Search Engine Optimization Services effectively work to better page ranks and back links, but also commonly feature what is infamously referred to as Black Hat SEO. Black hat SEO is all that is shady and cheap in quality marketing initiatives. SMO services have come to be closely related with SEO but both are distinct in their approach, the former concentrating on media optimization; thanks to the excessive prevalence of social networking nowadays.
Even if you are not a SEO expert, you may still fathom the importance of Google page rankings to websites. Google has had an upper hand for many years now and with the recent developments like Caffeine (something Google rolled out a year ago), Mayday Update (which specifically focused on returning quality results for long-tail queries and killing much of the work done by link building services) and Panda algorithm (the enfant terrible to poor quality sites) has taken the game a notch higher.
Google announced its new Panda analytics earlier this year, which shifts the way it ranks websites and content. Google explained that the algorithm aims to reduce the number of websites that offer poor quality yet still rank highly and ward off money via its Pay Per Click Management. It labels these as “sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.” One might just question, “Why not just tell what you want, already?!” After all, if Google want us to produce quality documents their users like and trust, then why not just tell us exactly what a quality document their users ‘like and trust’ looks like? Notably Google’s algorithms clearly aren’t that bulletproof, as Google admit they can still be gamed, hence the secrecy. Conclusively we hit two points; Google can be gamed (something everyone already knows) and Google isn’t letting us on the secret (something it always does).
Trouble is, now we need to decipher how not to get labeled as the defamed ‘content farmer.’ Google want content their users find useful. As always, they’re cagey about what “useful” means, so those who want to publish content, and want to rank well, but do not want be confused with a content farm, are left to guess. Talking about blogs hit by the Panda, they could probably fix most of their issues by changing to simple themes like Magazine Basic and getting rid of all but essential (anti-spam, security-related) plug-in.
What’s different ‘post-Panda’ is that indexing, as a metric or signal, is no longer viable, simply because Google seems to want everything it can get in its index. The index is not a signal of anything, anymore, except that Google has the URL in its databases.
Now let us look into the best SEO approach for Panda is:
- Decide which URLs are canonical and create strong signals
- Decide which URLs are your most valuable and ensure they are indexed and well optimized
- Remove any extraneous, overhead, duplicate, low value and unnecessary URLs from the index
- Build internal links to high-value URLs from authority pages
- Build high-quality external links via social media efforts