People Chat About Possible Zombie Panda Update

I would like to know if anyone else trying to recover from Panda has seen a cumulative gain / recovery over the last 2+ months of this Panda roll out, that would confirm you are truly on the road to recovery?

From what I have seen on this forum and others like Glen Gabe, everyone is still pretty much flat. There are days, like Monday the 19th, where I have a 50% increase in traffic from the week prior, but yesterday was flat again. It really doesn't mean much to me because I am going from only 30 visits to 60 visits. My pre-panda traffic this time of year was 1,500 visitors a day. So a 50% increase on 1 day to 60 visitors, and then flat again the next day, just doesn't make me believe I am on any path to recovery. I feel like this is a smoke and mirrors game to confuse people even more.

I really wish Google would quit the focus on helping spammers quickly recover from manual actions and instead focus on helping small businesses target their algorithmic problems and quickly recover. I would sooo much rather have a manual action where they told me what I needed to do to fix my problem. There are so many great small businesses with great websites out there that don't have a clue. I am stuck in this algorithmic penalty since July 2013, and it feels like Groundhog's day, every day. Is there any hope?


https://disqus.com/by/disqus_qcm5r3DWXB/

The zombie thread on wmw is about site owners reporting major disparities between traffic *volume* and traffic *quality*. Many are seeing no change or even increases in traffic volume, but massive drops in conversions. Traffic seems to switch from high converting to low converting daily or even more frequently. This may be far more widespread than is being realised, because relatively few sites (e.g. ecommerce) have a handle on conversions and so can see this phenomenon. Other sites wouldn't be aware if the quality of their traffic was being changed by Google. It seems to have started around September.

It's as if Google is giving sites a daily traffic *volume* quota and also a separate daily traffic *quality* quota. So a site receives a proportion of good vs bad traffic up to its volume quota. In terms of what constitutes 'good' vs 'bad' quality traffic, this is unclear, but it may relate to the confidence in which Google understands search query intent, e.g. "buy nike black airmax trainers" = high confidence, "white windows glass" = low confidence. But the make-up of good vs bad is complete guesswork and there may even be bot traffic involved here eating into a site's traffic quota. All that can be said is that a lot of sites are seeing their traffic suddenly switch to non-converting.

https://disqus.com/by/simonlhill/


Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-21059.html

What People Say About Content Blocking

Based on Jim's and Marie's clarifications below, Gary seems to have revealed a very significant loophole. Basically, where a page is gone, never return a 404 or 410 status code but instead change the page in some way to indicate it's no longer available to aid users (e.g. a rich 404 page) BUT leave the status code as 200, add a 'noindex follow' and continue to include the page in the sitemap.

Think about this. If an ecommerce site has a discontinued product, the recommended approach has been to either (1) 301 to an alternative product if a very similar one exists or (2) show a rich 404/410 page (with 404/410 status code) offering alternatives if a similar product doesn't exist. But the problem with (2) is you lose the external and internal link equity and any internal links to 404 pages that you accidentally leave are considered a technical issue. And your GSC crawl errors page ends up filled up with 404s/410s of discontinued products for months that make it difficult to see genuine 404 errors.

Now imagine that instead of (2) you do what Gary says and offer the user a page that looks like a rich 404, but is actually a 200 status code and noindex follow. Your link equity is retained and passed to all the alternative products linked from your rich 404 page. You don't have to worry that Google will penalise you if you've accidentally left some internal links to that page in your site. Your GSC crawl errors won't fill up with crap. And that page will actually be removed from Google's index quicker than if you 404 or 410ed it!

Am I missing something here because this seems too good to be true?

https://disqus.com/by/simonlhill/

I was there when this occurred yesterday. What Gary told the lady that asked the question about de-indexing thin content after that content lead to a Panda filter was that he thought de-indexing the thin content that triggered Panda was NOT the best solution. He said her time would be better spent writing great (thick? LOL) content for those pages previously containing thin content.

And I have to agree as not only would this eventually lead to the Panda filter being lifted, but now they would have those pages to drive additional traffic for their targeted keywords and the site would continue to benefit from any inbound links to those previously thin pages.

He went on to say that IF they decided to go ahead and de-index them anyway (against his advice) then rather than trying to 404 or 410 the thin pages, the best way to accomplish getting those pages de-indexed was:

a) to add a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/> to each thin page AND
b) submit a new sitemap.xml that contained all of the URLs that you want de-indexed.

He stated that as a result of submitting the sitemap.xml (I took him as meaning 

https://disqus.com/by/jimhodson/

If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept?

If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag?

If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?

https://disqus.com/by/sammy_hall/

- I'd worry less about the technicalities here - do what's best for your users and your website.

- Having URLs in a sitemap isn't a requirement for crawling. Google will likely still find these URLs and tags regardless.

- Note that noindex isn't a 'hard block' for Google's crawler in the same way as a nofollow or a robots.txt directive. Google will still re-crawl URLs with noindex tags, albeit it's likely to do so less frequently.

https://disqus.com/by/MartinOddy/

Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-block-thin-content-use-noindex-over-404s-21011.html

We Fight for Our Client's Loyalty

Unfortunately, the client that was planning to place bulk orders
hasn't contacted us so far in regards to new orders. It is not
surprising because the order had completed with a great delay.

Still, we plan to win their loyalty and in order to do so, we need to
produce a really valuable risk-free offer. Here is what we plan to
offer.

We will not be taking big orders, 450-word 15-20 articles per week. I
am writing to you because I thought that you'd be writing all the
articles.

You will be sending 3-4 articles daily which we will immediately
forward to the client. There is nothing new here. The only difference
is that if we don't complete all the articles on time (in a week or
any other set period of time), we will grant the client with a 100%
refund.

This means neither our company nor the writer (you, in this case) are
compensated for the work done and the client gets all the send before
articles from the current batch/order for free.

I know this may sound strict, but it is fair, taking into
consideration the situation. On the other side you said you can do 20
articles weekly, so there should not be any problems in completing
orders on time.

Before we paid to the writer each time he/she sends an article. That
was a mistake.

Let me know if you have questions and what you think about the offer.

Once you confirm this scheme will work well for you, we will get in
touch with the client and you will be notified about the results.

What About the Page Title?

Length

53-56 characters are okay for the Page Title if you don’t want Google to cut it off on SERPs, but it definitely okay to have more if it is needed for SEO purposes you simply can’t make it shorter.  

Placement

The most important key phrase should be placed in the very beginning of the Page Title.

Keywords

More long-tail key phrases in the title tag may dilute the power of the main one, so it better to use only important keywords in the Page Title.

Thus I believe the following rule for the Recipes will be good.

[Recipe Name] (without the Recipe word) + [Healthy Food Recipes] (category name which is a keyword too with 22 200 monthly searches).

This matter actually opened my eyes on the other thing. There is a point even in categorizing the recipes because people are often look for specific recipes.

E.g.:

Healthy dinner recipes – 110,000

Healthy chicken recipes – 60,500

Healthy breakfast recipes – 40,500

In case you want to categorize the recipes ASAP, I would need some unique text for each of the category. Let me know if you have questions. Thanks.

Traffic Reports: What You See Is NOT What Really IS

I have done an analysis of the website traffic in Google Analytics reports. Indeed, there is a traffic drop when comparing April and March.

Here is a short summary (also see the PDF attached):

Organic: -8.15%

Direct: -16.64%

Referral: -8.49%

Social: -61.80%

Other: -43.10%

As you can see all the sources gave less traffic in April, so there is no SEO issues. As you can see the Direct traffic has great decrease, which has nothing to do with SEO at all.

I believe it is a temporary activity decrease.

Another reason might be is that Organic Traffic section also contains keywords from Image Search while as your websites’ image (not pages) lost rankings. If you go to Entrance Keywords section in Google Analytics you will see lots of keywords like ‘plan’, ‘competitive advantage’ and others. Your website’s pages don’t rank for these terms, but your images do, because we optimize images when uploading blog articles as well. Another interesting piece of data to support this idea is an increase of traffic quality metrics (bounce rate, page /session and Avg. session duration). Entrances from the Image Search usually have high bounce rate – people just check the image and then leave the website. Unfortunately the high amount of ‘not provided’ keywords makes a detailed analysis hardly possible to make sure that it was really Image Search keywords that began to bring less traffic. I will do additional research to find a way to remove Image Search Keywords to be able to see a clearer picture.

After the SEO budget was considerably cut in Autumn 2013 we were forced to remove some links to your website but we were able to keep keywords with local intent on top positions on Google, besides other more competitive and popular general keywords (e.g.: IT Consulting (17) and IT consulting services (13), etc.) didn’t drop much, so they can be quickly brought to top once the budget can be increased again.

Here is a SERP for some target key phrases

IT consultants – 7

IT consulting company – 8

IT consulting Dallas – 1

IT consulting Texas – 2

IT consultants Dallas – 1

IT consulting firms Dallas – 4 (with sitelinks)

As you can see the target key phrases that we work on in regards to SEO rank well, we keep an eye on your rankings and keep your website link profile strong enough to reach the goals set.

In fact there might be issues (if image search and activity decline is not an issue) with performance of some of your most popular blog articles because some giant websites might have published content that outranks your articles for the key phrases that used to bring traffic. Please note that there is no a direct connection between the links we built for your website to rank for target terms and how other pages perform on search. Each link ads credits towards general authority of the website, but it is impossible to predict how each page would perform. 

I have attached another Google Analytics report for you see the traffic improvements for the last 5 months.

Organic: + 18.94%

Direct: + 54.46%

Referral: + 13.76%

In order to make blogging even more SEO-focused, we can do an analysis of the suggested titles and make recommendations on words/phrases to use in them and also other keywords/phrases to use in the body prior to articles’ writing. This will increase potential number of key phrases to be relevant for each article, but does not guarantee high rankings for each one or even any of them, depending on the key phrase competition.

Google Enterprise Products Customer Satisfaction Survey

At Google, our goal is to provide business users with the most useful and innovative tools for the enterprise. To better serve you, we're asking for your feedback through this Customer Satisfaction survey. Your experience is a critical component in shaping and improving our products and services.

One noteworthy example of how we use your feedback is the improvement we made in our Support program. In previous quarters many of you requested live phone support via this survey. We heard your wish are now thrilled to have 24x7 phone support available to all Google Apps for Business customers.

We look forward to receiving your input and appreciate your time in helping us improve our products and services. With your help, we can better prioritize our activities with your needs in mind.

The survey results will be shared with the Google Enterprise teams who develop and support your product(s). The online survey is now available for you to let us know how we are doing and what we can do to improve. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.

Listen to the Voice of Your Content

In order to come up with a valuable offer in regards to already existing content improvement (infographics creation) we have analyzed US traffic of the website and recent organic traffic (traffic from search engines) from all over the world.

What we did:

1. Analyzed the most popular content (mostly blog articles) in the US during the previous 6 months (Analytics *****t Organic Search Traffic 20131001-20140122.pdf).
2. Analyzed the most popular blog content visited from search engines from all over the world (Analytics ******* Organic Search Traffic 20131001-20140122.pdf) and compared it to US only visits. We took a more recent range of dates in order be able to see recently published articles and get clearer picture of content popularity. Naturally older articles have more visits since they are online for a longer period of time.
3. Created a report (Top Content Golime.xlsx) with two lists for you to be able easily compare the most visited content of your website.

What we found out

1. Having analyzed the data in Google Analytics report we were able to suggest 5-10 blog articles that can be improved with help of infographics for building brand strength and authority among the prospects and/or already existing clients.

Of course, we are not IT experts and cannot guarantee or tend to state that our suggestions are currently important. The research and analysis is intended to directions for content improvement as part of your inbound marketing strategies.   

2. Some of the article are on top of both lists

Top 5 articles suggested to be improved with infographics

1. Monitoring Network Traffic with Windows 8 (http://www.*********/blog/bid/179720/Monitoring-Network-Traffic-with-Windows-8) [brings three times more visits from search engines than any other blog article]

2. Thinking of Moving to Microsoft Office 365: Pros & Cons (http://www.******/blog/bid/166976/Thinking-of-Moving-to-Microsoft-Office-365-Pros-Cons)

3. Rightsizing Your Help Desk Team: Part 4 (http://www.*******/blog/bid/171997/Rightsizing-Your-Help-Desk-Team-Part-4)

4. The 3 Most Frequently Outsourced IT Functions (http://www.*******/blog/bid/143379/The-3-Most-Frequently-Outsourced-IT-Functions)

5. How Cloud Computing Reduces Costs and Increases Value (http://www.*********o/blog/bid/136271/How-Cloud-Computing-Reduces-Costs-and-Increases-Value)

Other findings to consider

1. During the US traffic analysis we found out that IT Cost Optimization page (http://www.*******/consulting/it-cost-optimization/) is also frequently visited. This page is not informative. Please consider improving page content as well.

2. The recent focus of articles was aimed at Virtualization. This is why we want to note that one of the Virtualization articles is in the list of 10 most visited (from search engines) blog articles globally. Article: How Is Enterprise Virtualization Impacting the Server Market? (http://www.**********g/bid/189892/How-Is-Enterprise-Virtualization-Impacting-the-Server-Market).  Consider creating an infographic on this topic.

3. More than 15% of the whole visits from search engines are brought by the homepage (1,891 from 10,206). Homepage layout and organization can be improved (e.g.:  there is too much of a whitespace in the lower right corner which can be filled out with recent (or the most popular) blog articles, testimonials section, etc.)

Infographics Packages

Infographics creation includes the following:

-          Concept building and writing instructions for a designer

-          Writing necessary text content for an inforgraphic (VIP quality, Native English speaking writer). We have already discussed with your current blog writer, he is ready to work on it.

-          Designing an inforgraphic

-          Project management (task clarification, consulting, pre-approval, etc.)

-          Publishing an inforgraphic in the corresponding blog article

-          Creating a profile and publishing an inforgraphic at http://visual.ly/

Rates:

The cost of an inforgraphics mainly depends on the number of specific items to design, their number and complexity or on the time needed to complete a specific task.

Level 1 (Simple Graphics)

Sample: http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/100-calories_5295b13517f09_w1500.jpg

Cost:  $200

Level 2

Samples:

http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/what-small-businesses-should-know-about-virtualization-security_502911aac8e0d_w1500.jpg   

http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/how-to-deal-with-social-media-complainers_528416d18d627_w1500.jpg

Cost: $250-300

Level 3

Samples:

http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gmo-laws-or-the-lack-there-of_52700214223e8_w1500.jpg

http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/the-power-of-the-hashtag_5280ef10cf2a0_w1500.jpg

Cost: $350-$450

Some information on benefit of infographics:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhendricks/2013/10/10/infographics-videos-and-more-the-new-face-of-marketing/

http://mashable.com/2011/08/22/infographics-marketing-value/

http://vimeo.com/29684853