Earlier in 2011 Google announced they had launched a new update in the USA. Initially the update affected a massive amount of the rankings (around 12%) , they sent the course of the next month tweaking like crazy and before they finally decided it was ready to be unleashed on the rest of the world. Fortunately, the new version of Panda was a bit more forgiving. Google have continued to work on their new algorithm and Panda 2.2 is the latest incarnation.
What does Google Panda 2.2 do?
Essentially Google Panda 2.2 represents Google’s latest leap forward in their war against nonsense. Speak to many a designer or developer and they’ll argue that we SEOs are nothing but hacks spouting and distributing drivel out there to get some rankings back. I’d like to say that I’ve always been squeaky clean, however I must be honest and say that I’ve produced content that’s all about getting more traffic back to the site.
The thing about the direction search engine optimisation has been going over the past couple of years is that there has been progressively less focus on the onsite content and rather a focus on the creation of offsite content that is found by the search engine crawlers, which then spider back through a link to the website they are pointing at, increasing the potency of the website and increasing the association of the website with that specific and related keywords.
It wouldn’t be too much of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that just about everyone in the world seems to have got on that back of this and really flogged it as hard as they possibly can. The content I’ve always created to be distributed has always been unique content that reads well and is based on what I believe people want to read about, admittedly I’ve not been writing it with the thought that people might actually read it, and I’ve rewritten countless pages of content over and over again so there is enough content to get out there.
So Google have closed a loophole – as one loophole closes another will inevitably open, but I’m not here to just exploit loopholes, I’m all about marketing, I’m a search marketing specialist not just an SEO that’s looking to make some tweaks here and there to get traffic back to the site.
If you’re looking for an SEO to make those kind of changes, you either have a really old and badly built site or have completely the wrong perception about where SEO is at the moment and where it’s going. If you are talking to SEOs and they’re telling you about links and article marketing and not much else then I’d suggest you find get a second opinion.
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