You have built your business on someone else’s land.
Yes, I am talking to you; bloggers and website owners!
And unfortunately you don’t have any control on these external entities. In other words, you might have to say goodbye to your business ANY TIME, no matter how profitable it is presently.
That’s scary!
These external bodies include the ‘annoying’ web hosting companies, ‘dirty’ search engines, ‘pricy’ online tools and resources, and many more. Obviously, any of these can change their policies any time and can severely affect your business.
What can you do to save your business?
Just one thing: keep up with the changing policies and trends.
It goes without saying that major percentage of any website’s traffic comes from search engines, especially Google.
No traffic, No earnings.
Google makes over 500 changes to their algorithm every year. However, two of their recent updates have created enormous hype on the internet:
Google's Freshness Updates
Panda: The new algorithm, released a few weeks earlier, which affected nearly 12% of the searches.
The so-called Freshness Update: Revealed in a post by Google on 3rd of this month, it will affect nearly 35% of the searches.
Now, after the freshness update, it’s a make or break situation for the online business owners. If you are one of them and want your search engine rankings to improve, you must give utmost attention to the following five elements.
1. Freshness:
Google has a policy to only reveal things on ‘need to know bases’ and keeps almost everything secret for keeping out the crooks.
Does the age of a webpage matter in its ranking? It was a matter of debate, even among the Google’s employees.
Whatever the truth was, now it is history.
It was obviously a pain in the neck when you searched for Olympics and you wanted to see details about the upcoming event, but you were presented with links to info about Olympics 1900. All that is going to change now – thanks to the freshness update.
Fresh content will get higher value, so the rule for bloggers is simple: the more frequently you post, the better PageRank you will gain!
Ads/Content Ratio
You know content is king.
Ads are not!
When Google released Panda, many websites, including every writer’s favorite ezinearticles, were thrashed to the bottom due to superfluous ads on their pages. It’s funny that abundance of Google’s very own AdSense is also not desirable.
Now, the lesser ads you have the better rank you will get.
Media Richness
Content with audios, videos and images is much easy to read and conveys your message more vigorously. Google is aware of this fact and media rich webpages are performing far better that those that are full of just large chunks of text.
Social Proof
Humans have similar nature.
If you like, tweet or share a post, it’s quite possible that you friends will also like it.
Though Google does not give much value to the backlinks from social media, yet Panda believes that more social presence means the content is of higher value.
Users’ Reaction
Gone are the days when keyword stuffing and ‘disguised’ keywords guaranteed the top listing in the organic search.
With the help of Google Analytics, Panda takes into account how much time users spend on your page after they discover it in searches. If they spend more time, they share/like it, Google also likes it.
But if you have misused keywords and your pages don’t have the content promised in the search results, user will obviously click away. And if the users quit quickly, your rankings drop even more quickly.
Yes, it’s time to tweak your blog and change your stratagems a little!
What do you know about the latest trends in SEO and Google’s freshness update? Please share in the comments.
Article by Ali Abbas
Ali is a seasoned freelance writer and a blogging enthusiast. Want to keep up with the latest trends in freelance writing, blogging, SEO and content marketing? You should totally read his Writers Blog. You can also add him on Google+ for extremely useful resources and for FUN ;-)
Ali has written 2 awesome articles for Shariffdotorg
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I think apart from the mentioned points, you need to take care of internal site structure, how users friendly you site is.
Well Limo, It goes without saying since your internal structure is the foundation of your whole process and it does not change much. This post focuses on off-page SEO and changes in Google algorithm.
Ali recently posted..10 Must-Have FREE Resources for Bloggers
Thanks Ali to share it! My blog is also affected by panda due to our ads placement now we have deleted all the spots and try to give our best and hope in the next panda update we would be out of this war.
Best Regards!
Mohammad Shadab
shadab @Google Panda Update recently posted..What is Google Panda Update | Get Back Your Blog From Panda Update
Shadab I’m happy that my post was helpful. You know ads in the sidebar don’t harm a site as much as the ads INSIDE the text do? But ads inside the text have a better chance of being clicked – it’s a trade off and you have to make your choices smartly :-)
Ali@Writers Blog recently posted..What Bodybuilding Teaches You about Freelance Writing
@Ali you might agree that this is a very good opportunity for the new blogger who are trying hard to get higher rank. I have analyzed some keywords and found that many new blog are getting higher rank.
I can’t agree more on this. It is very helpful especially for me as a beginner. Sometimes we combine a few technologies to make them even more useful.
Mika Castro recently posted..שליחת SMS