Watch a very informative video from the SEO Moz boyz about the latest Google panda update. The main take home points that I gleaned from this ‘Whiteboard Friday’ video on how Google’s panda update change SEO best pracives forever are as follows:
- Design and UX matters! If you have obtrusive adverts interfering with the content, big G will know about it and will penalise accordingly! The big G also doesn’t like crappy design apparently, although I’ll wager that this is to do with page loads times which we know they already penalise for. Cut out all the JS and Jquery plugin includes people!
- It’s no longer good enough to just write smatterings of original content for the search engines, you need to humanise your content. You must have an angle on the page or article you are writing about and include ‘value added’ meta information such as, an anecdote, some supporting images, a commentary, opinion, etc. It also needs to be grammatically correct so you’d be watch out article spinners!
- Do everything you can to make users want to share your page.
- Crappy sub pages will bring down the whole of the domain, even if you have quality content on the other pages. Top tip, hide all non optimised pages from tghe search engines in your robots.txt file
- They track who, what and where your users are coming from via Chrome, Android, Google toolbar, etc,…scary eh! They then use this usage data to calculate if your usage metrics are up to scratch!
Anyway, enough from me, watch the video below, essential viewing for anyone involved in web strategy.
