Google has changed its SEO alogrithms over time. In fact it’s constantly changing. Some SEO tricks that have worked in the past, may not work after some time. Because of these changes, it keeps content creators and bloggers on their toes.
This is very true since the Panda/Farmer algorithm changes made by Google. Statistics say that the search engine demoted as much as 12% of their total results due to the recent rules. This means that there’s an new set of SEO guidelines that address more than usual, like keyword stuffing, leaving keywords out of titles, java script, and more.
Below are some of the new things to look for on your website, that you may want to change before you lose some of your listings in the search engine results:
1. No Action on Long-Ignored pages: Google’s John Mu tells you what you can do with pages you’re that haven’t been updated. Basically, if you don’t want them, trash them (send a deleted content notice to Google), or let them become 404s and redirect them to existing content.
2. Bad Homepage-to-Article Site Content Ratio: If you’re submitting content to article sites (or article mills) just to build links to your homepage, but you’re not updating your front page, you’ll run into issues. Make sure to submit your best work.
Additionally, you need to submit related content to those places. Something unrelated will not add value to your website, link juice-wise. Use rel=canonical if you are cross-posting or syndicating those posts so they know where the original article came from.
If you’ve updates your homepage, make sure your article submissions reflect that relevant content.
3. Write interesting and engaging content: If your readers aren’t interested, they won’t read your articles, and they won’t engage with them.
4. Length of content does matter: Although the recommended minimum for content is 300 words, Google really likes long form content. So aim for 500, 750, 1000, 1500, and more on topics. Not every article has to be that long. You can mix it up. And yes, you can still have 300 words. Just make EVERY word count.
Hopefully these tips will help so you aren’t docked negatively by Google in the future.
Was your site affected by Panda?
Nice tips Spencer. I do try to mix up my content including the length of my articles. My most recent post was closer to 800 words rather than the 500 to 600 range I usually shoot for. I didn't realize I was doing something right at the time. I just let the content dictate how much I have to say. 🙂
Great point about posting your best content on your own site first and then rewriting it to submit to article directories. I don't even submit to article directories any more. I've been to afraid of having duplicate content to risk it. Is there value in submitting them?
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Good post and a nice read. Thanks for the updates. Keeping fresh content and becoming an authority is a good move for most sites. I am surprised not to see more people leveraging this in their online business ventures. Thanks again! Dave
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Hi. To be honest, I never paid attention to the 500-word maxim (I never even knew that "500" was the magic number). And the reason for that is, I've had short articles (less than 250 words long) do well in SERPs, while long ones (of over 900 words) garner hardly any traffic…
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@keepupweb thanks for the comment. as for submitting to article directories, we do not use them much anymore, if they still hold any value it is probably very little so the bang might not be worth your buck. there are other ways to increase visibility that work much better.
Agreed. You do make some great points, Spencer. One thing you wrote about that I had never heard before was the importance of mixing up size of your content. I had no idea that this could have an impact on your ranking. I've guess I've got some changing to do, as most of the articles we post on our blogs are about 450 words in length. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
I didnt know google had upped their word count for rubbish filtering. Thanks for info
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I think content as a service on the Internet is slowly become cheaper and less valuable. Finding other types of services and platforms for people to utilize is a sure-fire way to get good traffic to a site.
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Hi, Spencer.
I am a newbie in the blogosphere, so I am very glad to have read the tips you posted here. At least, now I know that I shouldn't dwell on producing 500-word articles always. That my 300-word and 600-word pieces are okay and should not be lengthened or shortened respectively.
You also appeased my heart about writing so much about 3D rendering, when almost everyone seem to be writing about something else like SEO, marketing and branding.
Thanks, Spencer. 🙂
And, thanks to Nile for having you here. 🙂
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Great stuff, Spencer. Through this, we will be able to stay on our toes and watch out for any mistakes that we might be doing to upset our SERPs. Like Sherryl, I have zeroed in on the size of our blog posts because we are more or less on the same boat. Although I have posts that may more or less have the same word count, I don't follow a certain dogma about what length of article to put out. I just write and post and it just so happens that some are shorter and some are longer. And like Sherryl, I have stopped my article marketing efforts as well. I figured that if I should write something, then I should just do it for my own blog and not for other sites. 🙂
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Recently i have deleted lots of post that's will give 404 errors. what should i do? restore them or don't! because those files don't usable. Suggest me.
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@Kim Davies
your blog content value doesn't necessarily come from numerous pieces of content strictly based on 3D rendering, yes it is your industry and product line but unless you are getting thousands of visitors each day, you may want to broaden your horizon and write more on 3D aligned topics. The posts do not have to be strictly about 3D rendering for them to provide value, but one thing i did notice on your blog was that there are 3 posts on the front page, all three have "3D Rendering" in the title – now don't get me wrong but you are speaking to a very targeted audience there, by varying up topics and mentioning 3D rendering, you may have a larger 'per post' audience but trying to fit the keywords in the title of the post is a positive thing if it fits. Also, you don't link out anywhere, how will Google ever be able to see you as an authority for 3D rendering if you do not link out to credible sources referencing examples or maybe even linking to your twitter page. Yes, Google gives credit for inlinks and not linking out to other places but that will also encourage those other sources (hopefully not competitors) to link back to you as well.
@Wes Towers
yea we do not do much of it anymore either, it is just too low quality and doesn't provide too much value, kind of the way social bookmark links are getting, they don't seem to hold any true value unless it has 500+ diggs. As for posting your articles on your own blog, that is generally how we do it as well, for more exposure, check out Scribd or another content publishing platform that you can upload your articles / posts to. Articles uploaded in Scribd tend to be crawled pretty quickly and show up in SERPS most of the time too.
Thanks for comments everyone.
@ascentive
randomize it, some 500+, some 800+. you don't have to write a certain word count for it to have value but writing to the reader and not the spider may help you along with that as well. if your posts are truly providing value to readers, you shouldn't have a problem with content.
also, including pictures, videos, lists, bullets can help posts get more visibility as many readers are visual, they cannot just read a few chunks of content without giving their eyes a break on a nice graphic.
I have started cleaning up some posts with little content on. I have made the post private and used noindex nofollow to remove them form google. One problem I have in GWT is that I get a lot of page not found errors. I would expect the bots to stay away for the post when I have used noindex on the posts. Hopefully its just a matter of tim until google stops crawling the posts..The "thin" posts are on a subofolder of my main page I used to add small reviews of dofollow blogs, but I think I can have a influence still…
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Couldn't agree more with you Spencer. You have to write quality content in your articles. Quantity can only get you so far.
Great article Spencer. I like that you mentioned about keeping your valuable pages updated regularly. I have had trouble in the past keeping my home page up to date. One thing I have done to keep it fresh with not much effort is to install a Twitter post plugin that would show my recent Twitter posts. It maybe something simple, but I think it has helped my home page to look fresh in Google's eyes as long as I consistently write some new Tweets.
I kinda get the jist of what you're going at, but I don't understand how the new industry recognized "switch-it-up" is the way to go when there are sites with 100-word duplicate content still ranking above quite a few of my own keywords. Any insight into what is the deal with all of those?
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Hi Spencer,
Great tips. Especially I am surprised to know about size variations.
Creating quality content is something that comes as a responsibility for every blogger and I am sure if people like the content they will make Google like it too.
Cheers,
Jane.
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I think people freak out too much about Panda. None of my site lost rankings. Most important thing it to become trusted in Google's eye, then you can rank anything, even duplicate content 🙂
Hi Spencer, Good article I have had articles under 500 words do well. At the end of the day I think content will always be king.
Hello,
It's great to read such interesting articles like this one about new mistakes, things to avoid and such things. Indeed, those mistakes are frequently made, I see them a lot and they are trully mistakes. As you've mentioned in this article, the key of success is by mixing the content with quality frequently, if today you write a 300 words article, next time write a 400 words article and so on but always think like the reader and in the favor of the reader – the target must be to help the reader, once the reader is helped – the search engines are happy.
Best wishes,
George Williams
Hi Spencer, really nice post but i have to disagree with your last point. There really isnt any correlation between post length and quality. You can have an industry expert write a 200 word mini post that has incredible value or you can have a wannabe expert write 2000 words of mindless drivel. The point is post length isnt an indicator of quality.
However, there may be some correlation in this. Longer posts may be correlated to being higher quality than shorter posts. But i doubt the correlation is enough to give a massive ranking boost to vasts pools of text.
Just a few thoughts, nice post.
– Jenny
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Some of my sites were hot by the update – and although they have few pages there are duplicate content pages for almost identical products. The problem I've had is that although they are almost the same they are not identical – so I have had to rewrite many of the product pages with original text. I am also writing much more than is strictly necessary to describe the objects just to allow some variety in the txt.
I read that you suggest merging product pages – the problem here is that Googles shopping feed appears to prefer a variety of landing pages – and much of my sales comes via this route.
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Many websites got slapped by the new Panda update. But i think that the update really makes sense as the web now if full of garbage. If you're not spamming or doing anything to trick search engines without providing value, then soon or later you'll end up with nothing. I like the notion of "rewarding the best". Thanks for the tips
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Google Panda algorithm has effected ranking of some of my websites. I have begun to change my link building strategies, already avoiding spun and PLR articles and focusing on writing long and quality articles. These four tips are really useful and would really help me to keep Big G happy.
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Hi Spencer, really nice post but i have to disagree with your last point. There really isnt any correlation between post length and quality. You can have an industry expert write a 200 word mini post that has incredible value or you can have a wannabe expert write 2000 words of mindless drivel. The point is post length isnt an indicator of quality.
I do not think that finding bad content algorithmically is that easy. For example a long content could be with no useful information and short can answer the question directly. Also I have read that the new panda is making sites with duplicated content rank even better than the original article. So good luck to Google, but they are far from done with the web spam :).
Spot on when you say "Write Something People Want to Read". I'm always surprised when I see SEOs updating blogs on behalf of a client when the SEO has no knowledge about the client's business.
Also, regarding article marketing – I think the Panda Update hit article spinning more than anything. I think the best thing for people to do would be to keep their best content for their own website and use bookmarking, rather than article sites to promote them.
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I agree that Google should find the best possible content for your niche in your blog. Panda has been such a pain, even good blogs or websites have been filtered. But I think the update took out most of the "cyber trash" from SERPs. Good days are about to come 🙂 Thanks!
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Nice update on SEO, I like the idea of mixing up the content count (word count). Still the SEO fight doesn't end there, there are thousand ways to gain the lead and #1 on them is the create a original / useful / will do good for people content.
Will do some research about this.
Thanks for informative and helpful tips on SEO, good job!
I agree with you that size matters.You need to vary your post length because writing post of similar length sounds spammy and automated.Isn't it?
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After Panda update website content value 200% doubled and most of the website make mistake only concentrate with backlinking not on page seo
I guess I should consider myself lucky as I didn’t see any impacts but only benefits post-Panda.
What if we’d like to maintain a presentation-like attractive main page? I think Google should allow that as well…
It’s not a jump page, but we’ve put more effort into making our design look nicer. Hopefully we won’t have to constantly update it so that Google will like it better…
Hi Shauna! Your page should at least have information stating what your site is about. You can still have an attractive front page, but really, for conversion-sake, you should be remembering the biggest thing: what do you want your visitors to do?