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Monday, March 14th, 2011
Whilst the noise about the Google Panda update (previously called the Farmer update) is beginning to die down, there will still be many websites who should consider the value and quality of all their content and how this may reduce their chances of good listing in the SERPs.
The obvious contenders may not be those you first assume. Aged and static content that has not been updated for some time may actually be bringing in long tail traffic, so don’t just bin old pages without checking your traffic stats and backlinks for those pages first. However, it may be that your business has changed direction since that content was added and it is no longer relevant, so take a look at some of your historic content to ensure it still fits the bill.
More likely culprits for content deemed to be of low quality by the search engines are those which may seem far too similar to other pages on other sites. For instance, if you sell products with a generic product description that other companies also sell, and you have one page per product (required for inclusion in Google Shopping/Base), these product pages may not appear unique to the spiders.
A quick fix would be to add the capability for reviews and testimonials. Until those reviews begin to appear on your site, add a “no index” tag, and then manually remove this from any pages where reviews have been added. You can request reviews from your customers for products that they have purchased, which will also give you a chance to get in touch with your customers and ask for feedback.
Other low quality pages may be a links page that includes broken links, links to irrelevant content, or links which are not providing any link juice to your site. Keep a weather eye on any links on your site to ensure that these are working, relevant and worthwhile.
Check your traffic stats (analytics) to see which pages are rarely visited or have high bounce rates. Check to see why this might be the case – is navigation difficult to reach that page? Is the content out of date or off-topic for your target audience? A quick revamp of your navigation or content may be all that is required to raise the quality score for that page.
And whilst we are talking about Quality Score – take a good look at your PPC, or ensure that your internet marketing agency understands how Quality Score works. One or two keywords in your Pay Per Click campaign that are not performing as they should can have a decidedly negative effect on your QS rating, which will affect your PPC positions.
Tags: Content, farmer, Google, links, Panda, PPC, quality, quality score, search engine, spiders, traffic stats, update
Posted in Blog, Google, Link Marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), SEO, Tips & Tricks, Website Usability
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Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
Now you can make the most of teamwork by allowing every member of your company who has access to Google Analytics to annotate the graphs about your traffic and highlight, for instance, why specific peaks and troughs have occurred in your website traffic.
Whilst it is possible to do this with static graphs taken from analytics already, eg in a Powerpoint presentation to a client or management, now Google have added the chance to annotate graphs to show why certain highs and lows occurred in your traffic.
Having this information available, rather than lost on a team member’s hard drive from research they were conducting, can only be ‘a good thing’.
Check out Google analytics annotations now and have a play!
We predict: 2010 will be the year of analytics analysis. It will be the year when people finally begin to nail down what works for their company and website, and what doesn’t, through hard-nosed maths, facts and evidence instead of guesswork or following the sheep.
Tags: analysis, Analytics, Google, search engines, traffic stats, web
Posted in SEO, Small Business Resources, Web Analytics
