Feeding The Panda

Feeding The Panda
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Copyright 2011 All Rights Reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Disclosure ..................................................................................................................... 5 The Goal of this eBook.................................................................................................. 6 Why Isn't this eBook Free? ........................................................................................... 7 Who Are We & Why Should You Listen to Us? ............................................................ 9 SECTION I: Some Background ..................................................................................... 10 SECTION II: Site Authority & PageRank .................................................................... 12 What does it mean to be an Authority Site? ................................................................ 12 Don't Confuse Authority with PageRank ...................................................................... 13 Defining Authority What does the Talking Panda Have to Say? ............................... 14 Defining Authority Our Definition ............................................................................. 15 Site Footprint ........................................................................................................... 15 Link Count ................................................................................................................ 16 Page Rank ................................................................................................................. 16 Speed of Indexing..................................................................................................... 16 Why it's Not That Simple .............................................................................................. 17 Why Majestic ................................................................................................................ 18 Internal versus External PageRank Say what? ........................................................... 18 Putting Some Numbers Behind the Logic ..................................................................... 19 Summing it All Up ......................................................................................................... 21 SECTION III: Symptoms of Panda ............................................................................... 22 #1 Significant Traffic Drop Though Main Keywords are Still Ranking Well .................. 22 #2 Short-Term or Even Prolonged 'Bouncing Around' in the Rankings........................ 23 #3 Rapid Gain in Traffic, Followed by a Dip and then Stabilizing over Time ................ 24 #4 The Bipolar Rankings Bounce .................................................................................. 25 #5 Significant Rankings Drop Site Wide........................................................................ 26 #6 Rankings Drop for Selective Keywords .................................................................... 28 #7 Overall Downward Trend for EMD's ........................................................................ 28 #8 Appearance that Google has a Throttle Mechanism for Traffic .......................... 29 SECTION IV: Break Out the Bamboo .......................................................................... 31 Content Related Panda Tips & Checklist ....................................................................... 31 #1 Is Your Content Unique? ..................................................................................... 32 #2 Size Matters How Big is Your CONTENT? ................................................. 33 #3 Does Your Content All Look the Same? .............................................................. 33 #4 What is the Content Footprint of Your Site? ...................................................... 33
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TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued)

#5 How Much and How Frequently Are You Posting Content? ............................... 34 #6 Watch Your Keyword Density ............................................................................. 34 Onsite Related Panda Tips & Checklist ......................................................................... 35 #7 What Does the above the fold View of Your Site Look Like? .......................... 35 #8 Ratio of Information to Advertising on the Page ................................................ 37 #9 Outbound Link Count .......................................................................................... 38 #10 Hide Your Affiliate Links .................................................................................... 39 #11 Make Sure to 'NoFollow' Outbound Paid Links ................................................ 40 #12 Make Sure to NOT 'NoFollow' All Outbound Links ........................................... 40 #13 Make Sure You Have Enough Outbound Links to Authority Sites .................... 40 #14 Make Sure You've Got the Relevant Disclosures .............................................. 41 #15 Make Sure You Have and Address and Contact Phone Number ...................... 41 #16 Are You Acting Like a Spammer? ...................................................................... 42 Offsite Related Panda Tips & Checklist ......................................................................... 43 #17 Are You Guarding Your House? ......................................................................... 43 #18 Is Your Site Anchor Text Over-Optimized?........................................................ 46 #19 EDU & GOV Links Not as Important as they Used to Be ................................... 47 #20 Look to Find More Authority Links? .................................................................. 47 #21 Anchor Text Isn't What It Used to Be ................................................................ 49 Other Panda Tips & Checklist ....................................................................................... 50 #22 Extend Your Domain Name Registration .......................................................... 50 #23 Explore Webmaster Tools ................................................................................. 50 #24 Have You Been Neglecting Backlinking? ........................................................... 52 #25 Age Doesn't Play as Big of a Role as it Used To ................................................ 53 #26 EMD Strategy Is Weakening .............................................................................. 54 #27 Is Your Site Design Dated? ................................................................................ 55 #28 Do You Have Any Social Media Proof ............................................................... 56 SECTION V: Going Beyond Panda ............................................................................... 57 So What Have We Learned? ......................................................................................... 57 #1 Unique Content Is More and More Important ................................................... 57 #2 Google Loves Authority Sites Bigger is Better.................................................. 58 #3 The Formula is Becoming More Balanced ......................................................... 58 #4 Google is Forging Ahead with Social Marketing ................................................ 60 #5 Authority Means Incoming Link Authority Matters Too .................................... 60
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TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued)

Wrapping it Up ............................................................................................................. 61 SECTION VI: Post-Panda SEO....................................................................................... 62 SEO Tactics You Need to Migrate Towards .................................................................. 62 More Traditional White-Hat SEO ............................................................................. 62 Link Bait & Creative Marketing ................................................................................ 63 Time to Start Giving It Away .................................................................................... 65 Get A List Already ..................................................................................................... 66 Improve Business Your Systems .............................................................................. 67 Engage Your User ..................................................................................................... 71 Post Panda Tool Recommendations ............................................................................. 73 SECTION VII: Take Action ............................................................................................ 75 Summary ....................................................................................................................... 76
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FTC Earnings Disclosure and Notice of Affiliate Links

First of all, before we can do anything meaningful, lets get this out of the way. Any earnings disclosures in this eBook are not representative of what you will earn nor do they imply any sort of guarantee or even typical result that you can expect. They are provided purely for reference and to illustrate what is possible and/or what we have personally achieved in our experiences. Your earnings and/or success will vary and there is no guarantee that you will be successful. No implication otherwise is conveyed or intended. We do not make any promises about what you will or will not achieve by practicing or adhering to any of the suggestions or guides in this eBook, nor will we be held responsible for any liability as a result of you following any of our suggestions or advice. Your individual results will vary and you are fully responsible for them. In the case that you feel otherwise, please know that we will refund you exactly what you paid for this report. Should we in any way be held liable, our liability will not extend beyond the amount you paid for this report. This report, as well as ArticleSubmissionReview.com, is provided without warranty or implication or guarantee of success. Furthermore, we will have links in this report and on ArticleSubmissionReview.com that may take you to a site where if you should make a purchase a percentage of that purchase may be awarded to us as an affiliate fee. This is our only way of producing income to compensate for the enormous amount of time and investment that we have made and continue to make with ArticleSubmissionReview.com. If that bothers you, please dont purchase anything or find another source of information. We try our best to provide you honest advice, feedback and value to you and we believe that, in turn, you will be happy to purchase through our links. If not, that is absolutely fine with us and you have no obligation to do so whatsoever. We make no attempt to hide the fact that this isan affiliate site, nor do we care to. We provide value and feel very comfortable making a small fee for that service. We hope you feel the same. If not, as we said, please find another source of information. Regarding the use of your information that we obtained when you downloaded this report, know that we do not sell or distribute your email address or purchase history to any other person or corporate entity. Any personal information we may gather is used in its exclusivity by us for the purpose of providing better value and service to you as a customer. Our emails and auto responders may have links in them which may indeed make us money if you follow those links and should make a purchase. That is the nature of this business. An exchange of our time and service to provide you quality information and a small potential reward based on a possible purchase on your part. You are under no obligation to purchase anything and will receive the same quality information and support from us regardless. Furthermore, you are under no obligation to stay on our marketing list and may opt out at any time as all emails from us will always allow you to with a single click of the mouse opt out from all further marketing or correspondence. The FTC requires that we disclose that we do potentially make money from any purchase that you might make as a result of visiting one of our affiliate sites and so that is the purpose of this disclosure to inform you. Ultimately you hold the keys to make your own informed decisions. Publication Date 2011 Author & Publisher Mike & Troy (yeah, still mostly Troy ) Copyright 2011 CTC Ventures, LLC Product URL http://articlesubmissionreview.com/feeding-the-panda Product URL http://ArticlesOnTap.com Support URL http://CTCSupport.com Affiliate Program Contact Us Via Support URL Legal: All Rights Reserved. The contents of this publication may not be sold, modified or distributed in any way without the expressed written consent of ArticleSubmissionReview.com, CTC Ventures, LLC. All content is Copyright 2011CTC Ventures, LLC and may not be used commercially. Any unauthorized use or duplication in full or part is strictly prohibited. Although every attempt has been made to provide the most accurate and trustworthy information as possible, neither Mike and Troy individually, nor the Company they represent accept liability for any actions taken as a result of purchasing and/or reading this publication. This publication is not intended as legal, accounting or investing advice.
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THE GOAL OF THIS EBOOK

The purpose of this eBook is to educate and inform and to bring full cycle the notion of authority and just how important that is becoming. While it may seem that looking backwards is a waste of time and reactionary, our main goal of this eBook is to map out a plan for moving forward beyond this Panda release and to be prepared for the direction that Google is headed. Does anyone know the exact actions they will take? Of course not. But, can we make informed inferences based on what they are emphasizing now? You bet. So while you likely bought this eBook to cure the ills caused by Panda the reality is that is not as much our goal as it is to help you restructure your site towards the direction that Google is headed for. While we are clearly playing up to the Panda hype right now, look deeper. Really read through this eBook thoroughly and then go back and re-read it. Print it out and highlight it and make notes of the ideas it stimulates for action on your own site. We believe that what you'll find is that the advice and recommendations being given have a much broader scope than simply gimmicky fixes or minor tweaks just to address this one algorithm change. Our real goal here is two-fold. First it is designed to help you identify and repair the damage caused by Panda but more importantly it is about how to apply the knowledge of what we've learned so that you'll be prepared for the next round of algorithm changes in advance because you know how to design a site that gives Google what it wants.
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W HY IS N'T T HI S E B OOK FR E E ?
Some will argue we should have made this information available for free rather than charging for this eBook. Our answer to that is, well, nothing's free. Sorry, but that's the truth. While most of this information is available online somewhere and generally available at no cost, what is the cost of your time to find it? More than that, there is the simple fact that there is tons of bad information out there by people that claim to be SEO experts but in reality are just regurgitating information they've seen somewhere else and have no personal experience with it. While Mike and I don't claim to be the best SEO experts out there, we do have significant experience over the past several years and run a full time SEO business. We own a few hundred domains ourselves, manage a large inventory of domains for our clients, have domains that we use for testing and evaluating, and we have a separate network of high PR domains that we market and manage as well. On top of that we use and have direct access to hundreds of domains and sites via the many network subscriptions that we maintain (some of them private access subscriptions) all said and told, it's more than a thousand domains in almost every conceivable niche you can think of that we interact with and observe. Through that experience we've personally seen 85% to 90% of the different scenarios out there caused by this Panda release and so the information that you're getting from us is first-hand information and not mere speculation. That experience has a value and so does the time it takes to put this information together in a digestible and useful format for you. Hopefully you've been following us awhile now and know that we always over-deliver on our products and are comfortable with that. Furthermore, we don't just talk the talk but we walk the walk as well. While many were complaining of losing 20% or even 70% of their traffic, our site, ArticleSubmissionReview.com, saw all time record highs for traffic and increased roughly 40% in the period immediately following the Panda release something that is directly attributable to their algorithm. What that should tell you is that the advice we're passing on is what we practice and get solid results applying that alone should more than justify the small price of this eBook.
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If you purchase an information product thinking that you're getting some secret that NO ONE else knows about, well, then you're definitely drinking the Kool-Aid. The fact is the reason that info products are successful is not because of their originality, but rather their value. Mike and I charge $250 an hour for consulting time on ArticlesOnTap.com that is the value of our time. So when it comes to finding a solution to performing some specific task, we would much rather pay someone whom we trust and respect to summarize and provide us the relevant version of that information that's what an info product does. Well, I should restate that. That is what a SUCCESSFUL info product does (and we all know how many crappy ones there are out there). Saving time is the easiest method of saving money. Believe it or not, paying for this information is actually helping you as well. You're about five times more likely to take action on something you have invested in rather than free information. It sounds odd, but it is true. As a culture we honestly don't value free information. It can be the best info in the world and most of us will likely not take action on it. But something that we had to invest in is much more likely to be productive because it cost us something to acquire and that carries a burden that actually stimulates us to take action a good thing! When we created our now widely popular Article Marketing Lies eBook we did release it for free and it has had thousands of downloads with rave reviews by you, our users. But all of the time and research into this was just far more than we could give away. Unlike most thin content digital products out there, we pack a lot of meat into ours and pour our heart and soul into it hopefully that earns your trust and respect. So it's all about (a) saving time and (b) providing value we hope that your find this eBook succeeds in both respects for you. If not, return it for a refund. But, think twice about that because the day will come that you venture into creating your own products and you'll know just how much work goes into an eBook and, honestly, it's pretty easy to get that much value out of most of them. Even if you only value your time at $15 an hour, it doesnt have to save you much time and to be more than worth it to you. Our whole motto is work smarter not harder and quality information has always been a valuable timesaver for us and we hope to continue to provide that same value to you as well.
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WHO ARE WE & WHY SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO US?

I think this is a very valid question to ask it certainly is one that we want to ask each and every person that we consider taking advice from. The fact is that there are a lot of information peddlers on the Net that are just repurposing stuff they've heard and really aren't even familiar with the topic, much less experts in it. So we think it's only fair to give you some background on us. Mike has a long and extensive background as a technology consultant to many Fortune 500 companies. In 1994 Mike opened his first Internet business and it quickly grew to a multimillion dollar mail order business with 95% of all business directly attributed to the organic Internet presence he created. Since then Mike has launched several other successful internet businesses utilizing the power of organic search. Troy Broussard also has an extensive Technology based career, starting out in the Navy as a nuclear electrician onboard submarines and then later as a programmer and software developer thru Executive Director of Technology for a large 200+ year old Chicago based international content provider Encyclopdia Britannica. Troy lives with his Brazilian family in So Paulo, Brazil and occasionally visits his second home on Oregon's Southern Coast. In early 2008 Mike and Troy joined forces on several affiliate marketing and SEO fronts deciding that two minds were better than one. Mike and I in no way try to represent ourselves as gurus we rather hate that term actually. We do, however, have extensive experience in SEO, affiliate marketing and Internet marketing as a whole and make a very comfortable living off of it. We're not going to tell you what we make or throw up huge numbers like all of the gurus tell you to do for social proof, etc What we can tell you is that we have several 4 and 5 figure monthly authority sites, do this professionally and love what we do. We consider ourselves first and foremost to be Entrepreneurs focused on a lifestyle not constrained by bosses and fixed work schedules. Lastly, regarding our knowledge on this particular topic of Panda, well when other IM'ers and sites were dropping 20% to 70% of their traffic due to Panda, we actually saw increases of 20% to 40% on our sites. We practice what we preach and we focus on site authority and long term SEO strategies, not short-lived tactics that are here today and gone tomorrow.
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S E C T I O N 1 : So m e B a c k g r o u n d
Panda, Farmer what's with the name anyway? Well, by now, unless you're hiding in a cave you're surely aware that Google officially named the most recent major algorithm change Panda. When it was first released, it was dubbed the Farmer Update because of its apparent focus on content farms. Later, however, it was renamed Panda as Google let it slip that one of the key team members in the group working on the algorithm had the nickname Panda, so they decided to name it after him. Okay, boring stuff aside, let's move on. Many still falsely assume that content farms were the only ones affected by Panda, but the fact is that it has affected many types of sites and probably the internet marketing thin content sites were the most heavily hit even more so than the content farms. Why? Well, because they were generally constructed around the lowest quality content and there are many more of them than Demand Studios for example. Other sites that were hit hard were older sites that had maintained their rankings and traffic for many years despite becoming very dated and static. This release apparently somewhat reduced the impact of domain age on the algorithm and many very entrenched older sites were shocked as their rankings eroded. Other myths surrounding this release exist as well, such as the belief that Panda was a single release on February 4th, 2011. The fact is that we have seen very strong evidence that there were at least two or three subsequent significant tweaks to Panda, one about a week later, one about two weeks later and yet another a full 4 to 5 weeks after the original debut. This type of blowback is not uncommon or unprecedented with Google. Historically they release and algorithm and then ease it off just a bit a few days later after getting a lot of
P a g e | 10 Copyright 2011 All Rights Reserved
feedback that perhaps they may have been too aggressive in some regards. Typically in the past, however, these minor updates seem to come very quickly on the heels of the release and things quickly stabilize (up, down or unaffected). With Panda what we speculate is that the following occurred. For one, it affected nearly 12% of all searches that's a huge alteration in the formula. Because of that the number of complaints and issues that arose was very significant and surely caused Google to really devote some serious effort to tweak the formula a bit. Matt Cutts has stated that Google is constantly tweaking the algorithm hundreds of times throughout the year, but that most are very minute alterations that go unnoticed. In this case, I think it was more like the main earthquake hit on February 4th and then a few rounds of significant aftershocks were still being felt four and five weeks later. Things finally have stabilized, but don't get too comfortable because According to Google, Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. Google's representative goes on to say that In fact, since we launched Panda, weve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users. Roughly 500 search improvements we've rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks get the point? So while this book is themed around Panda, it's more about the direction Google is taking recently than a single release. And getting to that Next on the way is Google +1. It has already been added to the SERPS and recently via their Google I/O conference Timothy Jordon of Google announced that it was just a matter of weeks before it would be launched in full force with tracking tools, buttons for your website and more. You can read more about Google +1 and the impending release on our blog post here. The more part will surely entail a massive data analysis phase for a period of time that will certainly lead to more alteration to the Google algorithm to incorporate +1 in some way (even if small) to begin to use social media to influence and personalize search even further.
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S E CT I O N 2 : Si t e A ut h o r i t y & Pa g e R a n k
What Is An Authority Site?
There's no way we can really have a discussion of Panda and it's affects without a basic understanding of Authority. In SEO, like any technical industry, there are lots of buzz words that are tossed around. One of those buzz words is authority but what does that actually mean? Unlike PageRank, which has a numerical value, authority is a more nebulous term and defining it can be a bit more difficult. First of all, there is no true definition, so just accept that. But what I will offer here is a way of estimating its value based on observation of its impact. What do I mean by that? We need to be able to roughly assess if a site is a low authority site or a high authority site. Now Google doesn't really tell us directly, but how they treat the site gives us an indication of how much authority they credit to the site. So, like anything, it is an estimated and derived value based on observation. I know, I know, you're probably tired of hearing that from SEO guys like us, but it's the fact. SEO is not so much a science as it is an art. Why do I say that? Well in a science you have a formula and you follow the formula like a recipe. Now if you give me your recipe for pancakes I can duplicate them. Many people expect SEO to be the same and to some extent it is. You can take a set of actions, a set of tools, a system for doing SEO and, yes, you can duplicate that. But some of the finer parts of SEO really the foundation of SEO starts with observation and assessment and those areas are much more obtuse. Site Authority is no exception.
Backing Up What does it mean to be an authority site?

Before we talk about trying to define authority, its important to talk about why it is even relevant. Why are people trying to become an authority site in the first place? The fact is you can equate authority with respect and trust in Googles mind. On the extreme side, you have a site like CNN.com clearly an authority site. They are trusted by Google and that trust has a lot of benefits. Their posts are instantly indexed. Their outgoing links carry a lot of value and that means that their business model benefits as well. They are
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given an extra boost in rankings just because of who they are and the authority that they carry. That leads to more long tail rankings without linkbuilding and more free traffic. A lot of the benefits of authority are esoteric and difficult to directly define, but with observation we can speculate that although there is no public definition or numeric equivalent of authority, Google does have some internal tracking of the concept. We see that every day in behaviors of SEO in rankings, in publication of content, in indexing of content and many other areas.
Don't Confuse Authority with PageRank

PageRank, while arguably a component of site authority, is a very different beast and is that mathematical or scientific evaluation of a page (not a site). So many people get this very basic aspect of PageRank wrong. PageRank, as its name implies, is calculated at the PAGE level and not the site or domain level. Think about that for a minute. Every single page on the Internet that is within Google's Index has a given PageRank pretty wild. PageRank is really one of the fundamental aspects of Google's algorithm and was the premise for their creation as it was a derived means for determining a numerical value of importance for every page. That is still true to a certain extent today. PageRank looks at the links coming into and going out of a page and their worth and assigns a numeric value to that page between PR N/A and PR10 indicating its importance. BTW, in case you're wondering, Google is not the only PR10 a rumor that has been spread around. There are not a lot of PR10 pages out there, but there are others. Facebook.com, for example, is, at the time writing this eBook, a PR10 as well and I'm sure a handful of others. But just to give you an idea, even Adobe.com and Apple.com are only PR9. PageRank is still used today, but it is not as important as it used to be. In the beginning of Google PageRank was one of the primary factors affecting your sites rankings in the SERPS. Today it is just one of more than a couple hundred factors and while it is still relevant it is not as important as it used to be. However, don't be misled by those that will tell you PageRank is meaningless either that's flat out wrong. PageRank still carries weight when it comes to links and linkbuilding. That is why there are so many linkbuilding networks out there that focus on PageRank we, ourselves, have a PR3 thru PR6 private network of sites for linkbuilding purposes. That network costs tens of thousands to create, own and operate, so let me assure you, if it had no value we would not be doing it.
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Defining Authority What does the Talking Panda Have to Say?

If you want to know how Google talks about assessing site authority this is what they advise you to do on a page by page basis ask yourself the following questions:
Would you trust the information presented in this article? Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature? Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations? Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site? Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors? Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines? Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis? Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results? How much quality control is done on content? Does the article describe both sides of a story? Is the site a recognized authority on its topic? Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites dont get as much attention or care? Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced? For a health related query, would you trust information from this site? Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name? Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic? Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious? Is this the sort of page youd want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend? Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content? Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book? Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics? Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail? Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
NOTE:
This information is a direct quote from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/moreguidance-on-building-high-quality.html
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Defining Authority Our Definition

Why do this at all? Why not just follow the guidance above directly from Google? Well this is not a competing approach, but rather a complementary one. We believe you should follow those guidelines that the questions raise, however, we also feel that you need some sort of measurement even if it's a rough approximation. There are many, many other factors that are not taken into this simple formula below, but remember the goal here is not to be all encompassing but rather to give a rough approximation and we feel that it does that. Hopefully it will be helpful to you as well. Now, first off, let me say that his is simply our interpretation there is NO hard definition of authority. But what Im going to suggest is a few (there are surely many others that Im bypassing in this short post) of the observable characteristics that define authority and some approximate scales for determining a sites authority. Site Footprint What I mean by this is the number of pages in the Google Index, but this is a bit more complicated than that as well. When you use the site:domain.com command youll get back a higher number than I use to consider in this evaluation. The reason for that is that WordPress and other CMSs will get multiple pages indexed with tags and such and inflate the number that were really concerned with. What we do to get the real number that were looking for is go off of the sitemap for the site and then check for whether those pages in the sitemap are indexed (this is brain-dead easy with Scrapebox). So if my sitemap has 117 entries but only 37 are indexed, then 37 is the number I would use to evaluate the footprint of the site. However, its not quite that simple either because a page is not a page. Im talking about high quality, 100% unique and authoritative posts. By that I generally mean 1000+ words or more but at least 700+. We have seen strong evidence that the post size also plays a factor in the site authority and while its certainly possible to become an authority site with all 250 word posts, we believe that the process will speed up considerably if you mix up your content sizes a lot and really focus on having a lot of in-depth and long posts, with a few medium and short ones thrown in for good measure. There is also the issue of the main Google Index versus the Supplemental Index, etc
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Link Count Many people will tell you that link counts dont matter that quality links are what count most. The truth, however, is that there is no one winner in the quantity or quality debate they both win. That is, they are both important. It is completely unnatural for a site to only have quality links in fact, that is a sure sign of artificial linkbuilding. If you think of the way natural linkbuilding occurs, a site will obtain thousands of low quality links before obtaining high quality links. Think of it logically. If CNN is considering linking to your site, its a sure bet that thousands of others (less significant than CNN) have already linked to it its just natural. Therefore, we firmly believe that the total link counts do have a degree of influence over your site authority. Page Rank PageRank is another factor that is hotly debated, but we base our opinions on empirical evidence. Dont fall for that BS that PageRank doesnt matter. People that buy our linkbuilding packages are not one-time purchasers. More than 70% of them are repeat purchasers because they work. However, PageRank is still a mystery despite its apparent simplicity of a simple numeric value (see below our discussion of internal versus external pagerank). Speed of Indexing This is probably one of the easiest indicators to use to judge how much authority you have on your site. If you want to run a test, do this. Create a 100% unique and high quality post for your site of say 700 or more words and then post it. Next, note the time that you posted it and begin checking at regular intervals to see when it is indexed. Low authority sites may take 10 days to two or more weeks to index, or may not even index at all without linkbuilding. A medium authority site will probably index on its own in a couple or three days. A high authority site will index almost instantaneously.
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Dont believe it? Well, we know it to be true because our posts on ArticleSubmissionReview.com are indexed almost as fast as they are posted. On several occasions I have published a post and then in the time that it takes to copy the URL and paste it into Google to check if it is indexed, it already is within 30 seconds of publication. Sometimes it takes 15 minutes, sometimes 2 hours, but most of the time its nearly immediately. Why is that? Obviously Google sees the site as relevant and high quality and is watching for content from it to publish. This type of Google indexing behavior became popular with the Caffeine update many months ago. Now, I cant stress this enough, these indicators are not the only factors that contribute to authority. For example, quality of content has a huge impact on authority, but it is not as easy to define so I have not included it directly. Also, the authority of the content tends to contribute to the Speed of Indexing and thus is somewhat expressed in this very basic definition expressed above as well as via the site footprint. If I were to express these four factors into a formula, I would give slight preference to the Speed of Indexing and site footprint factors. In other words, I would say 20% of the value would be attributed to PageRank, 20% to Link Count and 30% to Speed of Indexing and 30% to Site Footprint. That would be my definition of a basic evaluation of site authority.
SEO PowerSuites SpyGlass

If you havent used or arent using SpyGlass, well, youre three steps behind when it comes to site and competitor analysis. It just is so far beyond other tools that weve used that we wouldnt consider doing competitive analysis without it (and Market Samurai). You can fully evaluate SpyGlass using the free version, so theres no risk in trying it out. The free version of Spyglass does everything the full paid version does, it just doesn't allow you to save your data. If youre working with relatively new sites and not a lot of links, that may not even be a big hindrance to you. Using SpyGlass you can get a very detailed report on the backlinks on your site or a competitors site (gotcha thinking a bit now, huh). Youll see exactly where the links come from, the PR of those links, the PR of the main domain and dozens of more attributes. Another feature of SpyGlass that is extremely relevant to this Panda eBook is the ability to analyze the anchor text to your backlinks as well. This is extremely useful in determining if you site is overoptimized or not. You can run the same analysis on your Top 10 competitors for the keywords you are targeting and map out an SEO plan of attack. SEO PowerSuite, as the name implies, also is sold as an entire suite of four applications including two that we use daily SpyGlass and Rank Tracker. Im not going to go into the others here, but Rank Tracker is a terrific asset for assessing and tracking your site rankings. It also has search features built into it to find more keywords and can run scheduled jobs so that you can let it go on auto-pilot. It even exports to SQL if you want to upload data into your own database. Good stuff
Why Its Not That Simple

Each of those factors above has variations that can dramatically impact your conclusions especially link counts and page rank. For example, Link Counts. The fact is that backlink counts can be very, very misleading especially today with Yahoo counts so unreliable. I have seen sites that show 0 links in Yahoo that I find over 2,000 links when I look at them through my trusty tool SEO Spyglass (see sidebar on
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SpyGlass).Likewise, when it comes to PageRank, there is what I refer to as internal and external PageRank (more on that in a bit).
Why Majestic?
The definition or metric above is based on Majestic SEO link counts. Why? Because for a free utility, it is what I, and many in this industry, consider to be the best resource for somewhat accurate link counts. Even so, it has many faults. For example, I would estimate that it only reports somewhere around 75% or so (plus/minus 15% yes, a wide range, I know) of the links. But that is far, far better than most any other tool out there. Another reason that we like Majestic for link counts is that it factors in something that many, many people miss the boat on altogether non-indexed links. Yes, they count too. The fact is just because Google does not index your link, does not mean that they didnt see it. It also doesnt mean that that link is not somehow (even if only in a very minor way) factor into your rankings. Yes, Im actually stating that non-indexed links can benefit your rankings. We have seen it.
Heres a look at just one of the charts that Majestic will show you. This chart shows the cumulative link growth for CNN.com, for example.
Internal versus External PageRank Say what?

Mike and I firmly believe that PageRank is still important and relevant. Its not THE ANSWER to anything, but it is a FACTOR that much is certain. People that tell you that PageRank doesnt matter, well, they dont get it. PageRank does still matter and it is relevant, its just not that simple like people want to believe. First of all, you have to realize that the entire Google algorithm was built around PageRank I simply do not believe that it just went away. There are many, many myths about PageRank. One of the biggest is that it takes time to develop, etc This is concluded because of the delay in publishing the PageRank and making it visible to the public. However, weve seen pages go from PR N/A to PR3 in 10 minutes. Yes, thats right, within 10 minutes on a news story. Obviously PageRank is a
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formula and can be evaluated instantaneously, but the issue is when does Google tell us what they have calculated? We firmly believe that there is internal PageRank and then there is external PageRank. Internal PageRank is what Google uses internally in its rankings evaluations and assessment of authority and it is updated instantaneously based on a mathematical formula. External PageRank is also commonly called Toolbar PageRank as it is the numeric value that we can see in on the toolbar or other utilities that report what Google tells us is the PageRank (again, it is our firm belief that though they report one number, they are using a much more updated number internally). Remember, PageRank is simply a mathematical formula and it was original devised to form the basis of search results rankings. So it only makes sense that it can be instantaneous. But, why then, does Google only update the PageRank periodically? In recent past it was fairly consistently updated every quarter. Nowadays there is not any set schedule when they update public PageRank data, but I can tell you it certainly is not instantaneous. How do we know? Through testing and observation you can see from the behavior of sites performance in various key metrics and can even predict (to a reasonable degree) future PageRank shifts. Weve seen this cycle repeat itself so many times that we are highly confident that there is this concept of an internal and external metric for PageRank.
Putting Some Numbers Behind the Logic

I hate to publish any set guidelines for authority because they are simply rough approximations and there is nothing that says these are accurate other than our gut feeling after observing hundreds of sites behavior, but I also dont want to totally leave you in the dark. Formulas are all BS anyway and anyone who tells you otherwise, well, theyre full of BS as well. Sorry, but thats the truth. Any tool that tries to summarize a hundred variables into one simple formula, well, its just to make things appear easy and none of the pros I know rely on those easy numbers. Micro Niche Finder, for example, uses an SOC number (for Strength of Competition) to try to reduce keyword research into a formula. I, however, dont put a lot of faith in that number and instead do my research through Market Samurai which shows me the data so that I can make my own inferences. Now, that doesn't mean that Micro Niche Finder's SOC has no merit, it just reinforces the point I'm making about formulas all of them lie and you really need to look at the details. All that being said, we will give you some rough guidelines for these four factors that we have outlined regarding site authority.
So, that disclaimer aside, here we go For Site Footprint

High Authority Medium-High Authority Medium Authority Low Authority 1000+ indexed pages 500+ indexed pages 100+ indexed pages Less than 100 indexed pages
For link counts, again, were using Majestic SEO link numbers.
High Authority Medium-High Authority Medium Authority Medium-Low Authority Low Authority 70k+ external backlinks 50k+ external backlinks 25k+ external backlinks 10k+ external backlinks Less than 10k external backlinks
Now before you object too much, look at the Majestic numbers for your site. A site that has 10k in Yahoo might easily have 40k in Majestic as it sees many more of the links than most tools report. For PageRank PageRank is really only a somewhat effective evaluation metric once your site is over a year or so old and has a year or so of CONSISTENT linkbuilding and fairly stable. Note also that I'm really not breaking down High Authority into various ranges simply because for sake of this eBook and my audience PR6 and higher is simply good enough.
High Authority Medium Authority Medium-Low Authority Low Authority PR6+ PR4/PR5 PR3 PR N/A thru PR2
Speed of Indexing
High Authority Medium-High Authority Medium Authority Medium-Low Authority Low Authority Near Instantaneous Less than 12 hours 2 to 4 days Within a week 2 plus weeks (or never)
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Summing it All Up
Now, please dont get discouraged if you're in the low end of all of these metrics SEO takes time and it is the turtle who wins the race. People (especially newbies) tend to have a short term expectation for SEO, but really anything less than one year of solid and consistent SEO is just getting started. Yes, I know, chalk that up in the category of one of my comments you didnt want to hear, but its candid. Nowadays, Mike and I frequently pursue a new endeavor only half heartedly the first year to just evaluate it in the background while we focus on other projects. Then after that one year point we make the go or no-go heavy investment decision. Now, its important to note that we are actively doing SEO during that year, but we just dont have the expectation that well really know what weve got until after we cross that one-year line in the sand. Obviously the exact timeframe is not set in stone, might be 11 months, might be 8, might be 13 you get the idea. Authority is something to pursue and not necessarily obtain. In other words, its the actions that you take to try to achieve authority that are much more relevant that some obtuse numerical evaluation of your authority. But, for those that say it doesnt matter, I strongly disagree. There are tons of benefits of Google seeing you as an authority site and we strive to make every site we promote an authority site. Furthermore it is clear that this is the direction that Google is going in the future, so it's best to go with the flow.
(a good spot to take some notes)
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S E C T I O N 3 : Sy m p t o m s o f P a n d a
Obviously changing the algorithm so significantly that nearly 12% of all searches were affected means that some pretty radical alterations were made. That means that the symptoms or effects of Panda would likely manifest in various different ways. The point of this section is not to provide answers so much as it is just to identify some of the symptoms and effects that we've observed. You'll likely read through this and have an ah-ha! moment as you say, yep, that's what was going on with my site. When you have a highly complex formula with as many variables as the Google search algorithm has, it's not just going to have one side effect. In fact, you've all seen the commercials for any prescription drug lately with the 20 seconds of side effects, well, that's kind of the same story with Panda lots of side effects. In this section we're going to dive into the various scenarios that we have personally seen caused by Panda. Significant Traffic Drop Though Main Keywords are Still Ranking Well This is a bit of an oddity and is somewhat related to the throttling topic below, but it is a long lasting effect. We have observed several sites that had significant traffic drops 20% to 40% range and yet the primary keywords that they were tracking and focusing on were still ranking just like they always had. In the past we've seen algorithms hit that tend to hit more site wide, but this type of impact is more directly correlated to site authority. What apparently has occurred is that Google has downgraded the authority of the site and is no longer giving it long tail traffic that it used to get. If you think of this further, you'll remember that Panda is primarily about content quality. If you operate from that premise then it is logical to conclude that if Google feels your quality is not as good as it should be that it will rank for less long tail keywords than it should. Long tail keywords are generally targeted by inner pages of the site which tend to get much less linkbuilding.
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Our speculation is that the reason the primary keywords rankings are not affected is that they have significant linkbuilding going to them and thus hold their ranks. The downgrade in overall site authority, however, impacts the long tail keywords because those pages have very few keywords and thus are reliant more on the content for their rankings than the links. This impact was generally permanent since the update was released. We saw a very small percentage of these sites recover with some of the minor algorithm tweaks introduced after the initial debut, but for the most part sites that exhibited this behavior have stayed pretty much the same in their traffic levels. LIKELY CAUSE What this scenario tells me is that the site is probably strong in linkbuilding for its main keywords and thus held their rankings fairly well based on that. However, the overall site authority has likely been downgraded by Google and therefore the long tail keyword traffic is falling off because natural rankings are not coming as easily as they did before. Short-Term or Even Prolonged 'Bouncing Around' in the Rankings Whenever you see this dancing around it is certain that Google is evaluating your rankings and just hasn't figured out quite where you belong (in it's not so humble opinion, of course). Bouncing around is pretty common when a new algorithm comes out, but there were some signs this time that Google was really doing some long term evaluations. We saw some sites that had specific keywords dancing around for four or five weeks after the update was initially released. They would drop from #3 to #17 and then come back to #4 a couple days later. Then a couple days after that drop back down to #19. Then back up to #5, etc For most sites this stabilized in a few days, but for some we saw this prolonged behavior for keywords that were very stable prior to the panda rollout. As said elsewhere, this was indicative of some pretty significant algorithm alterations and a lot of tweaks and adjustments over a prolonged period. LIKELY CAUSE This again, is likely an authority issue. Google is bouncing around a lot while it is trying to assess just where you belong. It is also very important to note that the individual niche has a lot to do with this as well. If you're in a very stable and natural linkbuilding type niche you wouldn't see as much of this behavior. However, if you're in a much more competitive
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niche that has a reputation for strong linkbuilding, you can expect more bouncing around to occur as this niche was probably hit much harder by the algorithm change. Now, for more on this theory of niche related impacts, you should check out this post online. Jennifer Ledbetter, known as the PotPieGirl, did a very thorough bit of research into this specific topic and has some good concrete conclusions that we recommend you take a look at: Theory on the Google Algo Change/Farmer Update Rapid Gain in Traffic, Followed by a Dip and then Stabilizing Over Time Another trend or symptom we saw was sites that surged forward with large traffic gains in the first couple of weeks. Some of those sites sustained that traffic, others dipped back down. But what was interesting was the source of the traffic. But first, let's take a look at this chart below. Here you'll see what we're talking about. This is a summary view of all of the keywords being tacked for this particular site more than 350 keywords. So the rankings are averaged for the entire site. Don't worry about the visibility score, it's not the actual ranking numbers, just a measurement of site exposure the better the rankings the higher the exposure and visibility. But as you can see this site was very, very stable in rankings between July 1 and the Panda launch (identified as the area between the green markers). Then you can see that this particular site experienced a surge upward in traffic right after Panda, then a dip and recovery. Overall the traffic for this site is still up about 20% over pre-panda levels. Rankings for primary keywords were not really changing. The majority of the traffic was coming from very long tail keywords. On some of our sites we maintain a very large list of keywords for ranking tracking like 1000 or 2000 keywords. We don't update them but once every week or two no one can keep an eye on that many keywords and that is not the point. This approach is something we use to observe overall rankings trends or patterns for a site. We're not really concerned about the individual keywords so much as the movement for the entire set generally positive? Generally negative? How much, etc What we discovered through this tracking was that the additional traffic was coming from rankings in long tail keywords. So even though the main keywords had not been affected
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overall site traffic was dramatically impacted. More on this below in the discussion of the apparent throttle mechanism of Google see #8 below. LIKELY CAUSE Again, this comes back to site authority. The initial surge was likely caused by Google being a bit too aggressive with the algorithm changes at first and the settling just comes back to re-establish the site as a strong and credible site but not as deserving as speculated. Now you can take this two ways. You can either choose to conclude that other sites were perhaps not as bad as Google thought and them bouncing back up took away some of your traffic or you can choose to look at it a bit different. You can see what added traffic is out there for you if you can convince Google you deserve it (increase your authority more). As the added traffic was not directly related to improved rankings on main keywords so much as added traffic from long tail rankings, the fact is that working on improving your site authority could continue to see those trends rise and get you back up to that surge level you briefly saw. The Bipolar Rankings Bounce This is really just a dramatic version of #2 above. The only difference is that this was hyper accelerated and was odd to observe. We had a couple of sites where one keyword was toggling back and forth between top 3 rankings and page 2 or page 3 rankings and it was flip-flopping nearly every single day. Now the situation described in symptom #2 above was more prolonged and the cycle was slower. This behavior was the same but the frequency was insane thus the bipolar nickname. There really is nothing special or unique about this particular impact, it was just odd to observe such rapid and consistent fluctuation. If you look at this chart below you'll see what we're talking about.
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Now, fluctuation is normal, but we saw this trend across lots of sites and lots of keywords. Notice the first impact of Panda on about the 4 th of February in the chart above. Rankings dropped, then bounced back, nudged forward a couple times then settled a couple or three spots behind where they started and gradually moved up over the next month to come back where they began. About this time we were saying, okay, the impacts of this change are stabilizing out and we're back to normal. Then look at the bipolar activity around the 7th or so of March and note how it continues for a couple weeks, well really a full month. Then another cooling off period. Anyway, the evidence like this on numerous sites and keywords is that the new algorithm is still settling in or is it? Perhaps this new algorithm has much more variation in it which will lead to more instability? At this point it is still hard to say, but we're seeing this variance to be much more commonplace now than prior to the Panda. LIKELY CAUSE See the response for #2 above. This is just amplified and that is likely due to the niche factor. Significant Rankings Drop Site Wide Our overall statistics were good with regard to Panda. On sites under our control (either our own sites or client sites) about 75% of them were largely unaffected (changes and shake-ups yes, but not much difference in traffic), about 15% went up and about 5% went down. With regard to our money sites that are our main priority we didn't have any that went down and both of our primary sites gained (one about 8% the other about 22%). For some of our second tier affiliate sites, they were mostly unaffected, but a couple that got hit. This particular site below, took a big hit as you can see. Prior date ranges were consistent and the subsequent date ranges through current are also, unfortunately consistent. This site has suffered about a 70% to 80% reduction in traffic. Unfortunately there are many out there post-panda that suffered this fate.
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Youll notice, however, on the chart above if you pay attention to the dates that traffic actually surged immediately after Panda but then evaporated a month later in subsequent algorithm shifts. LIKELY CAUSE Sadly this is likely to be the cause of several factors. Certainly your sites authority has dropped dramatically in Google's eyes, but when traffic is completely wiped out like this and it is a site wide occurrence, you're likely looking at a lot more complex set of issues. One of the questions that you have to ask yourself is how was your authority killed off so bad? One of the common causes we've seen is devaluing of the site content because it's been scraped and is all over the Net. This is ugly, but we deal with it all the time. Lazy and dishonest marketers that simply steal others content. If you've had your rankings completely wiped out like this, that would be the first place to start. And the cure, well, involves writing a lot of new content (sorry) and a lot of patience as well. Another cause may be hosting or other site wide type of situation that is affecting your entire site. Start with Google Webmaster Tools and check your site for any anomalies there. The Google algorithm is complex and monitors or tracks a couple hundred or more variables. You'll need to first determine if the site warrants the investment many speculative sites that are testing out a certain niche, for example, may not be worth pursuing. If this was a solid site that made you good money, then you need to pursue it but don't be too aggressive. Go through the checklists later on in the eBook and build up a game plan. The most important thing is that you have patience. Remember above where I said that we had a couple of our second tier affiliate sites that got hit pretty hard? Well take a look at this chart earnings on this site dropped from $4000 a month to $100 a month over night (not a good feeling).
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Now, what you'll see on this chart is a bit of a mess because it doesn't correlate well with the dates of Panda, etc You see that it actually gained a lot of traffic after the Panda update almost 4x'ing prior traffic levels. And it didn't lose traffic until the first part of April and though it was down for a few weeks it is making a recovery to decent (but not good) traffic levels. This site was one of our testing sites where we were trying out some different linkbuilding approaches stuff we do on our own sites and never on a client site. But as an SEO firm you have to do this, you have to be continually pushing the limits and testing in order to get the answers that you can feel comfortable selling to your clients. The main reason I wanted to put this in here is not so much for its Panda correlation, but more because I want you to see that you can have site traffic go to near zero and still come back from it. You need to be consistent and stick to your guns and have patience. At some point, sure, you're gonna have to make a go or no-go decision. Depending upon the site and how valuable it is or was to you, you'll have to decide how long is appropriate. I would say in our experience if a site is going to bounce back it usually does so within 45 days or so. We've seen them come back in about 60, but usually its the first two to three weeks and then the odds start to work against you after that. Rankings Drop for Selective Keywords We also saw on several sites where the site as a whole was not affected but specific keywords were. Now, remember that a keyword is tied to a URL, so if you see a specific keyword that dropped significantly post-Panda, well, bells should be going off in your head that there's something up on that page. Now some of these sites saw significant traffic drops and others did not. It was largely dependent on how well the traffic was diversified for the site. If the site was getting the majority of its traffic from just a few keywords it likely suffered much more than a more robust authority site getting traffic from a variety of keywords. LIKELY CAUSE More than likely this is content related. If it were site wide, we would jump to the authority angle, but as this is targeted behavior on individual keywords (pages), you really should be focusing on the content specific issues/causes. Overall Downward Trend for EMD's An EMD is an Exact Match Domain. So if the primary keyword is poodle puppy training then an EMD would be PoodlePuppyTraining.com. Now, there are EMD's
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and then there are partial EMD's. Obviously there's a ton of competition for EMD's so what you'll find is things like PoodlePuppyTraining101.com which is not a pure EMD but is close. In this regard when we refer to EMD's we're really talking about both of those scenarios. The fact is that EMD's used to be a gold mine in Google truly as close as you could get to striking it rich a couple of years ago. You could go out and buy up tons of EMD's for prime keywords and promote a product around that keyword. Lots of affiliate marketers had tremendous success with that. They still have an impact today, but times are changing. We saw about 20% or so of the EMD's that we monitor drop significantly in this last Google algorithm change and about another 20% to 30% drop but not as severely. While there are out there that are proclaiming that Panda is the end of the EMD's, we wouldn't really go that far. We still see lots of them having great page one rankings when they have very little authority or incoming links, so while they have been affected, I don't think the strategy has been killed off just yet. That being said, you should be reading the writing on the wall. If your primary Internet Marketing strategy is based around EMD's, well, I think it's sufficient to say that that is probably not a wise long-term strategy. Our speculation is that Google will continue to level this playing field and remove this loophole entirely over time. And honestly they should because the domain name alone should not be so responsible for your ranking high. Yes, it should be a factor, but it is still too weighted. LIKELY CAUSE This is a bit unclear. It could be just a side effect of the focus on authority that Google made with this release and EMD's are generally rather weak when it comes to authority. It could also be, however, that there were specific alternations made to the algorithm in regard to EMD preference tuning. I tend to believe that it is likely a little of both. Appearance that Google has a Throttle Mechanism for Traffic This is a bit tough to explain, but we've seen this behavior ourselves and began digging into it and found that others have seen similar behavior as well. This is likely related to long tail rankings that aren't as readily observed since they aren't tracked and monitored as much. When we say a throttle what we mean is that we've observed periods of time when it appears that the restriction is lifted and traffic quickly picks up and then after a period of time (a day, two days, maybe three) it tapers right back off.
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During that period of time, nothing really significant seems to be going on in terms of rankings nothing observable at least and yet Google seems to be opening the faucet or closing it down rather quickly. My Totally Unrelated Tidbit speculation is that it is evaluating your site and is temporarily lifting whatever The giant panda, or panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca, literally meaning "black and white cat-foot") is a bear native to centralfilters it has in place to see how your site western and south western China. It is easily recognized by its responds and then reassessing. But the large, distinctive black patches around the eyes, over the ears, and odd part about it is that during these across its round body. Though it belongs to the order Carnivora, the panda's diet is 99% bamboo. Pandas in the wild will peaks we were not able to observe any occasionally eat other grasses, wild tubers, or even meat in the real change in rankings of keywords on a form of birds, rodents or carrion. In captivity they may receive honey, eggs, fish, yams, shrub leaves, oranges, or bananas along test site that was tracking nearly a with specially prepared feed. thousand keywords. Yet during the The giant panda lives in a few mountain ranges in central China, period where traffic was really flowing in, mainly in Sichuan province, but also in the Shaanxi and Gansu the site was being found on significantly provinces. Due to farming, deforestation and other development, the panda has been driven out of the lowland areas where it once more keywords.
lived.
If you've ever really studied the science or math of search, you're aware that the vast majority of searches are relatively unique. Most people tend to think that there are only so many keywords and that people tend to search very similarly, but the truth is just the opposite. If you don't believe me, look in your Google Analytics account and look at how many searches only have one occurrence.
The panda is a conservation reliant endangered species. A 2007 report shows 239 pandas living in captivity inside China and another 27 outside the country. Wild population estimates vary; one estimate shows that there are about 1,590 individuals living in the wild, while a 2006 study via DNA analysis estimated that this figure could be as high as 2,000 to 3,000. Some reports also show that the number of pandas in the wild is on the rise. However, the IUCN does not believe there is enough certainty yet to reclassify the species from Endangered to Vulnerable. While the dragon has historically served as China's national emblem, in recent decades the panda has also served as an emblem for the country. Its image appears on a large number of modern Chinese commemorative silver, gold, and platinum coins. Though the panda is often assumed to be docile, it has been known to attack humans, presumably out of irritation rather than predation.
So, if you apply this logic, it seems that this throttling behavior may be the act of Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_panda lifting a filter on long tail keywords. Another way of wording that would be to say that Google is dynamically changing your authority on the fly and affecting how relevant your content is to various long tail keywords.
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S E CT I O N 4 : B re a k O u t th e B a m b o o
Okay, so that may be a lame stretch on the whole Panda metaphor, but I thought it was funny all the same. The fact is you've got to feed the Google machine what it wants if you want to keep in the SEO rankings. Love 'em or hate 'em, right now, Google controls search there is no denying that and if you want to be in the game, you gotta play by their rules. Now were likely to refer to Google almost exclusively throughout this eBook. In part thats no accident the fact is we only do SEO with Google in mind. Different search engines weigh factors differently in terms of their ranking algorithms. SEO for Google is not the same as SEO for Bing, for example. But for us, we take the road most traveled and that is clearly Google. Now, Bing is showing signs of life and is on the upswing, so in time we may adapt to that, but right now its just not worth the time to us. It todays world you have to be a specialist you cant afford to be a generalist or you will starve to death. Gone are the days of adjusting the timing on your car in the garage on the weekend. The fact is, many new cars come with specific tools fabricated just for that model of car to allow you to even change the spark plugs, so dont even think about it. Well the Internet world is no different. So there are two things youre not going to hear from us and one of them is SEO outside of Google we let others specialize in that. The second item we wont discuss is Google Local or what is now Google Places. Again, this is an area we leave for firms that specialize in it. We started to branch into Google Places at one point but it was just too change driven for our liking. It is still a new concept to Google and it is constantly changing around and to us was just not worth the ROI for us as a business. We dont do local marketing or offline marketing, partly because I reside in Brazil but mostly because we prefer online marketing. Google Places has its place for sure and can be the easiest way to get top rankings in some local markets, but its becoming a crowded space now too and I suspect it will continue to go through a lot of algorithm shakeups as well. Current numbers show that Google controls about 20% of all Internet Traffic and about 80% of all Search traffic. Surprisingly those numbers are actually down a bit as Facebook is coming on very strong, but in today's world, Google is still the King and will be for a significant time to come. While I believe that Facebook has a very legitimate shot at
leveling the playing field over the next 36 months, it will be a gradual process and there is certainly no guarantee they will be successful either. I can assure you that Google has no intentions of just rolling over and playing dead. We've thought a lot about how to organize this information to be the most helpful to you. We started off with just a single numbered list of items. That seemed all well and good, but as we started in they just began to logically flow into different groupings. So we decided to change it up mid-stream and re-organize into categories. Likewise, we wanted to give you some indication of the relative importance of one suggestion compared to another. The fact is, of course, that trying to be too precise with this would just be idle speculation. In the end what we decided to do is simply identify those suggestions that are most important as critical. We've identified those more critical items with an image and each item is numbered for easily reference. It is very important to note that just because this is an exhaustive list it doesn't mean that your site is necessarily affected by all of these issues. Google has admitted that they track over 200+ individual metrics to determine rankings, and though we've got quite a few items listed below, we're not close to 200 we didn't try to be either. What we wanted to do was present the most pertinent issues to this particular algorithm change the most relevant factors we've seen in the past couple months. It just so happens, however, that the goal of this Panda update was to improve quality and so if you follow these suggestions the likely outcome is that you'll have a better site for your users in the process and that, after all, is what Google is really after anyway.
Content Related Panda Tips & Checklist

Is Your Content Unique?
Have you been posting spun content on your site for filler? If so, please stop now. In fact, stop yesterday. If you only have a small amount of it you should schedule that content to be re-written. Why not just delete those pages? Because remember, we want to maintain larger sites for more presence and authority, so if at all possible we recommend rewriting the content and keeping the page rather than deleting the page. However, if you have a lot of content here, you may want to consider another tactic and that is making sure all of the duplicate stuff is in a separate silo. By that we mean that it is all grouped together on a sub-domain or specific category or directory structure. Ideally, however, you want to rid your site of duplicate content.
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Size Matters How big is your..CONTENT?

Okay, sorry, but I couldn't resist that one. But keep in mind content is the bamboo the Google Panda just loves to eat and so you want to give it what it wants. Do you have large 1000+ word rich content posts? If not, you should. We routinely make 2000+ and even 3000+ word posts and we find them to be very effective landing pages. Large posts that have various sub-sections (keyword themed sub-sections with H2 and H3 tags) and loads of content are simply great for your site. It doesn't mean that you have to make all of your content that way in fact you shouldn't because you want a natural mix but having large posts is one of the secrets of an authority site. Before you go and respond with dozens of authority site examples that don't have large content posts, yes, I know there are hundreds of them. But the goal here is to get authority as quickly as possible and large blocks of rich, quality unique and well written content can really help you along in that quest. Then, of course, there are the other big advantages of large articles they tend to get more natural links and they certainly get more long tail organic keyword traffic. The fact is that size matters and the more content you have on that page the more keywords Google can find you for and the more relevant your page appears to be to the topic.
Does Your Content All Look The Same?

In other words, if your site is a blog and your purchase blog posts, for example, to maintain the site they are probably all written at 250 or 300 words or something like that. It is not natural to have all of your content fit into one nice size like that and creates a footprint that is easily detected, so make sure that you mix it up. As mentioned above, throw in some big posts but you can also throw in some quick and short announcements or news posts as well. The real key here is natural and varied.
What is the Content Footprint of Your Site?

This is another way of asking how many pages you have in the Google Index this is often a strong indicator of authority and you want to evaluate your site in that regard. Remember that when you evaluate your site, do so relative to (a) your niche and (b) your competition.
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So, for example, let's say you start with your sitemap.xml file and determine that you have 73 pages. Then you check to see how many of them are indexed and you come up with 59. FYI, yes, you can do this via a simple site:domain.com in Google as well, but I don't really like that number because it tends to be skewed (high) since it takes into account things like Tags and such. Now, how does that compare to the top 10 sites in your niche for the keyword that you are targeting? Do they have 113 pages, or do they have 10,000? This is just one factor of competitive analysis so I'm not suggesting it is in any way conclusive, but it is something you should consider in your niche and keyword select (along with a dozen or more factors).
How Much and How Frequently Are You Posting Content?

As you should know by now, the Panda wants to feed, so keep that bamboo coming! Google loves content fresh content and quality content. So when you assess your site and its content footprint, earnestly spend some time considering what type of content needs you have and map out a game plan for addressing them. If you need to get a 100 posts added to your site to increase your footprint, then transform that into a budget and a timeline. Can you do it in 1 month? In three months? What is realistic pick that and map out a plan, set your publication frequency and get rolling.
Watch Your Keyword Density

Mike and I are both pragmatic so you're not going to get a long-winded speech on the technicalities of keywords density. Here's the bottom line just use a simple formula. If you want 1% keyword density (our recommendation) just use your keyword one time per 100 words of text. For 1.5% keyword density, use your keyword three times in 200 words of text (1.5 times per 100 words, but kind of hard to use it half a time). The fact is that you should largely write without any concern for keyword density and just write naturally around the topic at hand. But the fact is, you need to be cognizant of what you're doing and you don't want to put out spammy text. We have some suggest that we are far too conservative about keyword density. Even had a guy write us and say that 5% is common in his niche. Well, I find that hard to believe. 5% keyword density would mean that in a 100 words of text you would use your keyword 5 times. That means in a small
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blog post of just 250 words of text (typically two paragraphs) that you would have 12 occurrences of your keyword. If anyone can actually do that without it sounding spammy, well, send me a copy.
Onsite Related Panda Tips & Checklist

What Does the above the fold View of Your Site Look Like?
This is something that has picked up significance in Google in past months and this recent Panda update. This item kind of goes hand in hand with the next one about how much advertising you have on the site, but it really is all about the user experience. Now, just in case you're not familiar with the phrase above the fold, let me take a minute to explain. It dates back to newspapers. An article that was above the fold was an article that was above the middle of the page fold mark where a person would see it as soon as they looked at the front page (or, more precisely, the top half of the front page). In online terms, above the fold is a bit different because the page height is not fixed like a newspaper, so it does not mean the top half of the page, but rather it means the portion of the page that is visible when the browser is maximized to full screen resolution. So, its a bit of a mess because what is above the fold for you on a 15 screen running in 1024 x 768 mode is not the same is what is above the fold on my 24 screen running in 1920 x 1080 mode. But you get the idea. Now what Google wants to see is that your site has a lot of textual and relevant content to the topic searched on above the fold. Let me show you an example to clarify. Based on how bad this is you would think I spent 20 minutes looking for it, but in reality it was the first search I did and the third result on the page. It's a perfect example of terrible design and one that Google Panda is likely all over.
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The only content that is above the fold at all is four small lines of text on the left in the Table of Contents for the post. Now, here is the second page down (see below image).
Honestly, it's not a hell of a lot better, but at least it has some content. So, in this example the site design has absolutely no content above the fold and even on the second page it's buried on the bottom half of the page.
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What we recommend is checking your site in 1024 x 768 resolution and seeing what is showing up above the fold. Here are a few items you might want to consider changing: Shorten up the vertical height of your site header. Many times it is excessively thick and is pushing the content too far down the page unnecessarily. Often times just some minor site redesigns can tweak this pretty easily. Re-Evaluate ad placement. This can be more complex, but still, if you haven't got real content on 50% or more of your above the fold real estate then you need to make some changes. Look at the vertical spacing. Sometimes just due to CSS and such, there is too much white space above the Title, for example. Or too much blank space below the menu. Can you move anything out of your header? Perhaps you have all of those social media buttons up there, or a search box, or a banner ad that hasn't sold since Regan was in office whatever it is, look to simplify. Look for any other thing that is pushing your content down on the page and consider revising it. Bottom line is you gotta do what you gotta do to get a result.
While you're hoping to find easy stuff, sometimes a more major site redesign is in order. You need to have your primary content on at least 50% of the above the fold real estate. If you think about it, it really makes sense from a user experience standpoint and you can probably understand Google's perspective on this one. You will likely have a better overall user experience by going through this experience.
Ratio of Information to Advertising on the Page

This is very similar to the above item, only this relates not to the content on your page but rather the advertising. It's not uncommon to have a banner image and big blocks of Adsense on your site, but you've got to be careful about their placement and just how much vital real estate that they are using. Let's pull up this screen shot from above again only this time let's focus on the ads above the fold.
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You can see that about 1/3 of the above the fold screen real estate is clogged up with ads. Again, a less than ideal situation. But the far worse offender on this particular site is simply that there is ZERO CONTENT above the fold.
Outbound Link Count

Now, whenever the words outbound links are uttered from the mouth of an SEO'er, an ensuing fight usually starts. However, it's usually for a different set of reasons than what we are going to talk about here. A lot of pro's on both sides of the debate argue about the value of a link from a page that has loads of outbound links. There is intense debate some saying the links are diluted in value due to the number of links on the page others saying that's complete rubbish. What do we say? We say, wrong topic LOL What we're talking about has nothing to do with the value of the links, all we are saying is that you need to look at the total volume of outgoing links on a page. As always, there is no hard and fast rule. The best way to determine how many is too many is to take a look at the top ten sites for the keywords you want to rank for and see what they are doing. However, in general, when you get about 60 or 70 you're starting into the high territory and if you cross over 100 you've probably crossed that threshold for sure. That seems like a lot and you are probably saying that you can't believe you have that many, but if you look at a few pages you might be surprised. The typical worst culprits are
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the footer links (I know we need to adjust that on our own sites if only I wasn't typing away on this eBook, I'd have the time). Menu's especially if they have drop downs and nested sub-menus can also take up a lot of links. And if you've got a Wordpress blog site, well, you've probably got a ton of links sitting in the sidebars recent posts, categories, pages, blog roll links and more. I'm not suggesting this is a super critical issue or that you need to start rioting in the streets over it. I know that many, many big sites have huge numbers of links on their pages. I just believe that it is one of those things that can raise a red flag for your site and truly doesn't provide a lot of value to the reader. Most of those links are never even seen or utilized.
Hide Your Affiliate Links

After reading the section at the top about Site Authority you should be beginning to spot a trend here. Google really doesn't like the little guy. Google doesn't like affiliate marketers either and things are getting tougher all of the time here and it's not just in search. Have you tried Adwords lately? Quality score issues, popup issues, relevant content issues, squeeze page issues the list goes on and on. Google seemingly is just out to screw the little guy and the trend is certainly towards bigger sites and bigger dollars. The thing is, we're affiliate marketers as well, so don't think we're siding with Google here. This is a topic that really makes our skin crawl as it is becoming almost impossible to try and do affiliate marketing via AdWords and I'm afraid the trends towards organic search are going to be getting tougher all of the time. But the fact is that Google doesn't like to see a site full of affiliate links as it makes them suspicious of whether or not you're a spammer. So you need to cloak your affiliate links so that they don't appear so much like affiliate links. This also can help your affiliate sales conversions as well as customers generally don't like to see them either. So a link that might look like this: http://www.secureinfossl.com/adminAffProgram/PreiumWebCart-PartnershipProgram/100307 Ends up looking like this instead: http://articlesubmissionreview.com/webcart
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Now, both of those links will take you to the same location, but the former is ugly and just screams affiliate marketer while the second doesn't. Now, there's a big trend to use the /recommends naming structure, but we're not really that fond of it as it is easily parsed and potentially interpreted as an affiliate link as well.
Make Sure to NoFollowOutbound Paid Links

This is something that Google has always been on the lookout for and something that you should have heard of or seen by now, but it's still a relevant checklist item and you should double check it. The theory behind this is pretty simple, they dont want you selling Page Rank and a DoFollow link passes Page Rank. Im not so sure how much of that is really even important nowadays with PageRank Sculpting getting much less attention than it used to, but still its a Google requirement that shouldnt be ignored and can have big, negative impacts on your site.
Dont NoFollow All Outbound Links

This is important as well. You don't want to just try to save time and effort by simply converting all of your site links to NoFollow. That makes you look like you're trying to manipulate PageRank and hoard it Google doesn't like that. This is a holdover from the earlier days when PageRank had more of an impact on the SERPS than it does today. PageRank sculping is still practiced today, but much less so,and you have to make sure you're following the rules and not setting off any red flags. Many today are recommending using JavaScript links for non-essential links on your site that you dont want to pass link juice through, but we have not done that (not yet anyway). Our concern with that tactic is that it is JavaScript dependent and while most people use contemporary browsers if Java is disabled it will cause grief.
Make Sure To Have Outbound Links to Authority Sites

So here's where we're going with this. Google wants to see that you are a part of the community the larger community that forms the Internet. That means, do you participate in it or do you try to hoard traffic for yourself? It also touches on the issue of giving credit where credit is due. So if you're using another reference as the source article for your blog post, it doesn't hurt to drop credit to them and make a link for reference. In fact, it helps. This shows Google
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that you are trying to give your customer the best possible answer even if that means that further research may be acquired elsewhere and that's normal. No one has all of the information or is the expert in everything. The Internet is made up of sharing and links are just that a form of sharing. Google wants to basically see that your site plays well with others (okay, sorry for the kindergarten reference no painful flashbacks I hope). The other aspect of this that helps with your authority is that by citing credible sources it makes you credible as well. A spammer is not going to tell you who they swiped their illegitimate content from, but a quality journalist always cites their sources. Do you have to do this in every post? Is there some fixed rule of how many links you should create? No. Hopefully this far into this eBook you know that there are no hard and fast rules like that. You just need to assess your site and ask yourself some of those Google checklist questions (the ones directly quoted from Google) and see what makes sense from your standpoint. And remember, observe your niche and competitors. What are they doing?
Make Sure You've Got the Relevant Disclosures

You need to check out your site and make sure you have all of the relevant disclosure pages, such as your Privacy Policy, DMCA Policy, Anti-Spam Policy, Terms of Use, Earnings Disclosure, Affiliate Agreement and others such as your About Us and Contact Us pages (and yes, before we get some of the emails from you, we're in the middle of reassessing this on our sites as well we're missing a few). It's a process for all of us
Make Sure You Have an Address and Contact Phone Number

Now this is not necessarily relevant to all of you, but you might want to give it another thought. Physical address equates to a physical presence and that can help with your site authority. Likewise, a phone number says that you're not hiding and are easily reachable. We've tried it both ways and do different in different niches. Like any advice we have given, take a look at it and use it to compare your site with your competition. If theyre doing it and outranking you, well, it cant hurt. This is a small item but all of this stuff adds up. For many niches, however, a phone number is neither required nor necessary. For us, for example, we dont do it because profit margins are so thin on content at ArticlesOnTap.com that we simply dont want to encourage phone calls.
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We do occasionally do them, but primarily that time is reserved for our consulting, white label SEO providers and premium SEO clients. Youll have to evaluate what makes the most sense for you.
Are You Acting Like a Spammer?

Sorry, not trying to insult you here, but sometimes you may be doing things you don't even realize that are sending off the wrong signals and that is something you've got to be cognizant of. Most of these tactics are old and have long since been abandoned, but I still come across them on many sites almost daily. Don't Use Hidden Text What is hidden text you ask? This is an old tactic where spammers would create a long list of relevant keywords for a site and then make the text white in color and super small so that it wasn't even noticed and shove it way down on the site below the footer or something. The point is that the text isn't visible and not providing any value to the user, it was simply a strategy for trying to manipulate the search engines. Don't do this. It is super easy from their crawler to spot and you can get penalized for this type of behavior. Don't Use Images When You Should Use Text This is the spam tactic of taking duplicate text, for example, that you don't want Google to see and putting it into an image instead. We still see a lot of this today. With CSS you can easily overlay text right over the top of fancy graphical backgrounds and such, so there really is not much need for this. One of the places we see this tactic used a lot in the Internet Marketing space is with Testimonials. Many sites use images for their testimonials instead of text because you can be sure that marketer is likely using that exact same testimonial in several places, endorsing several products and he or she doesn't want you or Google to know that. Don't Put Text or Images Off the Page With <div> tags and page definition we have seen various sites that want to hide their links by putting them into the page source so that the crawlers see them but in a location that they physically do not show up on the page. So below the boundary of the page, or so far to the right of the page they'll never be displayed, etc
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As you begin to reverse engineer your competition via tools such as SpyGlass (see the sidebar on SpyGlass) you'll start seeing this behavior. You'll see that site A is getting a link from Site B, but when you go to site A to find that link you can't. So then you do a 'view source' to view the raw HTML behind the page and you uncover these hidden links. Look, Google has been very clear about this stuff do it and you'll pay the price. It's frustrating when you find this on sites ranking above you trust us, we've seen lots of competitors doing less than ethical stuff and seemingly getting away with it. All I can tell you is that karma will eventually get them (that's what I keep telling myself anyway).
OFFSITE PANDA TIPS & CHECKLIST

Are You Guarding Your House?
The fact is that it goes on every day. People come and swipe (translation: steal) your original and unique content straight off your site or via your RSS feed. A lot of it is normal and okay. For example lots of sites like TagAlly, for example, extract portions of your content for blurbs, etc The problem is when sites are swiping your entire posts and posting on their site as if it were their own. Trust us, we've seen plenty of it first hand. There are those that are accidental via automated plugins and scraper tools that were made popular by the $37 Clickbank eBooks selling Auto Blogging Riches type garbage. Now you may think we're really negative on that crowd, but the fact is that people just have to step back and not get sucked in by the hype. Several years ago you could pull off that kind of trick on Google and get away with it. Today you can't. But the real issue is fundamentally much deeper. The fact is Mike and I are about building serious and sustainable income and that means building a business. Now, many people don't get the difference. One way of thinking about it is that a business is something that you could sell. It has value. I would stand up to scrutiny from accountants and the outcome would be a value. If you want to build a sustainable business then you cannot build it from a house of straw.
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There have been snake oil salesmen as long as we've walked the planet, so this is nothing new. The only thing is that the Internet encourages deceptive tactics for a couple of reasons. 1. There is more anonymity on the Internet and that seems to bring out the worst in people. I don't know how many times we've received an email ticket sent to our helpdesk that is just over the top in terms of rude, and insulting just bam coming off firing on all cylinders right off the bat. The issue is usually something minor like an email got missed because it was picked up by the clients spam blocker or something similarly common. Then we bite our tongue (usually LOL) and summon up the strength to still try and be polite (when other ideas are crossing our mind) and about 70% or even 80% of the time the response back from the client is almost like it came from someone else entirely. They are polite, apologetic and we move on. But what is interesting is their initial barrage of insults. I truly don't believe that they would behave that way if there was a physical person on the other side of the screen. But the anonymity of the Internet seems to give people the courage to behave in a way they otherwise wouldn't. Both on the selling side and the buying side of the equation. Yes, that's right. While we don't appreciate the selling the hype tactic, there is an equally important problem on the other end those that are so eager to believe it (even when they know better). 2. People can avoid facing their mistakes and never really address the fundamental issues. This really is just an extension of #1 anonymity but from the buyer's side of the equation. Face facts, if you went out and bought a '71 Ford Pinto and brought it home (was thinking of the best candidate I could come up with for a lemon) there would be a price to pay. Your spouse would surely fire off a few rounds and there wouldn't be much debate over whether it was a classic or just a classic mistake. The point is, your bad decision would not be so private. You would have some humility and a learning process to go through over the $2500 you just threw away as you tried to justify the decision to others. But with the Internet, again, you're anonymous and so you too tend to do things that are perhaps out of character or against your best judgment.
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So, sorry to go off on a rant, but it is really important that you understand what you're trying to accomplish here and that you're actions align with your objectives. To build sustainable income, you need to be building a business one that is built on solid fundamentals and not fly by night here today gone tomorrow tactics. The other approach that you'll find when you start seeing people scraping your content is that there are those that just completely steal it. They manually swipe it and change all of the links to point to their own site (though there are some automation tools that do that too, so be careful of your accusations) and pass it off as their own. Bottom line is that either way there's not a lot you can do to stop it. Your best course of action is to try to first appeal to the violator and assume that it was done unknowingly. Remember my helpdesk ticket reference above. Don't come across slamming them and insulting them you're not likely to get far with that approach (though we totally understand the desire). Give them a chance to rectify the situation. In fact, give them a few chances. You may not hear anything back ever from them, so you have to check back up yourself and monitor the site. Many times the offender is embarrassed (not that they did it, but that you caught them) and so they won't even reply but will often just take the content down themselves. Of course, we wish they all were so cooperative, but most aren't. The next step if you don't get any response from them is to go to the hosting service. The fact is, yes, they're in violation of the DMCA, but can you really afford to hire an attorney for this? And even so, it's a long, long process. So, what we do is go to the hosting companies and try to get them shut down. The hosting companies have been pretty responsive to this especially if it's a big well known one because they don't want to be responsible in any way. But, sadly, in many cases you're just going to end up having to rewrite your content. If that's the case, you need to inventory your site and figure out how much of it has been impacted, which pages are suffering in rankings, and then which bring the most traffic and put them in priority and start attacking. The easiest way to track down if your content is being swiped is just a freebie solution. Go to a page you want to check on your site and pick a long phrase of about 15 or 20 words. I generally like to select mid sentence to mid sentence (across sentence boundaries) as that tends to quickly find duplicates and is very near impossible to be accidental. I would advise that you grab this test phrase from midway down the content and not from the first paragraph as that will likely be swiped a lot for tidbit blurbs and such. Next copy that phrase and paste it into Google, but make sure you put double quotes around it when you do. You want to use Google to search for that EXACT phrase. This will
help you identify sites that are copying your exact content word for word. Then you just have to sift through the finds. Open up Notepad (Excel is better) and copy/paste your finds into it so you that you make a list and have a place to track your actions and followups. Now, one thing that you should be particularly aware of is the order in which the results come back. Ideally, only your site will be listed and you dont have a problem. But if multiple sites are being listed, then look at the order hopefully your site is at least at the top of the food chain. Remember, Google orders results in the order of most important to least important, so if another site is listed above yours for YOUR CONTENT then they have really pulled a number on you because now Google is seeing THEM as the authority for this content and not you. If that's the case, you're probably better off to save time and just flag that post/page for a rewrite. Irritating, yes it is. But no sense and wasting time on something you can't change. Another thing you can do is make sure that your RSS feed is only delivering partial blurbs rather than your entire articles. Not this is a bit controversial because some people will argue that they want their entire article in the feed, but if you're having lots of issues with content swiping, you may want to consider this option.
Is Your Site Anchor Text Over-Optimized?

First off you have to understand anchor text. Anchor text is the text that appears highlighted in a link and is the text that you use as your keyword if you are doing offsite linkbuilding. The problem is that many people go way overboard and use too much keyword rich anchor text and that doesn't look natural. So, let's assume you have 5000 links to your site. If 80% of them are all the same keyword phrase make money online, well, that just smells bad, right? I mean, Google can sniff that out a mile away. Now some people again other very respected SEO's even will tell you that this doesn't matter, and right at this very instant they may be true, but we are already seeing signs that over-optimized anchor text is not smart. So what do we mean by over-optimized? What we mean here is that the anchor text is rich keyword text only. If you look at the links that come in for a site naturally, you'll see all kinds of variation of anchor text. Most of links will be some sort of domain name as the anchor text like www.domain.com because it is very common for people to write something like this: You gotta checkout product XYZ on www.domain.com and then link the www.domain.com off to the site.
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Likewise, people don't do things the same way. Some will use the www, some won't. Some will miss-spell your domain name (yikes), others will make a link an entire sentence and let's not forget all of the click here and here and download this and all of the other garbage anchor text that you will find. The point is that it is simply natural to have a lot of that and if your site has a lot of SEO behind it, chances are that unless you've been very careful about this, you may be far too optimized and that could be causing you some problems (or cause more in the future). Keeping it natural is really a recurring theme with us when it comes to SEO. And that is quite an oxymoron the irony is not lost on us. Because the simple fact is that we are artificially trying to look natural kind of funny when you think about it. Our goal is always to fly under the radar as much as possible and not raise red flags with Google. So, even if this is a hotly debated issue right now, we still like to error on the side of caution and we never give advice to our clients that we don't personally practice. We use a lot of junk anchor text and believe that you should as well. For more information see our blog post The Logic Behind Varying Your Anchor Text.
EDU & GOV Links Not as Important as They Used to Be

This is more of an observation than it is a tip, but it is something that has come about via the Panda update, so we wanted to slip it in here. Government agencies were getting sick of being spammed by every marketer under the sun and so they petitioned Google to downgrade their link authority so that they would no longer be targets. So from now on these are the same as any other link. The reason they may still seem to carry more juice is that Government and Educational sites are by nature authority sites, so they still are good links to get, but not as much so as in the past.
Do You Have Authority Links?

If site authority is so important now, dont you think it extends to the links coming in to your site as well? Of course is does. So one way of increasing your authority is getting links from other high authority sites. From Googles perspective if a high authority site is linking to you than you must have something of value and they respect that. But what types of sites are we talking about? Youre not likely going to get links from CNN.com, but there are lots of things you can do to get authority links. Many big sites like
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YouTube.com, for example, allow you to create a profile where you can put a link back to your main site. Take advantage of that. Setup an account there and upload a handful of videos into the profile as well. Now I know some people will come back with the comment but YouTube.com profile links are NoFollow. The thing is, dont worry too much about that thats our opinion. All links count to one degree or another and remember were trying to create a more natural appearing link profile for our site anyway thats not going to happen focusing 100% on DoFollow links that just doesnt look natural. Next what you want to do is build links to those profile pages that create a ring of authority back to your site. Its not hard at all to get a YouTube profile to a PR3 or PR4 PageRank with some links thrown its way. Now just wash, rinse and repeat across various sites like that which are big strong names and are going to be around for a long time. Another great approach for getting strong authority links is via Press Releases. Press releases can get picked up by hundreds of sites and some of them have great authority as news sites. Monitor which ones pick up your press release and then build links to them to boost their PageRank and the juice they send your way. If you repeat this cycle on a monthly basis, over the course of three or four months you can begin to create a ring of authority sites pointing back to you. But dont stop the linkbuilding. Keep it going for months on these pages and youll have some very solid, mid PR pages on high PR sites and high authority sites directed your way. The nice part about selecting highly popular sites is that they will be around for a long time to come and those links will continue to age. Having a quality link coming in is good, but having an aged one is even better because it shows consistency over time and that builds trust. Here is just a quick list of some that you might want to take a look at there are hundreds of them, so dont feel limited here. But the goal is not to get thousands of them, but to get those that you can sustain linkbuilding for. Remember you want to build up the authority of these pages via linkbuilding over time. Many of these will be NoFollow links, but they are still important to have for authority in our findings. Also there are many niche specific links that can be had, such as ActiveRain, if you are in the Real Estate niche, as an example, that would be good authority links for your site. Facebook.com Youtube.com Twitter.com
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LinkedIn.com Wikipedia.org DMOZ.com Business.com Yahoo Directory google.com/buzz Digg.com Stumbleupon.com Squidoo.com Hubpages.com PRWeb.com Mynewsdesk.com ezinearticles.com Articlebase.com technorati.com feedagg.com feedage.com prlog.org blogcatalog.com
Anchor Text Isn't What It Used To Be

Now I know weve already talked about over-optimization, but this is a bit of a different angle. Our theory is that Google was too easy to be gamed my Internet Marketers and aggressive anchor rich linkbuilding. It is clear that many sites weve analyzed post Panda are ranking well for pages even though there is not a ton of anchor text on those pages. The theory is that with the added emphasis being put on site authority and quality content that those are being taken more heavily into account now that anchor text. Link counts are still very important and anchor text is still important as well, but it has been depreciated some and can actually be a negative if you do too much of it. As always, (you should be spotting a trend here), our advice is to compare yourself to your competition and see where they stand with anchor text percentages. This is easily done via SpyGlass (see sidebar earlier in the document for more information on SpyGlass) as it will directly show you anchor text percentages and that makes it very easy to check your site against your competitors.
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OTHER PANDA TIPS & CHECKLIST

Extend Your Domain Name Registration
If youre already on our mailing list youve likely seen this tip already and its not super secret or anything none of this stuff is its just one more element in the array of variables that can help. Like everything, its about building authority and trust. Think like Google for a minute. They see millions of scammers and newbies creating sites and all of them are trying to do it as cheap as possible, setting up domain names for the one year minimum. If you extend yours for 5 years or more, you stand out from the crowd. Is this in and of itself likely to make a huge difference, no, of course not, but it is one more thing we do and recommend you do on sites that are your money sites. It doesnt make sense a lot of the time so you have to evaluate it on a site-by-site basis. We like to refer to our sites as money sites and tier two sites. Now we make money off our tier two sites as well, but theyre not our bread and butter and they are more experimental in nature and we have lots of those. Were not going to renew them all for five years just to make Bob Parsons richer and increase his GoDaddys Girls campaign. We like ya Bob, but not that much. So what we do is follow this strategy on our money sites only sites that have proven themselves to us and that are part of our long term strategy. That way we keep the costs down but invest where it makes sense to invest. We recommend you do the same.
Explore Webmaster Tools

You are going to hear a few differences of opinion when it comes to Google Webmaster Tools. On some fronts there are those that say do not use any Google tools, such as Webmaster Tools or Analytics. But then there are others that will say you should - that really depends on the scenario. If you are utilizing other Google properties such as AdSense or Adwords, then there really is no reason not to use Analytics or Webmaster Tools because Google already has their tentacles inserted into your website, so why not use the rest of the tools at your disposal? The thing is when all used together they can provide you with a ton of data. On some fronts more than you may care to know or understand you can literally spend entire days analyzing data if you have many websites or very busy websites.
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So what do we do or recommend when it comes to Webmaster tools? Well we employee both scenarios. In some instances on our money sites we have them integrated with Analytics and Webmaster Tools. And the thing is, it has come in extremely handy on more than one occasion. Webmaster tools allows you to see a lot of the data as Google will see it. Heres a bit more info on the subject: By placing your sitemap into Webmaster tools it helps you in getting your sites pages indexed, by giving Google the url for your sitemap. While this is not necessary, it does help. Because it allows you see any issues you may or may not have with your sitemap. As an example it will state how many pages are in your sitemap that are submitted and how many are indexed. However this data can be a bit nebulous, because we have seen cases with test sites where we have had a site that was not even indexed by Google, and submitted to Webmaster Tools and tools said it had pages indexed. So this actually points to the existence of the supplemental index and that Google is looking at that data. You can see crawl errors from within Webmaster tools. A while back we had a website of ours with 1000's of pages indexed in Google that all of the sudden took a large dip in rankings. Now this was pre-panda update so there was no algorithmic reason that we knew of for this to happen. Upon looking into webmaster tools, we noticed one of our developers made a mistake on a script on the site and what we wound up with was 100's of internal links pointing to the wrong url's. So our website wound up having 100's of 404's and this effected the rankings. We fixed all that up and within weeks the sites rankings came back. What that tells you is that what you may think is a Panda related issue, could be something else, so always check everything before just blaming Google. There is a ton of keyword data available within Webmaster tools as well. Now much of your keyword data can be gleaned from Analytics or a similar tool such as Clicky, etc... but Webmaster Tools is yet another source of keyword data. It gives data such as for keyword xyz we are position #2 and we receive 6500 impressions on that keyword and what our click through rate is. What is interesting about that is you can find out which keywords are better performers for you. For instance I may notice that keyword that gets 6500 impressions, only gets a 1% click through at position #2. But another keyword with 2000 impressions is getting a 18% click through at position #3. So that second keyword is actually a better performing keyword from an action perspective.
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Another very important item that you get from Webmaster tools is back link data both internal and external. This is a full count. As an example we have some websites that report over 300,000 links. That is a total of all links internal and offsite inbound links. And while that may sound like a lot, remember one website with 1000 pages and 10 footer links pointing to various other pages on your sites can generate 10,000 links alone. Now think tags, categories, etc it grows very fast. But it is always a very good idea to have an idea of what your internal linking structure looks like. Lastly, Google +1 will be deployed via Webmaster Tools as well. This will mean that you will be able to see +1 trends, data and analysis as well as get access to the tools that are used to generate the +1 buttons for your website. Our recommendation is to use Webmaster tools if you can, but we do not use the same webmaster tools account for all of our websites. We create separate accounts for Webmaster Tools and Analytics so that our sites are not tied together. Now, if you are running 10 AdSense sites, then obviously your sites are already tied together via your one AdSense account, so in that case they can share the same Tools and Analytics account because Google already sees the connection. We do not use any Google Tools for our link building network sites - that is a huge no no. We also do not use Google tools for some money sites, because we keep them anonymous on purpose, and we always like to see if there is any difference between sites using Google tools and sites not using them. We have not seen a difference, and do recommend using them for money sites unless you have something to hide.
Have You Been Neglecting Backlinking?

This one is a biggie. SEO has become very competitive in the past couple of years and backlinking is very important to solid rankings. The threshold just keeps rising. What we mean by that is that while a three or four years ago the number of backlinks was important, it wasnt nearly as critical as it is today. Now we dont want to get off on a rant here about the big debate over quantity versus quality. By now, if youve been paying attention, you will probably speculate that we take a middle of the road, pragmatic side on that debate. The fact is, you need both and if you doubt that take a look at any big authority site you can think of and please show me one that has very little links, just a bunch of high authority, high quality links and nothing more. They dont exist.
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The reason for that is that it is simply not natural and that is so easy for Google to spot. You cant simply build just huge numbers of links nor just high quality links you need both. Okay, enough of that rant With this Panda update and since then, we have seen that many factors have been downgraded in their importance such as domain age. Many sites relied on their age to rank well. These were typically small shops that have been on the Internet for years in small niches and have always done very well in the rankings. They never really kept up with contemporary site design nor did they pay too much attention to linkbuilding. But they managed to hold their authority because they had a long established presence and that was seemingly good enough. Today, that has changed. We have seen many of these sites that were ranking top 3 positions for their keywords and only had 1k or 2k worth of links to their domain just disappear from the first couple of pages recently. The fact is that when you do a competitive analysis (and you should do this for your main keywords about every 90 days to reassess your positions) you need to look at many factors not just the ranking. You cant rely on a simple ranking report to tell you if youre doing a good job or if youre suspect and liable to lose ground soon. Instead, use an in-depth competitive research tool like Market Samurai which produces great data about page one ranking sites for your keywords via their SEO Competition module. You can do this all on your own without Market Samurai if youre on a tight budget, but for the one-time purchase, it pays for itself the very first time you use it. To gather all of the data by yourself that Market Samurai presents in one quick summary chart in a matter of 30 seconds or so, youll likely spend a couple hours or more of your time. The more probable result is that you WONT spend the time and thus you WONT do the analysis and that is a mistake. Remember, time is money and you need to be efficient to be competitive.
Domain Age Doesn't Play as Big of a Role as it Used To

As noted above, the importance of domain age has been downgraded as well. Now, age is still very important, but it is not quite as important as it was that is evident from our observations of various sites. Just in the past week weve had three new SEO clients come to us to help restore their sites rankings and all three had the same exact situation. They were old domains from 1997, 2003, and 2004 and all had rather dated sites that had not kept up with the times or the linkbuilding efforts of their competitors but had held #1
or #2 spots for years and then poof theyre not in the top 30 anymore, much less page #1. Thorough analysis of these sites and many others that we have seen as well has led us to conclude that age alone is not going to get it done anymore. And thats the way it should be. Just because your site has been around since Al Gore invented the Internet (sorry, couldnt resist) doesnt mean that it is the most relevant or quality search result to be found.
EMD's Have Been Downgraded

The sub-title to that statement would be, but they still get preferential treatment. In other words, while they are less favored today than they were pre-Panda, they still maintain an advantage. It is our firm belief, however, that that will continue to erode over the next several months. Compare this to domain age which has also taken a hit lately. The same justifications and arguments apply. Though having your keyword in the domain name or an exact match to the domain name does imply a high degree of relevance, it is not the only factor. Right now we are still seeing tons of sites (and we have a lot of these EMDs) that are still ranking higher than they deserve to when you look at other factors backlinks, authority, PageRank, site footprint, etc So what does this all mean? Well, we can tell you what were doing and recommending for our clients as well. Here you go: If EMDs favored status is the primary strategy you are relying on and creating dozens of mico-sites around these EMDs, well, we urge you to diversify. It is our feeling that EMDs will, in time, continue to lose favor with Google and we dont believe you should have all of your eggs in one basket. This belief is based upon the trends over the past six months that we do not believe will just reverse themselves. As we discuss elsewhere in the eBook as well, we do not believe that a mini-site old strategy is a wise long term Affiliate Marketing tactic. These sites have been losing their favor for many months now and despite all of the aggressive product promotion around them, we just feel youre building your house of straw with that approach. All of the trends over the past six months point to more and more authority based solutions.
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If you have a money site that is an EMD and is doing well for you, great. But invest in solid SEO and linkbuilding to solidify that domains rankings and dont solely rely upon the EMD itself to provide your rankings. This is just hedging your bet and is a wise approach. If were wrong, what has it cost you? Nothing, youll still have solid rankings and more authority and backlinks. But if the trends continue, it may just save your bacon. If youre just getting started or if youre considering adding EMDs to your mix, well, thats fine, but dont rely on that to solve your rankings issues. In other words, sure, select an EMD if it makes sense for you, but then just treat it like any other domain and give it solid SEO and link building effort. Youll likely get an extra little boost in rankings given their preferred status, but youll also be building for the long run as well.
Is Your Site Design dated? Consider moving to Wordpress

This is more of a user experience factor than a Panda related item, but many people that came online five to seven years ago have not kept up with the times in regards to their website and design. Were pretty pragmatic about things, but you cant just take the attitude that it worked seven years ago so its fine now. Things change and you need to adopt the mindset that maintaining a business presence on the Internet in any way means that you must embrace that change. If your site design is dated it tells your user that you are out of touch and they will click away and fast. Were not suggesting you throw endless sums of money into high priced design, but you need to step back and assess your site objectively (or pay someone to do it). One thing that we would highly suggest is that if you do take on a redesign effort, it is our standpoint that you should start with the premise that youre going to use a Wordpress blog and then argue from there. In other words, we love Wordpress and so does Google and from a business standpoint we do almost 100% of our development on Wordpress now. Its more cost effective, easier to SEO, has thousands of plugins and tools readily available (and many of them are free), has e-commerce and membership integration capabilities, can be scaled for large volume traffic and much, much more. There are really only a handful of valid reasons to not use Wordpress today and honestly I cant think of one off the top of my head. All that being said, dont do a redesign just for the sake of doing a redesign it needs to meet a business objective and the costs need to be justified. There are also significant
issues such as URL naming and renaming and other architectural bridges that you must cross when you change the core foundation of a site, so dont make the design lightly.
Do You Have Any Social Media Proof?

While the jury is still out on the ROI of social media marketing for the average marketer, one thing that is not debatable is the need for social proof. What is social proof? Well simply it is proof to Google that your site is involved in the social networks. That proof comes in the form of tweets and likes, etc That stuff all leaves a footprint and Google picks up on it. So the concept here is to get involved in these social networks in order to prove that you get it and are involved. Kind of silly in a way, but then, so is linkbuilding. Silly, perhaps, but effective yes. The fact is that Google is in its infancy right now with regards to social media and so the bar is not set too high. This, however, will be steadily changing and is probably the single biggest area of expected change in the months to come. What we are doing currently is using a tool called Synnd to assist in our social proof and we have been very pleased with the results. Remember, social proof is a bit of an abstract so its not so much about rankings as it is just a general presence. But think of it this way. If three months from now a new algorithm change comes out and really impacts sites that have completely ignored social media, where will you stand? Again, call this a hedging the bet type of strategy. Its clear that the trend is for more and more social media involvement with regards to search results Google has made that abundantly clear. Even going so far as to say that in the foreseeable future they may use user site blocking data from Google Chrome to affect the search results. They didnt say that they had plans to do that, but they also talked about how they were analyzing that data in comparison with the sites that were negatively affected by the Panda algorithm and saw a very close overlap. In other words, we dont know if they will or wont, but we sure know theyre looking. Our feeling is that its best to be prepared for it now.
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S E CT I O N 5 : G o in g B e y o n d Pa n d a
So What Have We Learned?
The Panda release has really opened up a lot of discussion and in many ways Google has shown their hand, so to speak. It is fairly obvious that certain topics will become more and more important in the months to come and so you need to be prepared for them. In this section we will dive into each one one-by-one and examine what direction things are moving towards as well as what you can do to start getting prepared today. I know that we're playing with the Panda references pretty heavy in this eBook obviously to capitalize on the issues that the Google Panda algorithm has caused but the goal of this eBook is really the and Beyond portion of the title. You see, Panda was one algorithm change but it won't be the last. I want to state those quotes from Google again, just to really drive this point home. Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year
-- Google Quote
This point really cannot be emphasized enough. Don't fixate on looking backwards and trying to react. Our goal here is to get you out of reactionary SEO and transition you towards a more solid long term SEO plan that builds and bolsters site wide authority. With that in mind, please read this section with an eye on what is becoming more important and where SEO is headed so that you can be prepared.
Unique Content is More and More Important

It used to be that you could build out a decent little site with about 70% auto content and just sprinkle in some original content as well to keep Google happy. That's why so many of those auto-blogging programs exist. But they have been less and less effective for about 18 months now and this Panda update has all but killed their viability. Yes, I know, some people are still marketing those tactics, but we wouldn't put non-unique content on a primary money site today and we certainly won't advise that you do either.
Quality content has become even more important and that means you're likely to be seeing pricing increases across the board for article writing services. The fact is that since Google is demanding higher quality, customers will want it as well and that will lead to price increases from content providers as they strive to hire more native writers and less overseas writers to meet the quality demands. That translates to more costly SEO whether you do it for yourself or higher a firm to do it for you. I know this is probably not what you want to hear, but we want you and your business to be prepared.
Google Loves Authority Sites Bigger is Better

The days of the mini-site are numbered we firmly believe that. For example, look at our ArticleSubmissionReview.com site (clearly an affiliate review site) and compare it to the traditional mini-site approach. While everyone else was selling you $77 eBooks telling you how to create EMD's around a single product, we created an authority site that focuses on a theme and topic but not an individual product. This works for a variety of reasons. First of all because the site is niche focused and not product focused, it will naturally grow over time as more and more products in the niche are exposed. Secondly the income from it is not tied to any one product a very important aspect of affiliate sites. Now, in the past, where EMD type approaches carried so much weight you really didn't have to put that much effort into SEO to get an EMD to be page #1 (some will argue that that is still true, and for awhile, they may still be right). So the logic was that it was fine to churn out a bunch of these product specific mini-sites because they don't require much effort. Our standpoint, however, was that we knew we were going to be SEO'ing the site from the beginning and so we wanted to create a site which we could build for the long haul. We didn't like the churn and burn approach and when our primary traffic model is SEO, we couldn't afford that either. Despite what many believe, SEO is not free. In fact, SEO may be the most costly approach to drive traffic. Even if you're doing it yourself, there is a cost of time, effort, content, etc and those costs tend to be high. However, the end result is that in our opinion SEO is still the most effective traffic to have.
The Formula is Becoming More Balanced

The fact is that Google's algorithm is becoming more and more sophisticated and less easy to game than ever. Will there always be away? Of course there will.
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There will always be a place for SEO and Linkbuilding, but you do have to step up your game. And that is precisely what Google wants. Again, look at their actions and recent history they really don't want the little guy in their midst and what better way to drive him out than to up the ante on what is require to play the game. Here are just some of the recent shifts that show you that you need to up your game. Age is not as important. I didn't say it's not important I'm saying that it is not as important as it once was. We saw many sites that were holding page one rankings for years just because of their age in the niche that suddenly dropped off to page #2 or page # after Panda. Why? Because although they had solid age, they had let time pass them by and were no longer in touch with their competition in terms of site design, content, links and other aspects of site authority. Bottom line is that the age of the site a ranking factor has definitely been depreciated not eliminated, but certainly de-valued. EMD's are not as effective as they were. We've already spent quite a bit of time talking about this, so we won't go into it here, but EMD's still have an edge today but it is getting thinner. While we still employ them as a strategy, we wouldn't recommend that you build your business around this tactic. EDU and GOV links have been downgraded. This is something that hasn't gotten a lot of buzz, but it is true. The Government and Educational sites lobbied pretty aggressively with Google to devalue the edge that their links had been given in the past. Why? The reason is that they were just sick and tired of being bombarded with all of the spam comments and knew that if their links were devalued there wouldn't be the same incentive for spammers to keep pummeling them. Low quality spun content doesn't go as far as it used to. Spun content is still effective for offsite linkbuilding, but it is not as effective as it was. The simple fact is that many networks are getting more picky about it because the indexing rate of spun content is going down. This means that the quality of spun content must go up to compensate. Though we employ and teach article spinning, at some point in the future it is likely going to lose its effectiveness even further. Even site design has more impact than it used to. As we have discussed in our mention of the above the fold related conversations, site design does have more of an impact today as well. Google is determined to make the user experience better and dipping into the design of your site and how it aides or detracts from
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that experience is certainly within their purview and it likely will continue to broaden as well. Think of it like a law once it's passed, it never really goes away. Kind of like toll booths, right? They never go away even though their charter expired, they just look for new ways to expand the charter. I highly doubt that this trend of site design influencing rankings is going away either. Link relevance is becoming more important. While relevance is still largely irrelevant, there has been a small step toward that direction of getting more relevant links within your niche. If you follow us you'll remember a recent blog post where we discussed this very topic with SEO rockstar Terry Kyle. You can read more here if you like Is Link Relevance Relevant?. In that post I am very candid that the concept is very much over-hyped and I still believe that. I do, however, see that a small shift in that direction has begun. The conclusions of that post are still valid, but a small shift is underway.
Google is Forging Ahead with Social Marketing

Google has been slow to use social marketing because they haven't had a good solution. Maybe Google +1 will succeed where Google Buzz floundered, who knows. But what we do know is that Google is clearing laser targeted on Social Media and this is not something new. This actually began with the Caffeine update many months ago, but all signs are indicating that this trend is only growing. With the Panda update, Google admitted that they compared the ban lists that people can create in Google Chrome (their browser) to the results of the algorithm change. That statement was a very curious one because it really revealed a lot. They are basically saying that they're using their Chrome browser for market research and that it is very likely that they may use that feedback directly within the search algorithm at some time in the future.
Authority Means Incoming Link Authority Matters Too

Obviously by now youre getting the entire authority theme of this eBook and I know I just added it as item #1 in this list, but you need to extend that to think of the links that you go after as well. Focus on the easy stuff that you can do to build more evergreen authority links to your site. One of the easiest ways to do that is to build up more high authority profiles on sites such as YouTube.com and others where you can create a profile. Now were not talking about SEO profile link services, but rather the crme of the crop sites out there (see list previously mentioned above).
Wrapping it Up
In general, all of the ropes are tightening and to be effective in the months and years to come you're going to have to become more and more professional there's just no other way around it. I'm a former Navy guy a submariner and nuclear engineer to be precise so let me give you a Navy metaphor for this situation we find ourselves in. Imagine you're on a huge aircraft carrier and you spot a torpedo in the water coming at you. It's moving slowly and it's a long way out, but it is definitely tracking you and gaining ground. Now, you know you're on the world's largest and most fortified naval warship, but you still know that your course will be altered. You know that change is coming and that you need to get prepared for it. You are not frantically clamoring that the sky is falling, but you also are smart enough to know that there will be an outcome and it likely will not be a positive experience. That pretty much sums up this shift that Panda has initiated. Many have very falsely fallen into the belief that this update was just targeting content farms and sites like Ezinearticles.com and such dont be fooled. The fact is that the quality content aspect has hurt many more affiliate marketers especially newbies than content farms. This is mostly because newbie marketers tend to buy up a lot of the Clickbank courses out there and they are generally teaching tactics from 2 or 3 years ago that are simply out of date and don't work. For example, how many auto-blogging programs and courses are still being sold? Auto-blogging has been dying off rapidly over the last few months, yet it's still being promoted left and right because it seems so easy and newbies want to believe that Internet Marketing is easy.
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S E CT I O N 6 : Po s t- Pa n d a SE O
SEO Tactics You Need to Migrate Towards
There are some overarching themes that you should begin to adopt or migrate towards. You see the torpedo coming, so let's brace for impact. This advice is not meant to be some sort of major shift in our approach or yours to SEO and linkbuilding. Instead it is about making some gradual shifts that will help you transition over time. Mike and I have never been extremists we consider ourselves to be pragmatic. So when something becomes more effective or less effective we shift with the times. In our opinion that is the only smart way to approach SEO. We know tons of SEO people out there that define themselves based on certain controversial opinions on topics such as spinning, or black hat techniques, etc But thats never really been our approach because things change. In fact, the one constant in SEO is change and for that very reason we like to continually re-evaluate our stance on various topics. Now more than ever, quality is the theme of the day in SEO. Google has made it abundantly clear that their mission going forward is to emphasize quality and that goes hand in hand with authority. As you saw in the quotes from Google, they have more than 500 more changes coming our way this year so brace for impact. Now I dont mean that as a fear tactic thats not our style. But we do fully believe that they have shown their cards, so to speak, and the direction of subsequent algorithm changes is pretty obvious. This section is about some strategies that you may not be using now that you may want to start to explore and dip into. It doesnt mean abandon what youre doing by any means, but Id say a 20% shift in your time and budget to these strategies would be a wise investment I know were doing just exactly that only probably more like 30%.
More Traditional White-Hat SEO

Mike and I both really hate all of the white hat, gray hat, black hat BS but it's the jargon people are used to hearing, so we'll roll with it. I swear every time I even write those words I feel like I'm writing a Dr. Seuss book one fish two fish red fish blue fish! Yes, sad that I know that Dr. Seuss phrase off the top of my head, but with an 11 month old daughter all of those childhood books are coming back to haunt me! LOL (So, sorry, I can't take it white hat will be called traditional SEO from here on out).
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More traditional SEO is all about doing things that encourage people to come to your site, encourage Google to find your site, encourage people to want to come back and to link to your site on their own. Traditional SEO does not normally involve active linkbuilding but rather is geared towards stimulated user generated linkbuilding. While more aggressive but still ethical linkbuilding, like what we teach and practice, has really dominated the SEO landscape the past few years, traditional SEO can still be very powerful but it is more of an art than a science. A lot of it revolves around creative marketing techniques and very little of it is simple and repeatable. Guest blog postings, however, are simple and repeatable and very firmly in the traditional SEO camp. The reason that they are an effective strategy is that they do a few things for you. For one they increase your brand awareness and expose your writing style and content to another audience. If you put out quality content this can help you gradually build your traffic and customer base. This is NOT going to happen quickly, but with sustained guest blog postings you will see a gradual, if slow, growth over time. If you don't, well, you're not doing it right or not enticing the readers with your content and/or author box. Another reason, however, that guest blog postings are going to be helpful is that they generate more relevant links. Now, I want to be very clear on this point. We still firmly believe that link relevance is largely not relevant. We just recently did an extensive blog post on the subject and we stand by its conclusions. That being said, we have seen a very small shift towards more relevant links in this past update and predict that it will continue, however, for various reasons discussed in that blog post it will never be a huge factor.
The blog post being referenced is entitled Is Link Relevance Relevant (just click on it to go to the blog and read for yourself).
Link Bait & Creative Marketing Creative marketing can be a big, big win for your site. Now, it's called creative for a reason and it may not be up your alley, but that doesnt mean that you should ignore it as a big potential source of traffic. This is probably one of the fastest ways to stimulate natural links to your site and improve your authority. Now, were not the most creative guys on the planet and well be quite honest about this as we always are this is NOT our strong suit, but it is something that we will be expanding a lot in the months to come. That being said, it doesnt mean that we dont recognize the value that link bait offers.
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Here are just a few ideas that may or may not be relevant. The main thing here is to get you thinking outside of the box. Now some of these youll want to combine with list building by providing them a way of signing up to your list. Create a valuable resource targeted to your niche Lots of different options here like lists, how to information, reports, case studies just make sure it is very targeted to your site. Create a tool or widget These are really great ways to get people to bookmark and link to your site naturally. If you do it right, its also a terrific way to build your list. Just offer a free version with no optin and then another version with expanded functionality that requires an optin to your marketing list (still a free tool though). Interview Someone of Interest This doesnt have to be someone famous, just someone that relates to your niche. You can even interview your customers that are using your product in a way that your other readers may like to hear about or are having success using your product. These make great interviews because people can connect with an average Joe. Hold A Contest Contest are also great ways to get your readers to engage and if you make the prize something relevant to your niche you attract the right type of people to the contest. You can also include requirements in the contest that help your SEO require them to leave a comment on a specific post, for example. Do A Free Giveaway Similar to a contest, only here you just give everyone a free giveaway. Obviously you have to think of the logistics of how to make this work. Try the Humor Angle This is not our strong suit either, but you can do funny videos, clever comics, funny artwork remember its just meant to get people engaged, but youll always have more success if you can somehow keep it niche related. Well, thats far from an exhaustive list there are as many ideas as you can imagine (and many more you havent thought about). Spend some dedicated time each month trying to come up with a new link bait item and roll one idea out each month youre bound to stumble onto something good. And if you dont like any of the above or just want to try something different then just search Google on link bait ideas youll find plenty of good stuff.
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Time to Start Giving It Away Over the last year or so there has really been an uptick in online document sharing sites and if you get creative, these can be a great source of additional links and some traffic too. The way these sites work is that you create a document (PDF is recommended and trusted) and then give it away for free by uploading it to their sites. Now this is not an SEO tactic that will make a huge impact in your site, nor is it a sustaining source of traffic, but when youre getting started, all of these avenues should be pursued with vigor. The sooner you can get into profit and/or ramp up your profits, the more you can invest to grow quicker. Like writing an article and submitting it to EzineArticles.com, the point is to establish yourself as an expert and impress your readers with the quality of your free information. You want to entice them to follow some of the links in your giveaway document to bring them through to your site and convert them to buyers. Now this works fairly well in the sense that people that go through the effort to search out and download your information are generally very targeted readers and if you do a good job with the free content you have a very good chance of turning them into a loyal follower. Below youll find a quick list of some of the sites you will want to consider. Each have their own requirements, so youll have to experiment and come up with the ones you like best, etc but use this as a starting point. Also, this is just a small list, you can find many more if you spend some time looking around. Search Google for keywords like free pdf downloads and document sharing and youll surely come up with a bunch more to evaluate. http://scribd.com http://www.slideshare.net http://issuu.com/ http://www.free-ebooks.net/ http://www.getfreeebooks.com/ http://www.globusz.com/ http://www.yudu.com/ http://www.youpublish.com/ http://www.ebook2u.com/directory/add.shtml http://www.jogena.com/ http://www.virtual-ebooks.com/directory.htm http://ebooks.biz/
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http://e-library.us/ Download.com upload via https://upload.cnet.com/ Put A Stronger Emphasis on Social Media Marketing This is something that we know to be important but we have a bit of a different take on it than most people. First of all, we fully believe that social media marketing works and can produce very high ROI. However, we dont believe that its nearly as simple as most people make it out to be. First, lets define a few things. Social proof is more of what we focus on and social proof is just about getting some social links to your site to stir up a little activity and buzz around your site in the social forums and media outlets. Social media marketing, however, is in our opinion as much of a specialized service as SEO is. Quality social media marketers earn six figure salaries and they deserve it. But notice the operative word is quality social media marketers. The reason we talk about it this way is that it is our believe that social media marketing is as much art as it is science and that it is not something you can easily summarize in ten easy steps. Just like being a great salesman is not something that is easily learned. Now, you can become a good salesman through training and study, but the really great ones are born with it its part of their nature. And that nature is a sociable nature that makes social media marketers effective as well. So our recommendation is this. For now, focus on the social proof angle and automate your social media marketing with tools and plugins. Continue to educate yourself in social media marketing, but make it more of a long-term goal. The reason we say that is that you can easily waste a ton of time on this stuff and get absolutely no return and we hate to see people do that and the ROI is just too speculative at this point. Its our opinion that right now there are only two social media networks to bother with Facebook and Twitter. They have been proven to provide the most ROI right now, but personally we are not heavy into either because of the time constraints. Many big marketers have abandoned them and all other social media. While we think its too early to go that route, but we do encourage you to proceed with caution and watch the clock you cant afford to waste time (money). Get A List Already You may wonder why Im talking about list building tactics in an SEO eBook and youre probably right it doesnt really belong here. But, heres the deal, if youre investing in SEO then I believe its a fair assumption on our part that youre looking to make more
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money from your site. If thats the case, you really need to step up your game with list building. How can I say that not even seeing your site? Well, youre right again and I may be being too presumptuous, but the fact is about 95% of all of the sites we have evaluated for SEO Analysis have had weak list building efforts. So I would say that it is a general assessment that I have come to conclude about most marketers their list building generally needs some help. First off, if you are not using list building and email marketing now, well, theres no time like the present to get started. In fact, start yesterday its that important. Remember that our goal here is to help you build a business not just hobby income. Businesses need sustainable and repeatable systems for making money and that is exactly what list building and email marketing provide. If youre already doing it congratulations and sorry if we stepped on your toes! Improve Your Business Systems Again, this doesnt really fit with SEO, but is more in line with the overall theme of making more money from your site. Google is cracking down dont you think its time for you to start knuckling down yourself and step up your game? There are three ways to make more money from your site. Drive More Traffic to It This is something we focus a great deal on via SEO (though there are many other paid traffic methods you should explore as well). Its pretty obvious that if youre getting more traffic you should be making more sales as long as the traffic is of the same quality. Improve your conversions Equally obvious is that if you make more conversions from the same
Aweber Sidebar
For list management and auto responder needs we highly recommend AWeber. The reason is simply that your list is your most prized asset and you dont want to trust it to some freebie auto responder program that you then abandon later on. The reason is that these freebie versions will actually cost you money much more than you can afford. Down here in Brazil there is a saying that says barato sai caro which roughly translates to cheap can get expensive. What that means is when you try to save money sometimes it ends up costing you a lot more money down the road than if you had just spent a bit more upfront. Aweber is a perfect example of that principle. Lets say you start with a freebie list management software and build up a couple thousand names and begin to outgrow it and want to make a switch. Well, youll likely lose about 80% of your list because the reputable list management software companies like Aweber will *not* let you import names to their lists because they have no way of knowing that they voluntarily joined through proper legal methods. So you end up having to try to entice people already on your list to join your other list not a fun thing to do. Aweber is widely recognized as one of the top service providers in the industry and their deliverability rate is superb. Many cheap or free solutions have terrible deliverability rates and what good is a list if your email to them always ends up in the spam folder? And the reality is that Aweber is very affordable to get started at less than $20 a month anyway, so theres really no reason to look for something cheaper. Another option is iContact or 1Shopping cart, but we dont use them so we cant give you any personal feedback on them.
amount of traffic your efficiency and profits will also rise. Improve Backend Systems This is something that Mike and I are working very hard on and its a big investment, but it pays off big time. Now it doesnt have to be a big investment in money if you do it right and many of the items have very little cost (other than time) to implement. Now everyone likes to talk about the first two options above, but theres not a lot of discussion about the third and it is by far the most powerful. This is the single quickest way to improve your bottom line if you are already making some money. The quickest way to double or triple that income is to get more from what youve got. So, here are some ideas on what Im talking about. This is just a short list, but I challenge you to walk through the flow of what actions a user takes throughout your system and find ways that you could improve the process, automate it more and introduce new revenue options. Here are some ideas Look to move a portion of your business focus away from Google. This is tough, but you need to begin to branch out and identify other traffic sources as well. For example, the document sharing sites listed, or other traffic models. The point is that Google is going to continue to skew its favoritism towards bigger sites that trend is firmly entrenched and will continue. So the little guys are going to need to become specialists outside of Google as well. Were not saying walk away from Google, were just saying that you need to look at the writing on the wall and predict a year out. Do you think its going to be easier or harder to rank in Google in a year? I know our answer Now some may take exception to this advice and even find it odd since we are Affiliate Marketers ourselves, but our first advice is to start moving beyond affiliate marketing. Now we love affiliate marketing, but it has many downsides as well and our best advice is to do what we do and that is to combine the two your own products or services with affiliate marketing. So these remaining recommendations will focus on that. I know its challenging, but if youre not building a list while also doing affiliate marketing you are really shooting yourself in the foot. Its harder, but not impossible, so the sooner you get started the better off youll be.
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If youre marketing an eBook and its making you decent money, consider investing in having your own eBook in the same niche created to marketing instead via the same site. If the site name is and EMD and you cant do that, then create another supplementary report that you offer to them when they go to purchase the eBook so that (a) you capture them on your list and (b) you can sell them an upsell later. So the idea would be a page that says before you purchase download our free report on and entice them to optin and download. Then just redirect them directly to the affiliate offer. Even if they dont buy, at least youve captured them on your list. Make sure the product you give them is a freebie and very related to the item theyre purchasing. Then on your email autoresponder give them three really good emails spread out every 4 days or so and on the 4th email, sell them your own very closely related eBook. Personally I would sell something very affordable like the $7 price point. Then three more emails and then another related eBook from you for maybe $17, etc If youre main style or method is EMD based, wed recommend you re-think that approach. Income is much more stable if you have a larger authority based site that can promote multiple products than a single product specific domain. Set a goal to identify a niche that you want to focus on and begin to create an authority site in that niche that will be more broad and support many products via affiliate promotion. Dont go too broad and dont go too specific. Also, you need to select a niche that (a) you really enjoy and (b) that you can stand out in. I really would not recommend the IM niche, not because were worried about the competition but because it is very hard to brand yourself and set yourself apart plus the niche is crowded with all kinds of newbies trying to act like experts and that makes your job that much tougher. Besides that, competition is fierce and youll have a hard time competing. Experienced marketers that have good backend systems can LOSE MONEY on initial sales just to steal them from you because they know their numbers and know that they can make it up on the backend. Exactly the reason were trying to get you to go that route yourself with better systems and your own products. The
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best advice we can give you about niche selection is making sure that (a) you really enjoy it and know it well and (b) that you can create products to appeal to that niche. Even if you continue with affiliate marketing for the long haul (as we have continued to do) the goal here is that you can begin to think of the affiliate marketing as a funded proposal to your own products. In other words, a funded proposal is a way of getting traffic to pay for itself and on your list so that you can monetize it on your backend offers and generate revenue to go get more traffic. Thats how the big guys can lose money on the front end. If you have your own products already, then focus on growing that inventory and streamlining your sales process. Add cross sells, add upsells, add new products at different price points. You need to maximize the revenue your list can generate and you do that through efficiency. The temptation is to expand into other niches, but resist it. The reason you have that temptation is that you already know how to get a site to a certain level and so you want to go out and do another, but the reality is youre leaving much more money on the table. If you have your own products and they are doing well, you need to focus. You need to dedicate yourself to that site and the expansion of the revenue it can provide. Listbuilding, more products, better shopping cart (see recommendation below) integration, membership and continuity, more price points and complementary product offers, etc There is likely no reason why you can triple your income focusing on these areas. Heres a little secret for you. If you do a good job with your own products, deliver impressive quality and over deliver every chance you get and create rapport with your list, I can assure you that you will have a percentage of your list that will literally buy everything you ever produce no exaggeration. That is why you need to offer more products and higher priced products and create a natural sales progression and funnel from lower priced products to your higher priced offerings. I can assure you that your income from your site (if it is based on your own products) will increase dramatically this way. If you need a shopping cart solution for processing your own products we have begun with a new one that we are super impressed with. We spent several weeks
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evaluating shopping cart software before selecting it and would highly recommend it PremiumWebCart.com. It does everything you can think of - digital product delivery, its own membership sites, its own affiliate program with more options that you could believe, integration with fulfillment companies, and much, much more. If you decide to check it out, make sure to look at how it compares to the competition like Nanacast and InfusionSoft we were very impressed and it is doing great for us. We will be rolling out an affiliate program with it very soon. If you are marketing your own product and dont already have an affiliate program, launch one. Were in the middle of doing that ourselves and should have done it a year ago dont make the same mistake we made. Focus on continuity and affordability. Dont overprice your products on the contrary under price them significantly so that your customers are very impressed with the value you deliver. Think of every product that you sell having at least an option for a continuity product to accompany it. Even very affordable $7 a month or $9 a month continuity programs can be very productive and profitable over time. And due to the super affordable nature of a $7 subscription, the amount of content you have to deliver to over deliver is not that high. A very affordable product that you may wish to look into that goes into these small continuity programs in great detail is Nano Continuity by Ryan Lee. This program covers everything you need to know about setting up and creating these small continuity programs and is really a gem, plus its quite affordable at just $77 and Ryan Lee is a stellar marketer with a rock solid reputation. Engage Your User Another area that we feel Google is watching closely is the user experience on your site. If you have Google Analytics there is a lot of very telling data in there and I highly doubt that its an accident that Google created it. Time on site, pages viewed per visitor, bounce rate, comments left on your site all of those things are critical to your user experience and you should be paying very close attention to them Im sure Google is. They also reflect the user involvement on your site. There is a juggling and balancing act that the Google algorithm is doing to put all of this in check comparatively. For example, if youre getting thousands of links to your site but no traffic hmmm it smells funny. Or if youre getting all of these links but no one is
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commenting on your site, again, it doesnt balance out well. So keep that in mind and try to get inside of Googles mind a bit and youll come up with a better high level understanding of how to keep things natural as best you can. What you need to do is focus on increasing those metrics and track them from month to month. Track them when you do a particular type of promotion and observe the impact. Also design around those elements when possible. For example, lets say you want to run a survey on your site to engage the user and get some feedback. Spend an extra hour or two mapping out the flow of it all and focus on your metrics. Ask yourself what could you do to turn this campaign into something that generated more page views per visitor, or more time on site per visitor, etc Think out of the box and really design a solution that is all-encompassing and not just slam out a quick survey that meets your main objectives but ignores important secondary objectives. Make sense? Now, the survey was just one example, but no matter what approach you are evaluating, the methodology is the same.
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POST PANDA TOOL RECOMMENDATIONS

The purpose of this report is really not about tool sales via affiliate links, so were really not putting in a lot of meat here. Besides, most of it is already up on our review site at ArticleSubmissionReview.com. If you have a Panda specific question about a given tool, the best thing to do would be to leave a comment on the site for that tool review page and either Mike or I will respond there. We did, however, briefly want to touch on tools just because there are a couple of notable things to mention. We didnt include SpyGlass, Aweber or others that we already covered within the context of this eBook. For the most part we have seen very little impact on the tools that we use and market via ArticleSubmissionReview.com. There are some other tools (that we won't mention here) that we have been on the fence about/using/evaluating for awhile now that were just decimated by Panda. One article marketing network in particular has all but disappeared due to atrocious indexing rates now that make it a waste of time to even use. But that is not a site that we have promoted or endorsed in the past, nor is it reviewed on ArticleSubmissionReview.com. One tool/network that we have been impressed with since Panda is the old veteran Unique Article Wizard. It has really been coming on strong again lately and will be getting put back on our Best List for 2011. They have put a lot of effort into policing their network, expanding their network and expanding their in-house staffing as well and the work is paying off. We've seen continued and gradual improvements with the network in the past couple of months and it has moved into our #1 recommended public network for article marketing efforts. The one thing you have to keep in mind, however, is that you must do a better job of spinning your content than you did in the past if you want to get the same amount of links coming in. In other words, it takes a bit more work now than it used to. So go the extra mile and put the extra effort into higher quality spun content. If you dont, then dont be surprised when you see fewer incoming links. We recommend three manual sentence rewrites and then synonym level spinning on top of that
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(our #1 spinning tool recommendation remains The Best Spinner it just keeps getting better with all of the new features that have been added to it in past months). Note The Best Spinner is just about to come out with a new version as well, so definitely check it out if you havent yet. Jon Leger provides top quality tools and hes added a ton of features into TBS the past few months. Other networks like Build My Rank are also proving to be just as effective now as before. This is primarily because the owner had the foresight to insist on 100% unique content from day one and has a very clean and quality network that doesn't set off any red flags to Google. We have put thousands of posts through Build My Rank and it remains one of the single most cost effective linkbuilding solutions available today by far our top recommendation. Furthermore because of its very high indexing rate (over 95% of our posts are all indexed and we have content there for more than 14 months now) and unique content requirements it is likely to a very viable and solid solution for a long time.
For more tool related information check our site at ArticleSubmissionReview.com.
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SECTION 7: Take Action

Most of the information you need has been put on the table at this point, so the rest is really up to you. Remember, purchasing this eBook is not enough you need to take action and implement some of these suggestions. Heres our suggested way of doing this. 1. Print out this eBook so you can mark it up with notes as you read it. 2. Read it a couple of times. Some things will be apparent the first time through and others will sink in or reveal themselves to you when you read it a second time. Make sure to take notes and jot down any ideas as you read theres no time like while its fresh in your mind. 3. Go through each of the itemized and numbered suggestions with three questions in mind. This will help you identify the high priority fixes. a. Does it apply to your site? b. Do you need to address it with urgency? c. Should it be a second priority? 4. Endeavor to broaden your horizons and look to implement some of the more traditional SEO tactics especially link bait. Set a plan to try one new technique per month. 5. Identify what new types of systems you could use to increase automation and efficiency. Schedule some time to evaluate your options. 6. Map out your sales funnel (the path your client takes from arrival on your site to purchase) and try to be objective about ways you could enhance it using some of the suggestions in this eBook. 7. Look to expand your product line (if you already have one) or ways to create one (if you dont). 8. Look to improve your list building (if you have a list building system) or implement one if you dont. The fact is that there is no cookie cutter system that we can lay out for this process. Ive tried here to give some step-by-step guidance, but this is not a process that lends itself well to that type of an approach because there are so many variables and so many different types of marketing approaches affiliate versus e-commerce, for example.
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Personally, when I approach a more complex topic like this I just start by taking notes on the eBook itself (after I print it out I guess Im too old school, I dont like to read books on a computer). Then I transfer them to either a Word Doc or a notepad (the pad and paper kind, not the notpad.exe within Windows). I find that this double-entry process is a good thing because as I go back and look over my notes to organize them, re-writing them triggers more thought, more analysis and more ideas. After that I like to group them by priority and/or other designations that I might add like budget or time to implement or difficulty or whether I can outsource them, etc
SUMMARY
Mike and I both want to extend our thanks to you for your purchase of this report and we hope that you have found this product to be informative and useful. Remember that SEO is a fluid not a solid it is constantly moving and changing. Our number one goal with this eBook is that you being to learn how to not only backward analysis, but also identify forward moving trends so that you can be well prepared for tomorrows rounds of algorithm changes. And as always, work smarter not harder!
Mike & Troy CTC Ventures, LLC http://ArticlesOnTap.com http://ArticleSubmissionReview.com http://ArticleMarketingLies.com http://www.facebook.com/ArticleSubmissionReview HelpDesk http://CTCSupport.com
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TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued)

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FTC Earnings Disclosure and Notice of Affiliate Links

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THE GOAL OF THIS EBOOK

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WHO ARE WE & WHY SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO US?

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Backing Up What does it mean to be an authority site?

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Don't Confuse Authority with PageRank

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Defining Authority What does the Talking Panda Have to Say?

This information is a direct quote from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/moreguidance-on-building-high-quality.html

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Defining Authority Our Definition

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SEO PowerSuites SpyGlass

Why Its Not That Simple

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Internal versus External PageRank Say what?

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Putting Some Numbers Behind the Logic

So, that disclaimer aside, here we go For Site Footprint

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(a good spot to take some notes)

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Content Related Panda Tips & Checklist

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Size Matters How big is your..CONTENT?

Does Your Content All Look The Same?

What is the Content Footprint of Your Site?

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How Much and How Frequently Are You Posting Content?

Watch Your Keyword Density

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Onsite Related Panda Tips & Checklist

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Ratio of Information to Advertising on the Page

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Outbound Link Count

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Hide Your Affiliate Links