1 to $1000, so advertiser would have to pay 1000 times more for a backlink on a particular link page.

Many of our users might have noticed that now it is possible to change the price for a text links for existing link pages, so there is no need to send requests to the support to do so. At the same time, to protect our advertisers, the price change will not affect original price for one way backlinks bought on that link page. If, by any reason, publisher wants to change price for existing links, it still has to go via support, so we can approve that change and notify advertisers about it in advance.

We hope you will appreciate this change. We are also hoping to receive more feedback from our users, so we can improve our system.

How to Boost Your Search Engine Ranking with Quality Link Building

Getting your website into the top ten positions of Search Engine Results Pages is no easy task. That’s if you don’t know how. This article will discuss the methods I use to keep my site in the top three positions for my chosen keyword phrase.

As most of us know, Google is the world’s biggest and most relevant search engine. The problem is that their algorithm changes on a daily basis, and they won’t tell us what those changes are. Even the engineers at Google are unaware of each individual change, and it’s quite a private affair.

So one day your website is at number one position, the next position ten, or even worse, fall into the sandbox. And once your site gets into the sandbox, I can tell you it’s a lot of hard work to get back into the first page of search results. Your site will be buried with thousands of other sites that nobody will ever find through the search engines. Not unless some drifter goes to page twenty of the results pages.

But fear not, there are some evergreen techniques you can use to maintain or achieve a high ranking. The first I will talk about is content relevancy. Google are big on this one. If you build a site using content generator software and plaster it with Adsense or affiliate program adverts, your site will be picked up as a spam site, and you will be blacklisted forever. Such black hat techniques don’t work these days, as the big G are no dozer’s and their complex algorithm will pick it up. Also, your site would be short lived anyway, and users will not stay around to read the jumbled garbage.

On the other hand, if your site is full of quality content, relevant to the keyword phrase of the user, your site has a better chance of staying in the top ten search engine positions. Therefore driving more targeted traffic to your site and you will make more sales. Visitors will hang around longer, and even refer friends from Facebook and the like. But the snag here is that you must update your site at least once or twice a week. The more pages you have, the more brownie points you earn with Google, and the more reputable your site becomes. Also, your site must not contain misleading or untrue information. Google have actually begun manually reviewing websites and banning those it feels will damage its reputation as the world’s biggest and best. And once your site is banned, it can take many months to get back in, and that’s not guaranteed either.

So the other traffic generating, ranking booster technique I will discuss is the art of link building. This involves visiting numerous high ranking sites and requesting a link back to your site. The more links back to your site, the higher up the search engine ranks you will climb.

Now before I go into how to do this the right way, let’s talk about software that automates this task. A couple of years ago I purchased a program that promised me to get four thousand backlinks within a week. I thought ‘hey – this sounds great’. So fair enough, it got me the links ok. My site was in the top ten results for a month, and then it was banned! It was all down to an algorithm changes that detected this software that automated the backlinks. Google likes backlinks that are made naturally, and it’s advised never to use software for this, it’s just not worth it.

Anyway, the first method I suggest for getting your first bunch of backlinks is to submit your site details to online directory websites. You’ll have to go to each site, register then submit your link. Now unless you pay for having your site advertised in these directories, it can take up to three months for your link to be submitted. So just do a search for ‘free website directory’.

The next form of link building I will talk about is social bookmarking. These are high ranking sites that allow people to recommend your site, place votes and in turn drive traffic back to your site. The top four social bookmark sites I use are Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Slashdot. I advise you only make three backlinks a day, as well as use a variety of titles, descriptions and link back to different pages on your site. This makes it look natural in the eyes of the search engine algorithms, and you remove the risk of having your site banned.

And lastly, the other link building strategy is getting links from Web 2.0 sites. This involves you posting original articles on the sites, with a resource box at the bottom. Now your backlink MUST contain the main keyword phrase of the page you are linking to, or it will be deemed invalid. The main Web 2.0 sites I use are Squidoo, Hubpages, Weebly and WordPress.

Also, you could pay someone else to create all your links, but I don’t advise this because some unscrupulous individuals are using spam software, and you risk losing your place in the search engines.

That sums up this discussion on gaining quality links to your site.

Free Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

As we all know, Yahoo Site Explorer, the most loved tool of everybody, who knows what search engine optimization and internet marketing is, has been destroyed by Microsoft. It was mentioned about a year ago that it was going to be decommissioned, but no one wanted to believe in it. But it finally has happened and we cannot use this wonderful tool any more.

So, from now on, you cannot check backlinks for your website or for your competitors for free. You can still access Site Explorer if you have a web master account at Bing, but it would be only for your own websites.

If you take a look at SEO forums around the Internet, you will see that everyone is in shock out there. The only thing they are talking about is what kinds of alternatives are available out there and especially what you can find there for free.

Of cause there is nothing there that can compete with what Site Explorer could do for us, but we will show you some free alternatives, which webmasters can use to check backlinks to their websites.

List of free alternatives for Yahoo Site Explorer:

1. Link Diagnostics

First tool, which worth mentioning is Link Diagnostics : linkdiagnosis.com.

 

This is the best free backlinks checker tool, which we have been able to find so far. It takes its results from Linkscape, so the results are similar to Open Site Explorer.

There are some limitations to it, like, if you want to see all seomoz parameters for each backlinks, then you will have to use Firefox and install an appropriate plugin for it.

Another limitation is, that it uses ajax, so it is not possible to load backlinks data programmatically. Probably you could overcome it, but they have done it a little bit more difficult for us.

2. Blekko

Next free tool for checking backlinks would be blekko.com.

They are positioning themselves as a search engine, aiming to replace Google, but it is definitely too early to talk about it. This website can be used in many different ways and has other Search Engine Optimization tools, but let’s focus on backlinks checker for now.

We thought it could be a good free alternative for those, who uses an automated process for checking backlinks, but after couple of days since yahoo had gone they added an authentication on their website. So, the only way you can use their features is to register and login to their site.

This makes it pretty useless for those wanting to analyse a lot of sites. They also do not have as much information as Yahoo Site Explorer had and quite often they do not have any information for smaller websites, but still it is a nice tool to know.

There are some other free tools available, but we did not see anything, that worth talking about. We are going to investigate some comercial tools in the nearest features, so you will be able to get better understanding on what tools, like Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and other can do for you.

Link Building Services in the Post Panda Era

Link building services had to definitely change their strategies following the new Panda updates. First will attempt to define what link building is so that we understand how things have changed following the search algorithms updates. Search engines use three criterias to rank website pages. The factors involved in calculating how a page is ranked include on page optimization, the popularity of the page in relation to back links volume pointing to the page and the relevance of the keywords used on the content in the site. All these factors are important but none of them takes a lot of time and study as link building. It is probably the most time consuming exercise undertaken by any webmaster or SEO expert.

To understand how backlinks work, let’s take an example of a road with road signs. Think of the road signs as the backlinks, the more of these signs on the road giving directions to a particular location the easier it is to get to the location and most certainly the more popular the location will be because everyone passing through the roads will have at some point read one of the signs. So with this example search engines think of sites with a large volume of backlinks as being popular and thus give them priority when it comes to retrieving search results. The more backlinks one site has the better chance of it appearing higher on the page ranks.

Another example we can use is if we can think of websites as real estate locations, with the prime city locations with the tallest building as being the most popular and the interior locations as being the least popular. Having that in mind now, let’s imagine that the tall prime buildings have large billboards on them advertising other buildings. The bigger the building the more popular it and so the more people visit the building thus having a lot of traffic.

Now all the people who visit the building will always get to notice the large bill boards advertising other buildings with nice things on sale and the people will definitely make an effort to visit the advertised stores. In trying to differentiate the value of backlinks, let’s think of billboards appearing on tall popular buildings as being more expensive but highly effective in driving traffic to the advertised stores. A small building with a small poster advertising another building is not given much attention as one that appears as a big billboard on the most popular building in town. There is really no better way to explain this other than the two examples above.

The point is, one has to understand that text links aren’t just backlinks sand that some links have more value than other. For instance text links from a web page with page rank 5 have more value than a web site with page rank 1 or 0. So while conducting your link building campaign it’s important to invest in building links from highly ranked websites, otherwise all your efforts will not produce much reward. For this reason companies providing link building services offer professional link building campaigns that over time will bring your site to the ranks that you desire and that is top ranks. Take note that link building is not something you do overnight and wait for results. It takes strategic planning, and should be done over a period of time so as not to raise flags to the search engines.

Most websites get flagged and banned by the search engines when they suddenly build high back link volumes over a short period of time. Let’s say, the last time the spiders crawled the internet to look for new content your website was indexed as having 20 inbound backlinks, 3 days later your site has 10,000 inbound backlinks, definitely your site will raise eyebrows, the search engines like to be fair and one thing they don’t like is to be cheated so having done that you could face a penalty of being ignored by the search engines which will definitely be costly to your business.

Following the recent Panda updates link building has tremendously changed and some of the traditional link building strategies don’t have any more relevance and for this reason don’t make any more guesses, employ a link building services company to plan and conduct an effective link building campaign for your website.

Why To Buy Backlinks

There are a lot of debates around this topic and we are also getting questions about why would you buy backlinks? Quite often webmasters think that they are paying too much for text link ads, but they should really think about it in a completely different way.

When you pay for backlinks, you are actually buying a position in search engine results (SERP). So, depending on your niche you can estimate how much a position on the first page of Google or other search engine can bring you in revenue, so you can set a budget for your link building campaign. So, do not think about backlinks purchase as about simple link buying technique, but you are actually buying a position in SERP.

Second most frequent question we get is whether a website, which has bought links is going to be banned or not. The correct answer would be – it is not going to be banned because of bought links. If it was the case, than it would be very easy to get rid of your competition. Simply go and buy text links and you are goint to get rid of your compettitor. This is not the case. There are many factors to get your website banned and the main one would be to have a trash content on your website, then it would be spamy backlinks to your site, which are coming from websites with bad content or links, which look spammy, like massive blog comments, profiles etc.

Another thing, which can mark your website to be banned, is a huge number of one way links to appear in a short period of time. So, if you buy text link ads or build backlinks in a different way, make sure you spread this process over time, so number of backlinks to your website grows gradually.

Last thing we would like to add is that having investigated different tolls, which simulate how Google and other search engines try to identify bought backlinks we noticed that it is more chance to be cought if you buy simple text links on separate pages of a website and it looks more natural, when you have context links or site wide links instead. Because of this we added a capability to buy different text link ads in our system, including simple text links, contextual links and site wide links (both text links and context links).

We hope this article has clarified some of the questions, but if not than feel free to get in touch with our support for further clarifications.

Buy Site-Wide Backlinks

We have been asked many times to add an ability to buy sitewide text links, so we have worked hard to add this ability for our advertisers.
Now you can buy four types of backlinks, which are listed below:

  • Simple text links
  • Context links
  • Site-wide simple text links
  • Site-wide context links

To learn more about buyind sitewide backlinks, read our how to buy backlinks guide, which explains all the steps you need to follow to buy different types of text links.

The Basis of Backlinks and How They Affect Your Site

Backlinks are one of the most basic forms of search engine optimisation that determines how high your site is ranked on search engines. To put it simply, a backlink is a hyperlink leading to a part of your web site, showing the content you have there.

The parameters of backlinks are one of the most important factors that Google uses when sorting out page rankings. Other search engines use backlinking too to sort sites out, but seeing how Google holds most of the search engine market, this tells how much good backlinking is important. Not so long ago when Google was fresh, it was enough for you to ask another webmaster to link to your content and he would link back to you and that would give both of you a bit of a ranking boost, but Google has grown smarter over the years and now web crawlers can recognize backlinks that are used in this way, and not as part of quality of content.

Also, the rankings of the site that you are getting linked from used to not be important, but now that and the volume of traffic coming in through that link are key factors in determining page rankings. It is much better to have 10 high quality backlinks then 100 of low quality ones as far as Google is concerned, and that’s what makes social and viral marketing so important, it gives you a good ranking boost and lets you have plenty of internet exposure, giving you a chance to present your ideas or sell your products to more and more people.

While backlinking is something you will definitely get if you pay for a quality SEO, with some effort and social interaction, you can do an average job yourself, it just takes time and a lot of effort.