TP Designs Blog

Well, Google has done it again! Earlier this month, the 40 Search Quality Updates they announced in late February have been officially named as the Google Panda 3.3 update. As you many know, Google Panda was an update that hit many websites hard.

With 40 separate updates, it can be overwhelming to sort through the inconsequential tweaks to find the significant changes. Within these 40 changes, 3 stand out as being huge for Google SEO

Two are related to local search results, which is where SMBs (small and medium businesses) are going to get their traffic:

26. Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

36. Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

Until now, a local business would get traffic in two ways:

1) By optimizing for their website with geo-specific keywords (city, county, area) and trying to capture those searches that specifically used the geo-specific keyword in the query, e.g. "Oakland Chinese Restaurant."

2) By optimizing their Google Places listing and hoping that Google would serve up a map listing based on the searchers location.

The change brought about by the Venice update adds a third stream of traffic and is a synthesis of the other two. Google will now promote websites in the organic results for generic searches, where it detects the website is local to the searcher.

That's good news for local businesses, but not good news for directory sites that target multiple localities, as they get pushed down the page. With so many other changes slowly eating away at the above-the-fold Google organic results, that doesn't leave much room for that niche.

Another change that is potentially huge for a lot of people in the SEO world is related to link building:

33. Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

The first Panda Update devalued a lot of low quality link sources. There has been speculation that this change actually devalues anchor text as a method for determining the topic of the linked page.

This speculation makes perfect sense, because anchor text is something used by SEOs and webmasters to tell Google what the content of the linked page is about. Just as with the old meta keyword tag, this signal is too open to manipulation, and not to be trusted.

So, some good news and some bad news, at least from the perspective of promoting local businesses. Time will tell how Panda 3.3 shakes out, and by that time, I'm sure there will be another update that shakes things up.

We have just added a detailed RFQ form to the website. Or to be more accurate, we have brought it back. This form will basically help you skip a step in the quote process, as our initial contact with you will focus on gathering this information.

RFQ Questionnaire

What is Google Panda?

Google Panda was an update of Google's search algorithm that was implemented in February or 2011. In case you don't know, a search algorithm is the formula with which Google, or any search engine ranks web pages in search query results. Google updates it's algorithm frequently, and names the larger updates.

You may have heard of Panda, because this major update was controversial, not only because it caused many highly trafficked websites to drop much lower in the results, but because the effect the update had on the overall search results seemed by many to be counterproductive, if indeed the update was aimed at improving their quality.

What Did Panda Do?

The Panda update was aimed at penalizing garbage websites with little or no original content, or with content deeply buried in affiliate links or Google Adsense ads. Although the idea was a good one, the execution ended up penalizing websites with good original content and promoting websites that were copying that same content and repackaging it.

Panda also reduced or negated the positive attributes of low quality backlinks.

Should You Care About Google Panda?

If you are a small business and have a user-friendly website with original content, and not a lot of affiliate links, banners or Google Adsense ads, there isn't anything you need to do with your on-page search engine optimization or content as a result of Panda. You may, however, need to build some higher quality backlinks to maintain the position you had before Panda, if you did see a drop in traffic starting in early 2011.

It's not uncommon during a web design project for a client to ask for a design to “fill the entire screen.” The response to that request is: “Whose screen would you like to fill?” The appearance of a web page in a computer screen, or monitor, is dependent on a lot of things, not the least of which is the screen resolution at which the user has their monitor set. I took a look at the last couple of months of one of my higher traffic blogs, as I do on a regular basis, to see how my visitors are viewing the website.

Here are the results:

	Screen Resolution	Visits	Contribution to total:
1.	1280x800	1,041	14.53%
2.	1366x768	896	12.50%
3.	1440x900	726	10.13%
4.	1920x1080	702	9.80%
5.	1280x1024	670	9.35%
6.	1680x1050	630	8.79%
7.	1024x768	582	8.12%
8.	1920x1200	491	6.85%
9.	1600x900	272	3.80%
10.	320x480	125	1.74%

As you can see, screen resolution widths of between roughly 1300 and 1400 pixels are most common, with larger resolutions coming next, and the old 1024 x 768 standard making up less than 10 percent of the total. 800 x 600 is long gone. And 320 x 480? That's the iPhone, ranking number 10 at 1.74%.

So you can see that filling the user's screen is relative. Elastic designs can be used to some extent to resize the page to fill screens at different resolutions, but this technique has limits. In the end, it is more important to have all of the content visible to users with low screen resolutions. That means that sometimes visitors will see background on the sides of your web content, especially if they have a large monitor set at a high screen resolution.

Gone are the days when Google would update it's ranking algorithm only semi-annually. On those momentus occassions the SEOs (search engine optimizers) would fill the forums with posts about which datacenters the new algorithm was showing up on, and what it was doing to their ranking. Google now updates its algorithm on an average rate of nearly one a day, if you are to believe Matt Cutts of Google. Many of the changes are minor, but some are significant enough, and noticable enough to be name, just like in the old days.

The "May Day" update, that showed up last month, in May of course, reportedly has had a significant effect on "long tail" traffic to some websites. Long tail traffic refers to traffic from search phrases consisting of more than three-words. Long tail searches are less competetive and have historically been much easier to rank well in. That may be changing. Google has been messing around with the long tail for some time, both in their natural search algorithm, as well as their Adwords pay per click algorithm. This is likely a move in the same direction, towards big brands and away from a more "democratic" Web.

I promote a number of Websites on Google and haven't noticed a drop-off in traffic, so "May Day" looks like a change that effects websites that get most of their traffic from the long tail. If it is a change that is truely aimed at improving the quality of search results by minimizing SPAM, I'm all for it. If it's a move designed to somehow push people towards larger companies who tend to provide Google with more income, as have been the majority of their updates recently, then it will result in lower quality search results. That has been the way Google has been drifting in the last couple of years. We'll see how this change plays out.