Synonyms are managed automatically by Google for years now, but it seems that there are a few smart & simple ways that you will allow you to increase your ranking using the following Synonym Google Ranking Technique presented below.

So why all the fuss about synonyms and Google being able to understand them? “Is it such a big deal?” you may ask. When you have your site ranked for “seo professional” and a query on its synonym “seo expert” lists you way below the first position, you are bleeding traffic. Check how much the monthly searches can differ based on the searched keyword.

Imagine the traffic you may gain by simply optimizing your page for those synonyms too. That is why I randomly picked the 941% in the title of this article as it really depends on your situation. It can be 1% or it can be 10.000%. It is up to your niche and your own research and steps you take in order to conquer those ranks. A search engine cannot distinguish objects in photos and doesn’t accurately understand the meaning of a sentence. At the end of the day, the search engine’s main goal is to return the best results for the user’s search. In order to do that, Google has made efforts in teaching its algorithm “humanish” (aka Google Hummingbird) and has moved well beyond just word matching, to matching based on intent and understanding. The big G invests a lot in understanding concepts and synonyms are only a small example. This is really a revolutionary step in making search engines smarter in order to make order  in the huge pile of information clutter. Ok. So let me tell you how it works and what you can do to increase your traffic on synonyms.

How does Google Rank a Site on Synonym Keywords?

With the risk of over loading you with information, allow me to clear things up a bit about what a synonym is. A synonym is commonly known as being a word or a phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. There are simple, common synonyms like “happy – joyful” or “impartial – unbiased” but we also tend to use more subtle synonym expressions like “the East” as a synonym for the former “Soviet empire”. Google is getting better and better at understanding synonyms while it is becoming less and less dependent on exact keyword matches for returning results. If you are searching for “SEO Consultant”, Google will understand that even if a page says “SEO Expert” or “SEO Services” or “SEO company” these all represent the same concept. So it ranks pages that talk about “SEO Experts” and “SEO Companies” for the query “SEO Consultant”.

If your page is not well optimized for the synonym keywords you are losing a lot of SEO Visibility and Traffic.

How does Google Actually Detect Synonyms?

Back in 2010 Matt Cutts, The Head of Google’s Webspam Team posted a blog post about how Google find synonyms where he referred an article about how Google tries to understand language and not only strings. He also goes further to underline the importance of synonyms for Google:

“However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches [note from Matt: of course, it could be a subtle change] across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.”

In a recent article, by Bill Slawski, about some Google Patents that Google uses to detect synonyms, an interesting patent is found that evidentiates how they go about detecting synonyms. It shows technique that they may also be using to identify synonyms using internal and external links anchor text. The basic idea is that Google can learn about things from both on-site and off-site factors. Having said that I think it is clear why Synonyms are a very important component when you talk about On-Page and Off-Page Optimization.

You can easily lose or gain traffic due to Not-Optimizing simple things that shall give you what is yours already.

The thing to keep in mind, however, is that in order to teach someone (or something) about any language-specific concept, you sometimes need to go broader. So it is with Google and the synonyms-inclusive searches. What we understand to be a synonym may not be immediately translatable to a machine. Or, as AJ Kohn would put it, while “auto”, “automobile” and “car” are all by default wired in our brains, there isn’t really anything intrinsic that makes one of those words trigger the others. Each of them can be used in a context that makes it no longer related to the other.

Sometimes the synonym that Google takes into account is not necessarily a grammatical one, but rather a logical, or contextual one.

Because the real stake for any search engine is to figure out not “what answer fits your question?” but rather “what did you really want to find out?”. Which is probably why Google will return results for “floral delivery” when you search for “flower shops”. Because that’s probably what you really wanted, isn’t it?

Synonyms vs Co-citation and Co-occurrence as Other Potential Rank Influencers

We need to clear up the terms “co-citation” and “co-occurrence” so we can easily make a distinction between them and synonyms. Why? Because we are trying to figure out how does Google rank a site by using synonyms and no other factors. So, like in any other serious research, we have to take into consideration all the variables that might influence the understanding of our subject (plus the fact that these are some interesting concepts that deserve our attention). Co-occurrence is the process whereby the words on the linking pages influence a site’s rankings. This means that the close proximity of important keywords develops a tight association. For example, let’s say you have a website about cooking. If a webpage with an article about fry pans, recipes, kitchen utensils links to your site, then it is likely that your site will get a ranking boost for these keywords. Google understands the correlation between the two of you and might use it as a ranking factor in its algorithm.

Co-citation is the process whereby other links on the linking pages influence a site’s ranking. As peculiar as it might sound, this is actually the process of link building without actual links. Let me explain you why: let’s say that websites A, B, C, D all link to the websites 1, 2, 3, 4. Even if web pages 1, 2, 3 and 4 don’t link to each other, Google will consider that these web pages are related to each other. The more sites they are linked from, the stronger the relation becomes between them.

How to Identify Your Synonym Problems and Opportunities?

Watching the screenshot below, the one with the “seo expert” search query, we see that Google is doing pretty well at matching the right synonyms.

As we can see, the results are indeed relevant for both cases but they are not  exactly the same. The website that used to be listed 2nd for the query “seo consultant” is listed 6th for the search query “seo expert”. This is because Google identified the synonym between the two words but it ranked better other sites that targeted the exact “seo expert” keyword. If this page was a bit more optimized, by using the phrase “seo expert” a few more times than this page could have ranked higher in the SERPS as the relation between the query and the page was stronger. These differentiated results had us thinking about the effects that synonyms might have in the overall ranking of a site. As we were intrigued enough by this fact, we went further with our research and we found a relevant example of webpage whose ranking is influenced by the Google’s synonym detection algorithm. Just like in the previous case, the site Towerhobbies.com ranks different for the search queries “remote control airplanes” and “radio control airplanes”. But there is more here than meets the eye.

Google understands that RC (or R/C) is a synonym for remote or radio control and highlights it with bold even if we didn’t search for this specific keyword. Even more, www.towerhobbies.com ranks high for the keywords “remote control airplanes” even if it doesn’t contain these keywords in the title, in the domain, in the snippet or anywhere else on the site.

Another important metric that might influence the ranking of this page in Google are the Anchors that might be pointing to this site. Looking at the anchor text profile of this site we found out that the keyword “remote control airplanes” is not used as an anchor text for this site on external backlinks. However, the website ranks very high for these keywords. Quite interesting, right?

• But why does Google bold “RC” when I am looking for “remote control airplanes”?
• How does it know that they are synonyms?

It’s important to know that synonyms depend on the other words in your search query. There are many signals that Google takes into consideration when providing the results. Also, the personalization of the search can mean that you won’t necessarily always see the word “RC” bolded for “remote control”, but only when the algorithms think it is useful. Let’s take another example for a better understanding. When searching for “GM”, there are several potential correspondents to this abbreviation, from General Motors to Gmail. When searching for “GM cars”, you will see that General Motors will be bolded. When you search for “GM corn”, “Genetically Modified” will be bolded. For the search “GM high scores”, “game maker” will be bolded. Apparently, there are dozens of synonyms that Google understands and uses in relation with the “GM” keyword.

How to Find The Important Synonyms for Your Site?

The best way to look for synonyms is really just to use a dictionary, or thesaurus. The latter is better, because it focuses specifically on similar alternatives to a word. And like with many other things (but not all), the online version is often times better than the paper one.

Thesaurus.com, for instance, allows you to look for word synonyms but also to analyze and play around with the results.

You can sort them by relevance, complexity and length, you can filter them by common usage and you can also display them as a proximity graph if you’re a premium user (but if you’re not and don’t want to be, you can use visualthesaurus.com as an alternative for synonym maps). In addition, it lists a separate list of synonyms for each of the primary meanings of the word. To top it off, you also get a list of antonyms, to help you get additional ideas of what would constitute a relevant related word.

Making judgment calls is still necessary even when using a powerful thesaurus tool.

There are other online thesaurus options to be found, such as the Merriam-Webster thesaurus (which, interestingly enough, doesn’t have an entry for the word “thesaurus”) or the Collins English Thesaurus. While both are extremely competent, they are nowhere near as useful, or visually appealing, as the previously mentioned ones. Tower Hobbies , for instance, deals mainly with remote control models. Or is it radio control models? Probably the latter, since that’s the wording they use on the website, and they show up on the first page on a Google search for “radio control airplanes”. What’s interesting, though, is that they also show up on the first page for “remote control airplanes”, even though they don’t write themselves as such. It’s probably a good guess that users look for both, though. Yet, the most accurate way to find out which are the synonyms that are really worth using them is Google Keyword Planner. Here you can check out what the traffic for a certain keyword is and in what direction is worth investing energy and also money. If a synonym looks really great but has a small volume of searches, maybe you should find another one. Let’s take a look at the keyword traffic for “remote” and “radio” and see whether Tower Hobbies did the best choice when they chose their keywords. We see that for “radio control airplanes”, the number of average searches per month is around 1000, which is pretty good, but let’s see how are the things going for “remote control airplanes”.

When it comes to “remote control airplanes”, the average monthly searches are 12 times more than the previous keyword. Then, why doesn’t towerhobbies.com get advantage of this highly searched keyword and uses a similar one but not so successful ? As we saw above, Tower Hobbies already ranks well on the first page of Google for “remote control airplanes”  and if this website would invest in this specific keyword it would only propel itself upper.

It is also important to understand the competition for each independent keyword so that you understand the chances you have to rank on the synonym keyword you target.

Use the Synonyms SEO Ranking Technique and Increase Your Rankings in Days

While the future of Google and other search engines may render this question useless, we’re not quite there yet. So for now, you can still help yourself by helping Google better understand what you’re about. If the object of your business can be expressed through more than one word/expression, perhaps it’s time to add synonyms to your site’s content. Of course, you have to be careful when doing so, because there’s a natural way of doing this, and a not-so-natural-seeming-way of doing it. If, for instance, Tower Hobbies were to present themselves as not only “The World’s Premier Supplier of the Finest in Radio Control Models”, but also, somewhere else on the first page, as the premier supplier of radio & remote control models, this would make a lot of sense and wouldn’t come off as shady . This could simply be achieved by clarifying the terminology in a presentation text, by adding a paragraph to the extent of “Radio control models, often referred to as remote control models, are models whose movement can be influenced by someone using a radio-wave based transmitter”. It’s not only good for Google ranks, it’s good for your audience and good for yourself. For very important keywords you should also alter the titles of the pages as those are very important metrics that are used for ranking. In this case the title should be: “

OLD – Tower Hobbies – Best Source for Radio Control ( R/C or RC ) Cars, Trucks, Airplanes, Boats and Helicopters NEW – Tower Hobbies – Best Source for Radio or Remote Control ( R/C or RC ) Cars, Trucks, Airplanes, Boats and Helicopters

Modify just a few pages at first, so that you can keep track and see if there is any exposure increase in the rankings. Have a variety of presentation texts, so that the use of synonyms is natural, organic.

Don’t feel obliged to bring in the synonym(s) with every occurrence of your keyword(s).

If you notice an improvement, extend the strategy to all of your pages, but do so gradually, otherwise it may look like an unnatural spike. Remember that the synonyms algorithm is making progress, so you don’t always need to spoon-feed it. Synonyms need not be next to each other or even in the same section, but the fact that they can be found on your website creates a certain context. This is, again, a matter of strategic choice and of human judgment.

Is this a safe strategy?

If we’re to believe Matt Cutts is not trying to purposefully steer us in the wrong direction, we should probably take his answer in this video as a reassurance that we’re on the right path in using synonyms, as this is probably helping Google’s dedicated team as well.

While cautiously fending off potential “old-school” keyword stuffers, Cutts’ answer is a fairly clear endorsement of the approach we’ve outlined. If you’re feeling uneasy about it, or don’t fully trust your sole judgment, ask someone else to look at the added text with a critical eye. Do not over-optimize. Allow accurate monitoring by making one change at a time. If something goes wrong with the search rankings, you’ll know the cause and you’ll be able to revert to the previous state.

All in all, it’s worth going for the synonyms. And it is a Very Simple Technique.

Google Synonym Detection Issues

Of course, if you ever tried to guess what someone else wanted at a certain point, there is big chance that you got it not only wrong, but completely backwards. It’s only human. So maybe it’s a sign of evolution that Google seems to make “human” mistakes. Looking up “SEO interview questions and answers for experienced” is, in fact, going to give you results about “SEO interview questions and answers for fresher”. As we can see the word experienced is matched with fresher as synonym. It could be a bug or a feature. A possible explanation would: The “experienced” word was the last word in the search, and thus may carry the least weight. So when someone starts a sentence by saying “I’m looking for SEO interview questions and answers for…”, you’ll probably finish the sentence – at least in your head – with “freshers”. Because they are the ones who probably need such suggestions, not experts, right? And since Google is trying to “think” based on what we think, it’s not hard to see why this may have occurred.

The takeaway here is that the algorithm is still learning, and we can help it to be more accurate by creating the correct semantic correlations.

It’s not a 100% predictable mechanism, but then again, that’s what makes it different from the past, and that’s what makes your job as an SEO expert different nowadays.

Fitting as many words and synonyms of those words into your website is no longer the goal, but rather adding specific content while maintaining a natural look.

Conclusion

It may seem as if history repeats itself.

“Are we back to keyword stuffing?”

But if that’s what you’re thinking, you couldn’t be further from the truth. The evolution of this algorithm is going to lead, in time, to the opposite scenario, where you won’t be able to “fool” the machine in pretty much any way, because it will be able to not only read but also understand what you’ve written. It will “get it”. It’s not there yet, but it’s learning, and that’s quite amazing. And you can play a part in the learning process and win from it also.

Use synonyms smartly on your website in order to rank higher not just because you’re obsessed with ranks, but because your website might be relevant to people who search using similar but not quite exactly the same words.

Mark Twain used to say that the difference between the right word and the almost right word was like that between a firefly and a lightning strike. Help Google bridge that gap by cautiously and organically improving your search – or better yet, your “being found” – potential. If, for instance, you’re dealing in electronic health records, there’s no reason to skip mentioning electronic medical records as well. There may be a lot fewer people looking for the latter than for the former, but they’re probably as much in need. And most importantly, you’re not fooling anyone by adding those words to your search word pool. Find the synonyms whose meaning adds value and are worthwhile ranking on. Integrate them seamlessly in your already existing content and watch what happens. Help Google understand what you’re about and you may find that, just like with people, once it “gets you”, you’ll get along just fine.

The post 941% Traffic Increase Exploiting the Synonyms SEO Ranking Technique appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

We don’t want to throw ourselves in the belly of the beast right from the beginning but our first hypothesis is that Google Panda 4.0 does not penalize sites in the way we are used to(total drop from the top 100 SERPS), but instead is deranking or boosting sites ranking.

If you browse just a bit through the articles written on this issue, you will see how the latest Panda is “accused” of being more “soft and gentle” than its elder brothers. Maybe the Google engineers wanted to bring the Google Panda 4.0 Update closer to the origin of the “big furry mammal”. It is known that Pandas are a symbol of peace. For example, hundreds of years ago, warring tribes in China would raise a flag with a picture of a Panda on it to stop a battle or call a truce. Yet, given Google’s declared war against spamming and thin content, we think that there are other characteristics that the search engine copied from the Panda bear: the fact that unlike other bears, giant Pandas do not hibernate. They walk around all year-long, looking for elevations suitable for each seasons but they can be active at any time of the day or night.

This is a really long article so if you do not have the necessary time to read it, just skip to the conclusions. This is short TL;DR conclusion. For more click here.

Conclusion I. “Content Based Topical Authority Sites” are given more SERP Visibility compared to sites that only cover the topic briefly.(even if the site covering the topic briefly has a lot of generic authority). More articles written on the same topic increase the chances for the site to be treated as a “Topical Authority Content Site” on that specific topic.

Google Panda 4.0 Winners – Quality is Not a One Time Act, it is a Habit …

There was not only once when Matt Cutts said that we shouldn’t trust specialized information coming from sites like eHow or generic find-any-generic find-any-answer sites but look for specialized sites instead, the ones that really have related content and well-documented stuff. Even more, in a video posted in April this year, same Cutts stated that he is “ looking forward those rolling out because a lot of people have worked hard so that you don’t just say oh,  this is a well-known site therefore should match for this query, it’s this is a site that actually has some evidence that it should rank for something related to medical queries, and that’s something where we can improve the quality of the algorithms even more.”

Here we are, one month later this video, facing the reality of the SERPs where it seems that indeed, “Topical Authority Content Sites” gained much more ground. Let’s confirm this situation with some examples that speak for themselves.

Winner – Topical Authority Content Focused Sites 

After the latest Panda update, EmedicineHealth  seemed to have won important positions in ranking, as we can see in the screenshot below.

To figure out why did this situation occurred we took the keyword “brown recluse”, for which they’ve won a lot of positions in ranking, and we’ve compared the content they offer on this matter to another site that lost 36 positions on the same keyword, LiveScience.

Winner

Loser

At a first glance, both sites seem to offer good quality information, well written and with logical structures. Even more, livescience.com has great interactivity with its audience, judging by the high number of shares and comments. Nonetheless,  emedicinehealth.com was the one winning more than 99 positions on this keyword and not livescience.com. Why would this apparent paradoxical situation occur?
To start with, livescience.com is a site offering general information about a lot of things. We see that the trending content from this site includes articles from military&spy tech area to best fitness trackers and 3D printing. On the other side, emedicinehealth.com offers articles highly related to the present topic, leaving the impression that this site really is specialized in medical emergencies and really offers reliable content on this matter and related topics.

Also, in the last years, Google’s goal was to return the best possible results that match not just based on the exact match query but on the intent of the user doing the query. It’s clear in our case that  emedicinehealth.com has  had a more in-depth topic covered than a simple article about the problem, like livescience.com has.

It is interesting to see this patent that Google was granted in 2013 regarding the detection of topics in particular pages and documents. Applying this procedure to each individual page across the web Google can map out all the topics for each and every page and create buckets of pages from sites that talk about those specific topics. Using this methodology it is rather easy for Google to understand the most talked topics for individual sites and map them out based on the authority of each individual page relative to that topic.

The patent goes in more details and outlines how it may be used by being cross-referenced to these related applications.

All of the listed references are practically exactly what they would need in order to map the Topical Authority of each site across their index.

 Let’s continue our Google Penguin 4.0 Case Study with more examples that will underline more the Topical Authority Content Update related to this Google Update.

To sustain this affirmation, let’s take another example that has suffered some changes due to Google Panda 4.0. Webopedia is an online tech dictionary providing definitions related to computing and information technology.  www.webopedia.com is among the sites that lost rankings for a lot of keywords, most likely because Google might be looking at in-depth concepts and not just generic and simplistic content nowadays. Let’s take a look at one Webopedia’s definition page :

We find here the definition of a GIF, a graphic interchange format. Although the definition seems correct, this is a broad topic that it is covered only by a  very small article. There are other publications that cover the concept of the GIF in much more detail and those sites are the ones that outperform now Webopedia, after the Google Panda 4.0 update.

We shouldn’t draw a hasty conclusion out of this, believing that dictionaries, by default, won’t be able to rank high due to the Panda 4.0 new algorithmic improvements. Below, you can see two screenshots taken from MedTerms  , an online dictionary specialized in medical terms but  written, as they claim,  with consumers and patients in mind.

When we searched for “kidney”, not only that we found many articles related to kidneys issues from which we can choose the one that might interest us the most, but each of that articles has substantial and relevant content which covers the topic very well.

Winner – Great Site Structure + High Quality Content

Other sites that seem to have benefited from the Google Panda 4.0 update are the ones that focused on unique, high quality and well-organized content. I know that this concept might seem a bit abstract and is always a challenge on deciding what does” high-quality” really mean. We cannot give you an exact, holistic response on this issue but we can try to figure out what really matters at the end of the day:

What does Google consider to be high-quality content? We are going to unravel the answer to this question by analyzing some sites that have been boosted by the Panda update, most likely on quality and structure basis.

We will start our examples with some sites from quite a controversial area: the glamor and celebrity gossip field. Although a lot of skepticism is thrown up about the content quality of this area,  there are sites that turn out to be very “Google Panda Friendly”.

As we can see from the screenshot above, the content that is generated on this site is really unique and substantial. Is not regurgitated nor rephrased from other sites. Although the article’s titles are really flashy, the content is in correlation with those titles and responds adequately to the topic.

Another site from this area that got a high increase is Zimbio.com. The site is higher now in the SERPs by ranking on celebrity names like Mila Kunis, Justin Biber or Jennifer Aniston and a lot of other celebrity names. Let’s take a peek to their site to try to figure out what is it that Google found good enough to give them such a ranking boost.

In fairness, this site doesn’t seem to have much content at all, nothing further than some headers and some pictures. So, did Google make a mistake in this case or was the site ranked high for other reasons? Neither of the two affirmations can be stated fully. Yet, the content on this site is indeed relevant for “Jennifer Aniston” topic and does bring a lot of information (even though in a picture format) about the actress’s life, biography, etc. However, a lot of question marks hover across this website if we take into consideration not only the present Panda update but all the suggestions that Google gave us regarding the importance of the content on a website. Matt Cutts himself said in a video  that

“If you don’t have the text, the words that will really match on the page, then it’s going to be hard for us to return that page to users. A lot of people get caught up in description, meta keywords, thinking about all those kinds of things, but don’t just think about the head, think about the body because the body matters as well.”

So in the end it might be that the site covered the topic of Jennifer Aniston and all the other celebrities much better than other sites in the same niche.

Could it also be about the Topical Authority of the site and how it build it using relevant internal linking structures based on the in-depth covered topics?

A site that Google Panda 4.0 has pushed in front is myreceipes.com

Not only that the recipes offered  here seemed to be original and really well-written, but this site has also very well-organized content and structure. From its launch, the Google Panda algorithm focused on topical content segmentation and site and article structure. It looks like Panda 4.0 version still focuses highly on a good topical content segmentation.

Let’s take another example in order to reinforce this affirmation. The site we are talking about is Shopstyle.com.

In this case, we are dealing with an ecommerce site that while is presenting a dozen of products still manages to offer great user interaction  due to its well structured website. Due to the great customer-focused functionality, the site succeed to win a lots of SERP visibility for a bunch of important keywords.

If you concluded from these examples of well-structured sites that your web page should be very flashy and conspicuous, allow me to give you an example of a site that is an “Google Organic Winner” of the latest updates with a simple and plain visual layout. The site is Thinkexist.com.

As you can see from the screenshot above, thinkexist.com is a site with a pretty plain visual aspect but with very well structured data. In fairness, in terms of graphic design this site does not excel but what is important (and what Google seems to appreciate) is that it is really well made and it makes it easier for users to interact with it also.

The Panda bear is mostly a solitary animal that meets occasionally for social feeding and mating. Did the Google Panda Algorithm borrow this characteristic from its furry correspondent or social interaction, comments and sharing are now more appreciated than before.

Asked at the beginning of this year whether Facebook and Twitter signals are part of the ranking algorithm, the short version of Matt Cutts answer was “No”.  In this video , the Webspam Team leader said that Google does not give any special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages. They are in fact, currently, treated like any other page. Still, Google shows an increasing concern, in terms of social media user’s privacy, as if they crawled social media pages the way they crawl other sites, the snippets could end up containing information the user didn’t intend to have showing up in search results. Long story short, Google’s official position is that they don’t take social signals into consideration to rank a site.

Still, a high user interaction shown in comments and sharing on a website seems to have boosted up some websites after the latest update. Let’s put under the magnifying glass the Ultimate-guitar.com , a site that reunites guitar tabs, music news, reviews, etc.

Yet, as we take a look at the overall site, at a first view, we find it hard to figure out what is it that Google loves about this site. What makes this site to be one of the Panda 4.0′ s favorites is the high interaction it has with its audience. On ultimate-guitar.com you can be a contributor (adding chords or tabs), you can request tabs that aren’t on the site already (and is highly probable to get a response in just a couple of the days), you are given the possibility to be active on the forum and (maybe the most important) there is a very strong “ultimate guitar tab community”in which you can easily connect with other people with shared passion.

So, although on the first sight this seems like a website that doesn’t appear to have obvious grounds to be boosted, it’s capacity of gathering people who share the same passion, and have an active community is what Google wants to see.

Allow me to give you another example of a site that is doing better in rankings since the latest Google Panda update was rolled out on the 21st of May 2014. This is yourdictionary.com

Above, we can see that at the very beginning of May, yourdictionary.com has recorded a major increase. The reasons? Just as in the case before, good interactivity and sharing.

Google Panda 4.0 Losers – Quality “Means” Doing it Right When no One is Looking

Since it was first released in February 2011, Google Panda aimed to lower the rank of low-quality sites or thin sites, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. The 4th version of this algorithm kept the focus on quality and continued the war against thin content or automatic generated content. As Matt Cutts mentioned in an interview:

“Content that is general, non-specific, and not substantially different from what is already out there should not be expected to rank well. Those other sites are not bringing additional value. While they’re not duplicates they bring nothing new to the table.”

Loser – Thin Content

So, let’s see some examples that best illustrate this direction that Google seems to take nowadays. I am sure you seen the Ask.com site at least once in your life. It is, or was …,  a big authority site that is mostly a Q&A community.

As we can see in the example above, Ask.com scraped a lot of content and it seems that it did not pass the Google Panda 4.0 filter. They have a 72% drop. In order to draw an accurate conclusion, you can enter on a page from their site  to see why their site doesn’t line up with Google’s algorithm. If you look here , you wills see that the user experience is not really the best. All we can see is a definition and the a lot of ads and scraped content. Even if they have some user interactivity, the thin content outshines the interactivity. By comparison, to give you an idea of what Google considers to be adequate, take a look at a similar site, dictionary.com, that really provides a useful and pleasant user experience.

Loser – Automatically Generated Content

A lot of thin content and automatically generated content can be seen on the strongly Panda affected site 192.com.

The page exemplified in the screenshot above is replicated on thousands other pages. There is no user-generated content mostly but only a database built up without any real user interaction.

An intriguing situation can be spotted on Vocabulary.com, another site that has lost rankings due to the new update. Let’s take a sneak peek on their site to see what we’re facing here.

In this situation, it might be a problem with such database content, no user interaction and some banners. But this kind of structure can be seen on other sites that are still ranking well and where not affected by panda.  We cannot say whether Google may be doing a mistake here or not but, hey, the algorithm “knows” better, right?

Below, there is another site, xmarks.com,  that has been busted by Google Panda for having lots of Google Indexed pages with automatic content based on scraping other sites.

As it can be easily seen in the snapshot above, taken from one of the xmarks’ page, there is a lot of automatically generated content that caused a massive drop in rankings.

Another automatic content generation caused a drop for isitdownrightnow.com . For each site, this site  generated  a distinct page that showed statistics (automatic) about that site’s uptime. They have tens of thousands if not even more pages indexed this way. Yet, we can also see some user interactivity due to comments and shares as we can notice here .

Retailmenot was hit by Google Panda probably because of the automatic content generation.

Pages such as the one illustrated above  are full of automatic generated content without any user input and these are scaled to thousands of pages. What is very interesting about this particular site is that much of RetailMeNot’s revenue used to come from their high rankings in Google. Given Google Venture’s investment in RetailMeNot, there has been controversy as to whether these ranks are organically earned or not.

Looks like Google decided to put an end to all speculations and like a father that punishes his own kid when he did something wrong,  penalized their own investment.

The Curious Case of the Ebay Ranking Drop

A lot of “SEO literature” has been written lately about the curious case of the Ebay Google Drop. Some assumed that it was a duplicate content issue that pulled Ebay from the high rankings it once had, others said that Ebay might have a structure issue. Aggressive internal linking on long-tail keywords has also been brought up. Yet, other sites that have some big ad banners above the hold are still ok. Although Panda had a problem with ads above the fold before, on this update it does not seem this to be an issue.

As we stated at the beginning at the article, when it comes to the latest Google Panda … known as Google Panda 4.0, it is hard to talk in terms of penalties. Instead, we think that deranking is a more appropriate concept. And Ebay is a very good example on this line. We are not saying that Ebay might not have its problems, but in terms of content and user interactivity, they are doing pretty well. So what happened here? If you scroll up to the examples that have grown in Google’s eyes, you will see that most of those sites are highly specialized sites on their own topic. A Topical Authority Medical site talking about “spider brown recluse” is doing far better than a generic one, talking about science generally. Sites like 192.com or answers.com that are not really specialized in something but have a lot of universal content, have generously experienced Google Panda’s anger. A similar pattern could be applied to Ebay too. Other smaller but more specialized sites in a certain area might have had a boost in ranking for some specific keywords, which automatically lead to Ebay’s decrease. For example, they lost 95 positions for “insanity workout” while the first sites that are ranking among the first for this keyword are some “how to” YouTube videos and some fitness centers.

Conclusions

We tried to objectively analyze the consequences that Google Panda 4.0 had on several sites, in our attempt of finding a pattern on how Panda 4.0 really works. Naturally, Google’s latest update brought joy for some websites and sorrow from others, but the most important thing is what are we taking away from all their stories.  Many Chinese philosophers believe that the universe is made from two opposing forces, the Yin and Yang. And it seems that the Panda is one symbol of this philosophy with its contrasting black-and-white fur : some websites went up, others went down.

Let’s make a quick review with the conclusions drawn after our analysis:

Conclusion I. “Content Based Topical Authority Sites” are given more SERP Visibility compared to sites that only cover the topic briefly.(even if the site covering the topic briefly has a lot of generic authority). More articles written on the same topic increase the chances for the site to be treated as a “Topical Authority Content Site” on that specific topic.

Conclusion II. Sites with High User Interaction measured by shares and comments got a boost.

Conclusion III. Thin Content and Automatic content is deranked, even if it is relevant.

Conclusion IV. Sites with clear navigational structure and unique content got boosted.

Right from the launch of the first Panda, in February 2011, Google said it only takes a few pages of poor quality or duplicated content to hold down traffic on a solid site and recommends such pages to be removed, blocked from being indexed by the search engine, or rewritten.  However, Matt Cutts warns that rewriting duplicate content so that it is original may not be enough to recover from Google Panda. The rewrites must be of sufficiently high quality, as such content brings “additional value” to the web.

A few important considerations:

• Take a look at the number of your indexed pages. If you have 1 million indexed pages with thin or duplicate content, you might have been deranked by the latest update. It’s better to reduce the amount of indexed page to only pages that matter to your visitors.
• Be sure that your main pages, which offer high-quality content are indexed, and “no-index” the pages that don’t offer important content to the user.
• Investigate your site structure in order to have it relevantly linked to topical content on your site
• Be less of a generic do it all site and more of Topical Authority Content in your niche.

The Chinese philosophy says that the gentle nature of the Panda demonstrates how the Yin and Yang bring peace and harmony when they are balanced. It’s hard to tell whether Google Panda 4.0 brings any harmony at all but for sure it tries to bring balance in Google’s search results. At the end of the day, it is all about the user retention by providing a value added service or value added content for the user.

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