Central Perk: Why I Love Google Panda (and you should, too)

miercuri, 5 decembrie 2012

Why I Love Google Panda (and you should, too)

Posted: 04 Dec 2012 06:48 PM PST

"Panda" has become kind of a dirty word among SEOs. Tweet about a trip to the zoo or a cuddly stuffed animal, and you're bound to get a tweet back saying, "Ugh, don't say panda, I'm still traumatized." My response to this reaction is twofold:

Reaction 1: Whatever, you guys. I still love pandas.

I mean, look at this guy:

Pandas! by RickWeiss, on Flickr

Reaction 2: Whatever, you guys. I love Google Panda.

The hell you say?

Yes, that's right. I'm kind of a fan of Google Panda. Why? Because in addition to being an SEO, I'm also a Google user. I use Google multiple times every single day; everything from topics I'm researching for work, to the menu of the place I'm going for dinner (WHY PDF WHY?), to a variety of queries that start with "can dogs eat." And back in 2010, Google started to suck.

An embarrassing anecdote

During the 2010 holiday season, I went out and got myself my very own, non-plastic, real live Christmas tree for the first time. Unbeknownst to me, that tree came with a very special Christmas gift just for me: fleas. My apartment got fleas like your great-aunt's cat Mr. Mittens. It was bad, people. And it being the holiday season, I was pretty strapped for cash. What I wanted was a way to get rid of the little bastards myself, without calling an exterminator or spraying my apartment with poison. So what did I do? I turned to Google.

Here's what I found: pages and pages of articles titled "How to Get Rid of Fleas" that were all meaningless, thin-content paragraphs riddled with links to exterminator services. Not just one or two, but multiple searches resulted in a SERP full of this garbage. It was only after a fair amount of digging that I was able to find the solution (vacuum alllllll of the things really thoroughly, seal your clothes/bedding in a plastic bag for a day or two and then wash them in super-hot water) I was looking for.

Lately, I've been speaking to some college classes on SEO and when I start to talk about Panda, I ask if they remember a time when it seemed like every search they did turned up shallow, worthless results that seemed to talk about what they wanted, but didn't actually provide any answers. And you know what? They all remember, and they all agree that SERPs have improved significantly since then.

The Panda update was an upsetting, stressful time for SEOs and business owners alike. It was far from perfect; a lot of perfectly good content got knocked out with the bad, and a lot of innocent (i.e. non-black-hat) websites were affected. But it ultimately did make a lot of SERPs better, returning more trustworthy information that is more relevant to the query.

Take a look at the SERP for "How to Get Rid of Fleas" today. It still has a ton of results from sites like eHow and Instructables, which are sites that we might typically associate with having been hit by Panda. The difference is that now, those pages actually contain information on how to get rid of fleas. Additionally, there are results from highly reputable sources like the ASPCA, adding a measure of trust.

Panda was intended to make sure that when people Google something they can actually find it. On that measure, I'd say it succeeded more than it failed.

Bad panda

"But Ruth," I hear you say. "You should know as well as anybody that innocent businesses were affected by Panda. People lost a lot of business."

bad panda

I know, and I kind of blame Google for that. They told us that the best way to rank was to have content on every page. No matter how many times they told us "create content for users, not search engines," by also telling us to have content on all the pages, they were effectively saying "create content for search engines." Small businesses often don't have the resources to create the kind of consistent, deep, relevant content that Google really wants. I can see why creating a bunch of keyword-rich but otherwise meaningless content might have seemed like the next best thing. I can only imagine how frustrating and scary it was for businesses to have their pages wiped from the SERPs in Panda's wake, and I KNOW how frustrating it was for SEOs to try to help those once-burned, twice-shy businesses get back into Google's good graces.

How Google makes money

Google makes money because Google has gigantic market share. They can charge advertisers more because they have the biggest pool of potential ad impressions and clicks to sell. This means Google has a complete interest in ensuring that when people search for things, they find exactly what they're looking for. That's it. Google does not care whether or not they foster small or local business growth in the U.S. and abroad. They only care about serving up the most relevant results they can to as many people as they can, so everyone keeps using Google.

Like I said, Panda wasn't perfect, but it did make a big difference in SERP relevance to a lot of queries. The other side of Google's gigantic market share, however, is that many businesses need some kind of presence on Google to succeed. We owe it to our clients - nay, we owe it to the Internet itself - to help them actually create relevant resources for users who search on their keywords. In addition to pleasing Google, you may convince some of those people to buy something.

It also means that we should make sure our clients invest in diverse sources of traffic. If a site has more than 50% of its traffic coming from Google, that leaves you pretty vulnerable to changes in Google's algorithm.

Finally, it's more important than ever to help businesses of all sizes - even those who can't afford SEO - market themselves online, the right way. I'm so excited that SEOmoz is working with GetListed now. I'm hoping that with increased access to resources to market themselves online, small and local businesses can start knocking content farms out of the SERPs. I'm also hoping that future updates like Panda - designed to keep quality in the SERPs - will be less dangerous to small and local businesses, because they'll know more about what to do and what not to do.

I'm also hoping we can go back to thinking "D'AWWWWWW" instead of "D'OH!" when we see a cuddly guy like this one:

Panda by George Lu, on Flickr

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Announcing Our Acquisition of GetListed & Plans to Help Local Marketers & SEOs

Posted: 04 Dec 2012 12:59 AM PST

Posted by randfish

Ladies and Gentlemen, it has been a tremendously exciting year here at SEOmoz. While our burgeoning engineering team is toiling away on some amazing new stuff, we've been busy plotting the future of Moz. Today, I'm excited to announce we've taken one big step toward that goal with the acquisition of GetListed, and the addition of David Mihm to the SEOmoz team.

David Mihm at the Mozplex
(David and I celebrate at the Mozplex, while our data PM, Tela, photobombs)

David and I have known each other a long time - since 2005! - and we've long been passionate about the same big problem - that web marketing, particular on inbound channels, is far too inaccessible and poorly understood by small, local businesses. As Moz has expanded our mission, we've been in talks with David since 2011 about combining forces to take on this challenge.

As part of the acquisition, we're releasing the following reverse ransom note to the Internet on behalf of small businesses:

Reverse Ransom Note to the Internet

The letters are made up of signs from local businesses in Portland and Seattle, our respective home towns, and we had a lot of fun putting them together (special thanks to Derric Wise from Moz, who helped make this happen). You can see the official press release here, and a larger version of the ransom note here.

While I can't be 100% transparent about all our plans for the future of GetListed and our entry into the local space (partially because we haven't cemented it all quite yet), I do want to provide as much detail as possible:

David has officially joined the SEOmoz team, while his co-founder Chris Tanger will be contracting and assisting with the transition to the next version of the product. They will both be staying in their respective home towns of Portland, OR and Chicago, IL.
The current GetListed.org website and product functionality will remain completely free as it is today for at least the next 4-6 months.
In Q2 of 2013, we hope to release a new version of the product focused on helping local, small business owners and the consultants/marketers who frequently work with them to better appear in and optimize their online presence on major search engines and local portals.
Our long term goal is to provide software on the web and possibly in a mobile app that helps owners and marketers get a simple, but detailed overview of how they're performing in the local search ecosystem, what actions they should take to help their marketing, and how they compare against their competition. These goals may expand and will certainly get more fleshed out as we take products through user testing and release.
David's personal site is remaining personal, though we encourage everyone interested in local inbound marketing to check out the excellent resources there - the Local Search Ranking Factors and David's blog on Local SEO.
Local U is remaining a separate entity, though we hope to be able to support and sponsor some of their excellent events going forward, and David plans to keep speaking/participating in some of these.
The acquisition technically wrapped up a couple weeks back, and the total price was in the ~$3million range including cash and SEOmoz stock.

Moving forward, we've got a lot of work to do, including hiring some new team members to help support our growth into Local and David's ambitious and admirable plans. We also might be looking to open a new office in Portland, where Galen & Peter from Followerwonk are also based, (I like the idea to call it "Mozlandia") in 2013, so be on the lookout!

If you haven't already, I'd urge you to join the more than 2 million local businesses that have used GetListed to help understand and optimize their presence online: