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vineri, 3 august 2012

YouTube Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 08:03 PM PDT

This week for Whiteboard Friday we are taking a look at how to get a video to rank on YouTube. Each month YouTube receives over 800 million unique visitors who watch more than 3 billion hours of video, traffic we can't afford to ignore. So how do you get videos to rank for competitive terms on YouTube? By paying close attention to these 12 important ranking factors.

Do you agree with these? Disagree? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Jeff McRitchie from MyBinding.com, and today we're going to be talking about how to get your videos to rank better on YouTube and specifically YouTube ranking factors. We're going to cover 12 specific YouTube ranking factors, kind of in 2 different categories.

The first category would be the content that you create. These are things that are really in your control. Not everything about ranking on YouTube is in your control, and yet you have the ability to affect it all by the content that you create. So that's really the place to start is by creating awesome content and then uploading that content in a way that is going to put your best foot forward on YouTube.

So let's talk about the first six ranking factors that fall under the category of content. The first is title. You want a title that is going to be awesome. You want a great click through rate. You want people to want to watch your video. So when they're doing a search on YouTube for a specific topic, you want to pop up, and you want someone to say, "That's exactly what I'm looking for." So not only do you need to do the keyword research ahead of time to understand what someone needs, but you also need to deliver on that concept, so that they know that that is what I want, and then when they watch the video, it's not something totally different.

So, when you are setting out to create a video for YouTube, the title is probably the most important thing. You want a title that's going to draw people in, but then you also want to make sure that you deliver on that title. If you are going to say that you have the best video on SEO ever, you better make it the best video on SEO ever. Otherwise, people are going to say, "That's lame." They're not going to click through. They're not going to respond. They're not going to do anything. So title is your first and most powerful tool. You're going to want to do the keyword research and make sure you have a call to action in your title.

Second is description. You want to write a real description for your videos. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a video, and it's like a link to your website is the only description in there. Or, "This is a great video on . . ." and it has like one keyword in it. Write a description. Talk about what your video is all about, what makes it unique. Put some keywords in there, but write it from a real perspective. Make sure you put a link in there to whatever you want, fully qualified URL, and it will light up so that people can click on it. But the real purpose of the description is to make sure that you describe it.

Content is king, and this is a place for you to make sure that you have content. For us, I make sure that my writers write the descriptions. They take time. We write 300 to 400 to 500 words in a lot of cases. Maybe we'll do 200 or 300 words, and then we'll add the transcription below. But you want to make sure that you have something unique that's really about the video. Take the time to write it. It's really worth it.

The third ranking factor on the content side is your tags. You want at least 10 tags. You want them to be keywords, you want to do your keyword research, and you want to make sure that they're relevant for the video. Something that's weird about YouTube that's a little different than Google is that you can have a video that's all about something, and if you don't use that keyword in there, it doesn't really do the semantic matching for you. So, you could have a video that's all about something, but if you don't spell it the right way or if you don't use the plural version versus the singular version, then YouTube won't even rank it. So you need to make sure, at least until Google gets better at it, that you put those tags in there that have both plural and singular. Do your keyword research. Again, make sure that you understand, what are people looking for that are going to need to watch this video.

The fourth YouTube ranking factor on the content side is transcription. This is something that most people don't know about. I'm going to tell you about it today. That is that YouTube has a feature where it's going to try to transcribe your video for you, and it is horrible at transcribing your video. If you've ever tried to read the transcription that it does by machine, it is awful. However, something else that they don't tell you is that they use those transcriptions to rank your video for keywords.

So, if you were to slip something, and there's actually been some tests done on this, where someone transcribes a video and throws in a word that isn't mentioned anywhere in the description, anywhere in the title, and then you type that in a search in YouTube and up comes that video. They are indexing the transcriptions. So take the time to go ahead and transcribe your video word for word. Upload the text file. It will match up the words. It will then make your video closed caption, which will increase your click through rate, and it will also allow you to rank better for that video. Just a quick tip on that. Definitely worth doing. If you're going to take all the time to make the video, take a few extra minutes and transcribe it and make it happen.

Number five, I put this under the content side of it, and that is your channel authority. You control your content, which means you control your authority. Google is looking for channels that have authority, and it's going to use that as a basis for your ranking. It's going to be easier for someone who consistently creates awesome video to rank for terms versus somebody who just throws up a random video. Now, it's a little bit controversial just in that YouTube also has the power to let any person with a cell phone rank really well for a video if they have enough engagement, which is what we're going to talk about in a minute. But all else equal, if you have a good channel that you have great content on and good engagement on your other videos, that's going to flow over into your current video and getting it ranked. So, you want to make sure that you look at all of your videos as a whole and your channel, not just your single video when you're trying to rank.

The sixth is delivery. I put this over in content, because really, ultimately, if you make a crappy video, Google and YouTube will figure it out, and you're not going to rank well. If you think about it, their best interest is providing people with videos that are awesome, that provide the user with exactly what they're looking for, that users say, "That's what I'm looking for," that they interact with. And if you can't do that, if you deliver content in a way that's really poor, the users aren't going to like it. They're not going to watch your video. They're not going to stick around. They're not going to comment. They're not going to engage, which is the next thing that we're going to talk about. If they don't do that, you're not going to rank. So, you need to make sure, when you set out to do a video, that you make an awesome video and not a crappy video. That's really the key. If your users are telling you that your videos are crap, then you need to look and say, "Okay, what am I doing wrong, and how can I change that?"

That's the content side, the stuff that you control directly. By making awesome content, you can then create awesome engagement, which is really the second part of ranking on YouTube and probably the most important. All else being equal, if you do all of these things and there's no competition, you're going to do great. But if there are other people with other videos that want to rank, and let's face it, almost any industry has other videos that want to rank for the keywords that you want to rank for, you're going to need to do more than just throw up a video with a great title tag and a description and some tags and transcription. It's kind of like creating a website but not telling anyone that it's there. So, now suddenly you have to take it to the next level. You need to get some engagement. That's the next six ranking factors that really come into YouTube. I'm just going to go quickly through them so that you can understand some of the different things that YouTube is looking for.

There's kind of a chicken and the egg thing that happens with YouTube. So in order to rank better, you need views. In order to get views, you need to rank better. So there's the sense in which you need to get the word out and allow people to see your video. Use your social media sharing, use your website, use your blog. Whatever network that you have, get people to go watch your video. Once they've watched it, then Google is going to say, wow that's an awesome topic, and they're going to want to rank you better. But it's not just about views.

They're looking at the quality of those views. That's why I put attention as the second part of number one. They're looking to see, how well are people receiving that? I don't know if you've ever logged in and looked at a specific video in the engagement report that you can get on YouTube. It's really cool. Basically, what you can see is how long people watched, where they fell off. So maybe you have a trailer on the end of your video. You're going to watch this nice graph, and everybody's following, following, following. Bam, they're gone. They got to the advertisement. They say,
"Okay, I'm done with this video." You can also see that maybe that happens. You delivered your point, someone got bored.

If your audience is getting bored, YouTube is using that to determine how good your video really is. So, if people are watching it all the way through, if they're totally engaged, then YouTube is going to rank you better than somebody who has a video where they watch the first 10 seconds and they're out. So that's something to keep in mind. You're going to want to look at those reports and make sure that you have the attention that you need. And if you're not, do something to fix it. Make sure that your next video is awesome all the way through, or recreate that video with a new version that's going to garner the attention that you really, really want and need.

The second part is inbound links. I know everybody in the SEO world is talking about inbound linking right now and everything. But essentially, YouTube is using inbound links to videos as a ranking factor. Surprise, surprise. It's Google. Inbound links are king. So, think about ways that you can build links to your YouTube channel and to your YouTube video specifically. So they're looking for both channel links, and they're looking for links to that specific video.

Now, awesome video content gets natural links. People say, "Hey, I saw this great video over here. Go ahead and take a look at it." It's going to build links naturally, but there are ways that you can help that process along by sharing it on your social media, by making sure that your users know that it's there so that they can go and watch it, especially your most engaged audience, which are going to be the people that you're dealing with. For us, that's our customers.

You're also going to want to make sure that you share it on your blog. Those count. You're going to want to make sure that you share it anywhere else where you can that gets people to know about your video so they can link back to it. And if they're really interested, they will link. So, you don't need to go and sit there and try to rack your brain on how to build links to your YouTube videos, and yet you need to always be thinking about how to build links to your YouTube videos. On the other hand, you should always be building links to your YouTube channel, and that should be natural.

All of your profile links, like when you do an email, you're going to have your YouTube channel in the bottom. When you do a press release, you should have your YouTube on there. On your website, you should link to your YouTube channel. It's just natural that you're going to want to promote your YouTube channel, because your YouTube channel is important to you, and you want people to see the stuff that's there. So, that's something that kind of gets overlooked in the YouTube ranking factors, but inbound links are really important.

The third is social shares. You have the ability on YouTube to easily and quickly share stuff on social media sites - Twitter, Facebook. It's simple to quickly share on your own, and it's simple for your users to share as well. Make sure you share it on your own, and hopefully you're going to have people reshare that. Google is tracking that. They're looking for it. They're looking for social signals for these videos. As more people share it, it's going to raise you up in the rankings. Again, it's just one factor in the basket of factors in terms of engagement.

Fourth is embeds. That's going to be people who want to embed the video on their site. Also included is you embedding it on your site or blog. So, if you think about creating your video, you don't want to just leave it on YouTube. You want to then go and take that and embed it somewhere. Also, you have the ability to turn on or off the embed feature. Now, you have to kind of weigh that out in terms of, maybe you don't want people to embed it. But the more people that embed it, the better it's going to rank. So, you kind of have to say, is there a specific reason why I don't want it embedded on other people's sites? If there is, then you can turn it off. But I suggest turning it on, and letting bloggers, letting people embed that right onto their own sites. You're going to see that your rankings will raise as people embed those videos onto their sites.

The fifth under the engagement section is comments and video responses. So this is really key, and Google is really good at figuring out which comments are spammy and which comments are real. So don't try to game the system. Try to produce content that's going to be awesome so that people want to comment on it. So, people who come and say, ask a question, respond back. If someone comes and says, "This is an awesome video," make sure you reach out to them. Google is looking for videos that build social following and that people interact with, because it shows that the video is being watched, that there's quality, and that it's really a worthwhile video to rank. So you're going to want to build up those comments.

On the other hand, they're also looking for video responses, which is a lot harder to get. So, how do you get somebody to make a video in response to your video? That's a pretty tall tale, but it also is a huge ranking factor. Because if someone's willing to do that, then, often, that says to Google, wow, this video really made sense to them or was really important to them. So one of the things that you can do is you can make your video a video response to other videos that might be out there. Now that's not quite as powerful as somebody making a video for you as a video response. You can also add your video as a video response to your other videos that you have on your channel. Again, not as powerful as somebody making a video for you as a video response.

Now, if you have a friend or you know somebody else who does video and you want to trade video responses, that would be awesome. Ask them to make you a video. Ask them to respond to it. Get in front of their webcam on their laptop and record a quick video response that says, here's what I really liked about this video, or this is how I feel. Upload it to their own YouTube channel, share it, and respond to the video and put it as a video response. That's going to be a huge factor for you in terms of ranking. It's just one of those things. It's kind of a big favor to ask. Video is not that easy to create for a lot of people. So it's one of those things that you've got to kind of weigh it out and say, "Okay, how big of a favor can I ask of my friends?" if I want them to create a video response for me.

Then, the last under the engagement side of things is likes and favorites. So there's a like button, just like Facebook. You can sit there, and you can thumbs up or thumbs down. You want, obviously, lots more thumbs up than you want thumbs down. You want people to say, "Hey, I love this video." But a thumbs down isn't the kiss of death for your video, because at least people are engaging with it, and they say, "Okay, I didn't like it." That might tell you, if you get too many thumbs down, that maybe you need to create a better video. But ultimately, you're looking for people to engage with the likes/dislikes side of things. And you also want them to favorite your video, which means that you really had an impact on them, that they really wanted to share it with their people. The more you share it and the more they share it, the better your video is going to rank.

When it comes down to all of this, content and engagement, there's actually an internal page rank system inside of Google and inside of YouTube that causes the rankings to fluctuate. That's why link building and inbound links work. That's why you have all of these different factors at play. When someone shares your video and it's on their channel, they're passing page rank to your video. When somebody accepts that as a video response on their video, they're passing page rank and authority to your channel and to your video. So you're going to want to make sure that you're engaging with the YouTube community, that you have your videos out there, that other people are engaging, because it's going to show up in their feed. Their feed is going to pass internal page rank to you.

Again, internal page rank, what I say that is that they're shuffling it, but they're trying to determine how well does your channel and your video really fit into the YouTube community? Ultimately, if you create awesome content and get great engagement, then you're not going to have any problems at all ranking for the keywords that you really need to rank.

Thank you and that's Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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15 Tips to Speed Up Your Website

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 04:21 AM PDT

Posted by ArminJ

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Tips to speed up website

After seeing some tweets and analyzing the SEOmoz website, I decided to write some tips and tricks that can decrease pages load time as much as possible. Any search engine wants to provide users a great user experience, just like Google, and a fast site improves overall site quality and increases user satisfaction. Everybody deserves a fast web experience. Some of the following tips are implemented well by SEOmoz, but I will explain them anyway because of their general usefulness.

"Experiments demonstrate that increasing web search latency 100 to 400ms reduces the daily number of searches per user by 0.2% to 0.6%. Furthermore, users do fewer searches the longer they are exposed. For longer delays, the loss of searches persists for a time even after latency returns to previous levels." Google says.

I will list a variety of factors (+ useful tips from Yahoo and Google) and will use SEOmoz as my example:

Note: Making a backup before starting is necessary!

a) Server

Choosing suitable hosting for your venture is the first step in starting a website. Hosting with a professional configuration can be of big help. Here you can find some good tips about choosing hosting.

1. Leverage browser caching

"Expires headers tell the browser whether a resource on a website needs to be requested from the source or if it can be fetched from the browser’s cache. When you set an expires header for a resource, such as all jpeg images, the browser will store those resources in its cache. The next time the visitor comes back to the page it will load faster, as the browser will already have those images available," says CJ Patrick in a nice article about how to use expire headers to set caching: Expires Headers for SEO

Unfortunately, it seems that SEOmoz doesn't use expiration for stylesheets and images.

2. Enable Keep-Alive

"A Keep-Alive signal is often sent at predefined intervals and plays an important role on the Internet. After a signal is sent, if no reply is received, the link is assumed to be down and future data will be routed via another path until the link is up again," says wikipedia.

In fact, HTTP Keep-Alive allows TCP connections to stay alive and it helps reducing the latency for subsequent requests. So contact your hosting provider and tell them to think twice about this! Most hosting companies disable this feature, (including SEOmoz's host) because it's an optional feature (whenever it transfers less than 60 bytes per request).

3. Enable gzip compression

Compressed HTTP respond

* Image by betterexplained.com

"Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today's Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip," says Yahoo.

Gzipping reduces the size of the HTTP response and helps to reduce response time. It's an easy way to reduce page weight. You can enable it by adding the following code to your .htaccess file:

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</files>

Or, use the following PHP code at the top of your HTML/PHP file:

<?php if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); else ob_start(); ?>

Or, simply use plugins for your CMS (like the WP HTTP Compression plugin for WordPress).

SEOmoz uses gzip. However, some external javascripts (AdRoll, Simpli and CloudFront) could reduce transfer size more than 60% by using gzip.

4. Make landing page redirects cacheable

Mobile pages redirect users to a different URL, (for example www.seomoz.org to m.seomoz.org) so making a cacheable redirect can speed up page load time for the next time visitors try to load site. Use a 302 redirect with a cache lifetime of one day. It should include a Vary: User-Agent as well as a Cache-Control: private. This way, only those visitors from mobile devices will redirect.

Since SEOmoz doesn't support any specific mobile version, it can't have this problem (someone should take care of the bad behavior of SEOmoz's website on mobile devices)!

5. Use a CDN

how CDN works

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. As you can see in the above image, it loads from different servers, based on the visitor's region. You can compare CDN hosting with standard web hosting here.

It seems that SEOmoz uses Amazon CloudFront for this functionality and I've tried MAXCDN, It's awesome, too. You can manage your caches and lots of other useful tools in one WordPress using W3 Total Cache.

b) Content elements

Since you don't have total access to your server, content elements are the most important things that you can manipulate. Let's start with the most obvious weakness of SEOmoz:

1. Minimize redirects

Sometimes to indicate the new location of a URL, track clicks, connect different parts of a site together or reserve multiple domains, you need to redirect the browser from one URL to another. Redirects trigger an extra HTTP request and add latency. Only keep redirects which are technically necessary and you can't find any other solution for it. These are Google's recommendations:

Never reference URLs in your pages that are known to redirect to other URLs. Your application needs to have a way of updating URL references whenever resources change their location.
Never require more than one redirect to get to a given resource. For instance, if C is the target page, and there are two different start points, A and B, both A and B should redirect directly to C; A should never redirect intermediately to B.
Minimize the number of extra domains that issue redirects but don't actually serve content. Sometimes there is a temptation to redirect from multiple domains in order to reserve name space and catch incorrect user input (misspelled/mistyped URLs). However, if you train users into thinking they can reach your site from multiple URLs, you can wind up in a costly cycle of buying up new domains just to stop cybersquatters from taking over every variant of your name.

This image shows what happens when your browser tries to load SEOmoz.org:

SEOmoz redirects problem

As you can see, the greatest latency is the result of some external redirect chains. SEOmoz is using about 20 redirect chains that slow down the load time about 3000 milliseconds.

2. Remove query strings from static resources

You can't cache a link with a "?" in its URL even if a Cache-control: public header is present. The question mark acts the same as Ctrl+F5. Use query strings for dynamic resources only. SEOmoz is using two dynamic URLs with "?" because of using KISSmetrics, but 2-3 queries are reasonable ;)

3. Specify a character set

Specify a character set in HTTP headers to speed up browser rendering. This is done by adding a simple piece of code into your header:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Note: Some CMSs use functions for character set (like WordPress with <?php bloginfo('charset'); ?> ). I suggest that if you are sure about your character set, write it instead of using PHP functions. It helps to minimize request size, so try to use HTML instead of PHP everywhere that is possible.

4. Minify your codes

Minify your codes

Removing HTML comments, CDATA sections, whitespaces and empty elements will decrease your page size, reduce network latency and speed up load time.

You can use simple online tools like Will Peavy minifier, and if you are using WordPress, Autoptimize can optimize and compress your codes and it supports CDN as well. By the way, SEOmoz could save 620B by compressing its HTML.

5. Avoid bad requests

Difference between optimized page and bad request page

Broken links result in 404/410 errors. These cause wasteful requests. Fix your broken URLs (pay special attention to images). Use online broken link checker or use WordPress link checker for free. You can also read about Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog tools at SEOmoz that can be really helpful.

6.Serve resources from a consistent URL

It's best to share Google's recommendation:

"For resources that are shared across multiple pages, make sure that each reference to the same resource uses an identical URL. If a resource is shared by multiple pages/sites that link to each other, but are hosted on different domains or hostnames, it's better to serve the file from a single hostname than to re-serve it from the hostname of each parent document. In this case, the caching benefits may outweigh the DNS lookup overhead. For example, if both mysite.example.com and yoursite.example.com use the same JS file, and mysite.example.com links to yoursite.example.com (which will require a DNS lookup anyway), it makes sense to just serve the JS file from mysite.example.com. In this way, the file is likely to already be in the browser cache when the user goes to yoursite.example.com."

7. Reduce DNS lookups

Reduce DNS lookups

DNS lookups take a meaningful amount of time to look up the IP address for a hostname. The browser cannot do anything until the lookup is complete. Reducing the number of unique hostnames may increase response times. Just look at how a DNS lookup can take about 3 seconds of load time in SEOmoz. You can measure yours, by using Pingdom Tools. I do want to mention that when I re-tested the homepage of SEOmoz.org from a server in Dallas, it showed better results than it did before I started writing this article.

Note: Sprite your images. This means put images that are loading every page of your site together to reduce your DNS lookups. SEOmoz combined lots of its images into one, like this sprite image. You can find more information on SpriteMe

c) CSS, JS and Images

1. Specify image dimensions

Your browser begins to render a page before images are loaded. Specifying image dimensions helps it to wrap around non-replaceable elements. If no dimensions are specified, your browser will reflow once the images are downloaded. In order to do that in <img> elements, use height and width tags specifications.

Note: Don't use dimensions to scale images on the fly -- the user will still be downloading the original file size, even if the image doesn't take up as much space on the screen.

2. Optimize images

comments in image file

Images can contain extra comments and use useless colors. Keeping image sizes to a minimum is a big help for users on slow connections. Try to save in JPEG format. You can use a CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+S shortcut to save an optimized image in Adobe Photoshop, use Yahoo! Smush.it, or if you are using WordPress, you can install the WP Smush.it plugin.

SEOmoz could save more than 50KB by optimizing images on the main page, particularly those in the slider.

3. Put CSS at the top and JS at the bottom

Putting stylelsheets in the document head of the page prohibits progressive rendering, so browsers will block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page. In most of cases, users will face a white page until the page is loaded completely. This also helps you to make a standard web page according to W3 standards. And, put your javascript code at the bottom of the page for the same reason.

There are of other ways to speed up a web page, but I have tried to write about the most important ones which even professional bloggers (like SEOmoz) can sometimes overlook. Of course, site speed is not the main goal but even an ideal website with a bad load time will find it hard to achieve success. Run the fastest website you can in order to reach your goals faster.

Now, let me repeat: DO NOT forget to make a backup before making any changes and don't forget to share your tips or questions by commenting. :)

West Wing Week: "98 & 98"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, August 3, 2012

West Wing Week: "98 & 98"

This week, the First Lady brought ‘Let’s Move!’ to the Summer Olympics, the President signed both the US-Israel Enhanced Security bill and HEARTH act, hosted twelve new Ambassadors to the United States, and met with inspirational groups of young people, both the PECASE science and engineering early career award winners and the 98 boys and 98 girls of the 2012 American Legion Auxiliary. That’s July 27th to August 2nd or “98 & 98.”

Watch this week's behind-the-scenes video.

Investigating Panda & Duplicate Content Issues

Investigating Panda & Duplicate Content Issues

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 05:56 AM PDT

During a recent analysis of a website (blog with less than 50k visitors a week), we came across some interesting factors that led to us taking a different approach to investigation.

The Problem:

The site faced 20-40% drop in traffic corresponding with periods in roll outs of the Panda Algorithm.
The site saw a loss in rankings, but no consistency across them – some keywords moved down a few positions, while others went off the first 2-3 pages of the SERPs.
The site is a blog, and as a result most of the content written was original and unique, and written by a single person based on their research and experience.
The site has been in existence for over 6 years and attracts a lot of natural links – in fact no link building to the site has ever been carried out.

From the above, this doesn't seem like your typical target for Panda, but the dates of the traffic drops were too much of a coincidence.

Panda: A Reminder

High-quality sites algorithm improvements. [launch codenames "PPtl" and "Stitch", project codename "Panda"] In 2011, we launched the Panda algorithm change, targeted at finding more high-quality sites. We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines. We also released a minor update to refresh the data for Panda.

And one piece of advice for working on a recovery:

One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site's rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

(bolded sections highlighted by us)

A full list of questions to ask and answer when analysing a Panda hit site: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html I previously covered this here: http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/10/seo-tactics-to-tame-the-panda.html and Kevin covered it here http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/05/how-to-survive-a-panda-attack.html

The Investigation

Often, QUALITY sites that were affected by Panda lost only a few key pages in rankings across a whole host of content. Keep in mind that Panda looked at a range of signals on content quality. On the sites that we have worked, the two main factors were:

Originality of content (duplicates? Does it appear original and unique?).
Volume of content and signals of sharing the content.

NOTE: A lot of SEOs believe that the Panda Algo is NOT page specific – but experience shows that a few major ranking losses and a site wide dip, due to Panda, are linked to specific pieces of content that causes an activation of the Panda filter. We have found that a cross-section of Panda-hit sites would either take major site-wide hits (thus losing right across the board) or would lose a few key sections, content pieces, AND have smaller losses across the site.

"…improve the quality of content or if there is some part of your site that has got especially low-quality content, or stuff that really (is) not all that useful, then it might make sense to not have that content on your site…." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMDx8wFAYYE

(bolding ours)

Keyword Referral Variation Analysis

Typically we would run a range of different investigations on the site, including a Keyword Referral Variation analysis on post and pre Panda hit periods. This is done for sites that never really did any SEO, and as such didn't keep a record of rankings and ranking fluctuations. It gives a decent snapshot of what the primary drivers were.

However, one more issue reared its head – "not provided". In the same Year-on-Year period pre-panda, the site had virtually no "not provided" keywords, but in the post-panda season the value grew to such a large portion that a Year-on-Year keyword analysis would be largely flawed:

As you can see from the above sheet, the top 10 key phrases show a significant dip, but the massive growth in "not provided" makes that analysis importent. Over 31K visitors weren't attributed a keyword, so it's difficult to gauge where the primary ranking drops would be.

Isolating Page Losses

With "not provided" hiding referrers, it's not possible to isolate specific keyword hits. This means we may have to take another route to isolating areas of loss.

An interesting way to do this is to look at pages, previously driving traffic, broken down to identify which pages have lost their referrals from search compared to previous periods.

Next we extracted the top 100 entry pages for each period – 2011 and 2012, cross referenced them and highlighted common pages, new pages and cross referenced the traffic.

In 2011, the top 100 pages captured 367K visitors. In 2012, this figure was 290K – a difference of 79K.

The key was to isolate all the top content pages to understand what their primary losses were.

What we did:

Downloaded all the top 100 entry pages and visitors for Period 1 and Period 2.
Dropped them into excel and instead of messing about with pivots etc. we went for the low tech version. This included conditional formatting and as a result found all that were in both columns and highlighted them.
After which we sorted by colour, then alphabet, which gave us a neat comparison.
We then ran a simple formula on visitor drop and then used conditional formatting to highlight scale.

The result:

This is just a snapshot, but you can see that there were a couple of really good pages in there, and some completely obliterated.

The next step would be to isolate all the big drops and look at those pages individually. We like to strip them all out and create a new sheet for clients to look at, using conditional formatting to highlight severe losses and order of priority:

Building a Strategy to Recover from Panda

Is it possible to recover? Yes. Is it easy? No. The change is algorithm-based, which means tweaking, then waiting, then tweaking a bit more. But, a recovery is possible, if we isolate the issues.

Quoting Matt Cutt's Latest video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8IzUuhTyvJk

"Remember, Panda is a hundred percent algorithmic. There's nothing manual involved in that. And we haven't made any manual exceptions. And the Panda algorithm, we tend to run it every so often. It's not like it runs every day. It's one of these things where you might run it once a month or something like that. Typically, you're gonna refresh the data for it. And at the same time, you might pull in new signals. And those signals might be able to say, 'Ah, this is a higher-quality site."

The steps needed in this case:

Isolate all the top losses and work out the total loss as a result. (done!)
Identify a common factor amongst these to try and form a pattern.
Confirm that the pattern identified matches industry reported reasons for Panda Filters.
Investigate any other issues such as loss of link equity, navigation, crawlability.
Fix said issues.
Try and add more positive signals to fixed content.
Wait for a Panda refresh and see how site performs.
Rinse and repeat.

Step 1. Isolating the data

In the analysis of the top 100 pages, the 25 pages that were identified with losses, contributed to a 95K drop in visitors in the time frame analysed! These pages should be a starting point for the site in terms of trying to understand patterns.

Step 2. Common patterns

Interestingly, poor content and duplicate content can often trigger Panda hits – one of the main targets were scraper sites. One of the first things we tend to do is isolate content from hit pages and "fuzzy match" them to search results. Which is a fancy way of saying, take a piece of content, drop it into the search bar and see what comes up!

Random samples of content from a page dropped into Google:

The pink sections are matches to the content – i.e. Google bolds them. As you can see, 3 out of the first 4 are exact or close matches. The grey block is the site in question.

We took another part of the page, in quotes this time, and dropped it into Google:

Insanely there were 42 exact matches – the original site didn't even show up on the first page! As a side note, I checked the date on most of those sites – they are published at least a year AFTER the clients original content.

We did this for the top 100 hit pages and came up with:

Interestingly, as we move down the scale of pages that were hit, the lower the hits, the lower the duplication! Now don't take that as a correlation, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Summary

What did we learn? Essentially, although this blog owner has been publishing GOOD content for many, many years, the fact that people have been copying and pasting that content for years only came to light AFTER Panda.

Most of the pages hit were either copied in part, or full, by either scraper sites, or really powerful sites.
Despite the age of the articles, some of them have been overtaken by other sites on this basis.
Some older articles that have lost rankings, to add insult to injury, have had inbound link loss.
In certain situations, articles have been overtaken by “authority sites” such as .gov sites – something that isn't easy to recover from.
In some situations, articles are a lot less useful to queries than they were, primarily because exact match articles have replaced them or the query no longer has any volume.
Google also updated caffeine filters (freshness algorithm) and the age of content may cause it to drop in favour of fresher content

The type of sites we found copying their content or sections of their content:

- Scrapers.

- Forums (such as money savings expert forum users quoting them!).

- Other blogs taking large blocks of text.

- Genuine Businesses(!) taking whole sections off to promote their own businesses.

- Government sites that were using portions of their text written years prior about certain guidelines.

The losses came by a dip in rankings through:

- Massively copied pages disappearing from the index.

- Content that had portions quoted in forums dropped a few places.

- Pages that had content that was copied by high authority forums and Government sites fell out of index or were massively lowered in rankings.

- A resultant Panda filter, in our opinion, which lowered the value of the whole site.

- Some content was topical in the previous year, which has low search volume now. This is a natural dip in traffic.

Other issues contributing to these factors that may play a role:

- Most of the losses came from older established blog posts – not been updated in a long time. Was Google using a filter to show newer pages with that content instead?

- Some key pages suffered link loss – although this needs further investigation, there may be further room to help that along.

- Some of these posts were written way before social shares existed – thus low or no social shares on them for a very long time – nor was there any incentive on the content to do so.

- Bounce rates had gone up from 70% average to 85% average – we investigated the content – it is still relevant and correct, but we feel that the date which is prominently displayed on the post may put visitors off, who are bouncing away.

Related Google Algorithm factors that may also be to blame:

- Caffeine (close correlation with content outranking).

- Bounce backs (increase in bounce rate)? (not proven).

- Lack of Social Signals (not proven).

Potential Actions and Solutions:

Try and get Author Attribution – since this is a blog, which has been running for a long time, and has established followers, they should get their attribution in place – this helps make the site a lot more "legitimate". More reading here:

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building

- http://yoast.com/wordpress-rel-author-rel-me/

Legal action and a DMCA request – where necessary and appropriate, get content disavowed in Google. Further resources here:

- http://blog.kissmetrics.com/content-scrapers/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGM4TXhIOFd3c1hZR2NHUDN1NmllU0E6MQ

- https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&

Refresh and rewrite badly hit pages. A take down request etc. takes time – it is often easier to rewrite content, at the same time making it "fresh" in the algorithm's view, and so a double benefit. Adding more content to "light pages" and adding resources etc. to heavy pages also seems to help make a piece of content authoritative.

Social shares and fresh links. The content is actually of a decent quality, but the lack of focus for social sharing means they are losing out on valuable traffic, at the same time not sending social signals that legitimises the content. Generating a decent number of +1's, tweets, etc. can help get the content re-crawled more often as well. At the same time, to speed up the re-ranking process, we suggest getting some fresh links into content that has had the most link loss.

vineri, 3 august 2012

YouTube Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday

YouTube Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday

Video Transcription