We all rely on google but a recent change to its algorithmn called ‘Panda’ has affected a number of top sites in the natural placement results. A change which was aimed at targeting sites with poor or little content and duplication of information.
Many voucher and discount sites have also been hit by the Panda update changes. So have some so-called “content farms” that scrape content and duplicate it on-line to different micro sites.
Some of the main popular sites that were affected are; Electric Pig, Tech Radar, and the ubiqitous Computer Weekly web sites have all been hit by the reshuffle, which means that they get less visitor traffic due to the fall in rankings.
It’s good that Bing has stopped Google dominating even more – data shows that Google has about 60% of the online traffic , still a fair share of the market but not the end of the world if your site is penalised.
What does this mean? Well it stirs up the SEO community and just reiterates what a lot of experts have been carping on about for a couple of years now, that it’s better to try and build your brand and link popularity from writing quality content; white papers, blogging, videos, infographics to try and attract natural and organic back links = harder to do it than say it though!
Successful and effective internet marketing can be a tall order and it’s now even harder for those that have resorted to yesterdays marketing techniques. So adopt what most businesses should be doing and outsource your on-line strategy to an internet marketing agency with a proven reputation that knows the landscape and has current, tried and tested marketing techniques to date.
There are also a few web design and seo companies that are no doubt having to take a retro-look at their methods and update their strategy to overcome this welcome search change.