Former Googler Vanessa Fox, who happens to be the creator of Webmaster Central, wrote an interesting blog post about it, which we discussed in another article about how the changes sound like they fall in line with Google’s greater philosophy of providing high quality sites (which is what the Panda update was all about).

We reached out to Fox for some additional insight, as hers is particularly unique given her background.

“I don’t think this is part of Panda,” Fox tells WebProNews. “Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes/introduces new signals/etc. every year. Panda is just one of many. Google just doesn’t name each one (and of course, not all of them are as impactful).”

She notes, as she hinted at in her own post, that Cutts may have been simplifying things for a non-search audience (SXSW isn’t a search conference like SES or SMX), and says that “it’s possible this isn’t a new anything, but instead is just tweaking of existing signals that look for things like keyword stuffing and link exchanges.”

Last week, Cutts pointed to the audio. Today he points to a full transcript:

If you’ve listened to or read what was said, you’ll notice that the whole thing was in response to a question about mom and pops, which might make you wonder if brand is a significant part of what’s at play.

“I don’t think it’s about just mom and pop vs. big brands,” Fox says. “Lots of big brands don’t know the first thing about SEO. I think (total guess on my part) the sites that will be negatively impacted are those that focus on algorithms and build content/sites based on the things what they think the algorithms are looking for. The kind of sites where someone didn’t say ‘I want this page to rank for query X. How can this page best answer what the searcher is asking about X’ but instead said ‘I want this page to rank for query X. How many times should I repeat X in my title, heading, content on the page, internal links…”

“I think it’s still useful (and not negative) to make sure the words that searchers are using are on the page, but some sites go well beyond this and get so caught up in what they think the algorithms are doing that they forget to make sure the content is useful,” she adds.

“As far as sites that will see a positive from this, I think it will likely be both small sites (B&B in Napa that titles their home page ‘home’ vs. an affiliate site that sells wine gift baskets) and large brands (sites that use a lot of Flash),” says Fox. “I think foundational SEO practices (like those I describe in my article) will continue to be beneficial for sites.”

When she talks about SEO in her article, by the way, she says she’s talking about “using search data to better understand your audience and solve their problems (by creating compelling, high-quality content about relevant topics to your business)” and “understanding how search engine crawl and index sites and ensuring that your site’s technical infrastructure can be comprehensively crawled and indexed.”

Whether or not the new changes are directly related to Panda, Google’s Panda-related quality guidelines will probably still be something to keep in mind, with regards to what Matt is talking about.

“Normally, we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working on in the last few months, and hopefully in the next couple months or so, or you know, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it,” said Cutts. “And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.

Update: Vanessa Fox offered some additional observations to WebProNews. >>> Click here to read the article.

“So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website…the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area,” he continued. “So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on it…we have several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

Naturally, many webmasters and SEOs are wondering just what all of this will mean for SEO going forward. Combine that, with a reported strategy of Google’s to greatly expand its direct answer results, which could also slow traffic to some sites.

Vanessa Fox, the former Googler who built Webmaster Central, offers some perspective in a blog post.

“A lot of people have asked me what this means for those who include search engine optimization as part of their marketing mix,” says Fox in the post. “Some are worried that Google will begin to penalize sites that have implemented search engine optimization techniques. My thoughts? I think that some site owners should worry. But whether or not you should depends on what you mean by search engine optimization.”

Interestingly, she compares Google’s approach to what the company has been doing with the Panda update, in that it’s about “separating high-quality, useful pages from pages that were just a collection of words about a particular topic.”

“Matt talked about finding ways to surface smaller sites that may be poorly optimized, if, in fact, those sites have the very best content,” Fox says. “This is not anything new from Google. They’ve always had a goal to rank the very best content, regardless of how well optimized or not it may be. And I think that’s the key. If a page is the very best result for a searcher, Google wants to rank it even if the site owner has never heard of title tags. And Google wants to rank it if the site owner has crafted the very best title tag possible. The importance there is that it’s the very best result.”

One great point that she brought up is that Cutts was not speaking at a search conference, when he was talking about this. It’s a different audience, in which he may not have gotten as specific about certain things with, as he may have at a conference like SMX Advanced.

The way Fox talks about it, it almost sounds like he could have even been talking about Panda-related offerings. Remember how Google has made Panda more a part of “its pipelines” recently. Wouldn’t that be part of “making Googlebot smarter,” as Matt put it?

Fox tells us, however, she doesn’t think what Matt was talking about is part of Panda, though I doubt we’re going to get much more out of Google on the subject, other than the usual monthly lists of changes. Either way, it does seem to fit with the greater philosophy behind Panda, which is really just about returning the best content anyway. More on this topic to come.

Key Interview Points

I really enjoy speaking with Vanessa about search because of her perspective about how to do things. As readers of mine know, I am a fan of the trite old way of doing it – producing a great web site, making it search friendly, and then promoting it well. Vanessa is truly an industry leader in promoting this type of thinking.

This is a great interview for you to read if you want to get a strong feeling for the philosophy that drove the Panda algorithm, and the implications of that philosophy going forward. Here are some of the major elements that I extracted (and paraphrased except in those situations which are quoted) from the discussion we had:

1. Like any business, Google seeks to maximize its profitability. However, Google believes that this is best done by providing maximum value to end users, as this helps them maintain and grow market share. They make more money this way than trying to squeeze extra CPM out of their web pages at the cost of user experience.
2. The AdWords team does not have access to the organic search team, and as a result the engineers working on organic search are free to focus on delivering the best quality results possible.
3. (Vanessa) “Panda isn’t simply an algorithm update. It’s a platform for new ways to understand the web and understand user experience”.
4. Panda is updated on a periodic basis, as opposed to in real time. This is similar to updates to the PageRank displayed on the Google Toolbar, except it is a whole lot more important!
5. It is easier to reliably detect social spam than link spam.
6. (Eric) “If you’ve got twelve different signals and someone games two of them and the other ten don’t agree, that’s a flag.”
7. Don’t focus on artifical aspects of SEO. If it seems like a hokey reason for a web page to rank higher, it probably isn’t true. If by some chance it is true, first it is most likely a coincidence, and second and more importantly, you can’t count on it staying that way.
8. (Vanessa) “I suggest you get an objective observer to provide you feedback and determine if there are any blind spots you’re not seeing.”
9. (Vanessa) “The question then becomes if someone lands on your site and they like that page, but they want to engage with your site further and click around your site, does the experience become degraded or does it continue to be a good experience?”
10. Added value is key. Search engines are looking more and more for the best possible answer to user’s questions. Even if your article is original, if it covers the exact same points as hundreds of other articles (or even 5 other articles) there is no added value to it.
11. Reviews can be a great way to improve web page content provided that they are contextually relevant and useful.
12. Crowd sourced content is also potentially useful, but must also be relevant and valuable.
13. One of the challenges facing both UGC and Crowd Sourcing is the editorial challenge of making sure it is useful and relevant.
14. Branding can be very helpful too, as it helps people trust the content more. Search engines recognize this as a differentiator as well.
15. (Vanessa) “I think social media levels that playing field a bit. In the past, you had to hire a publicist, do press releases, have relationships with reporters, and get on Good Morning America, or something on that order, to get your name recognized.”
16. SEO is still important! Making sites that are easily understood by search engines is still something you need to do. Effective promotion of your web site remains critical too.
17. Unfortunately, for many sites that have been hit by Panda, there is no quick fix. There are exceptions, of course, but they will be relatively rare.

Motivations of Google

Eric Enge: Let’s talk about what Panda was from a Google perspective and what they were trying to accomplish rather than the mechanics of what they did.

Vanessa Fox: I like that you addressed it that way because many people simply want to know mechanically what did they.

This update took many people by surprise and, certainly, there are things to be worked out. However, Google has never been secretive about what it’s trying to accomplish and, specifically, what it’s trying to accomplish with Panda.

Ever since Google launched, its primary goal has been to figure out what searchers want and give them that. This encompasses a lot of things. It encompasses answering their question as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. It involves all the things you think about in terms of making the searcher happy and providing a good user experience.

In the early days of the web, the only way Google knew if people found something valuable was if there was a link to it. Today, the web is more sophisticated and Google has much more information available to it. The bottom line is that Google is trying to provide the best results for searchers and, for them, Panda was a major step forward in accomplishing this.

Eric Enge: Yes, some people believe that Google made these changes because it favors their advertisers and their objective is to make more money in the short term. I don’t believe this. To me, the value of market share far outweighs the impact you could get by jacking up your effective CPM by a few percent on your pages.

It is short term and shortsighted to think Google is now focused on improving CPMs or trying to drive people … to advertise via AdWords.

Vanessa Fox: That’s absolutely right. It is short term and shortsighted to think Google is focused on improving CPMs or is trying to drive people, who lost ranking in the organic results, to advertise via AdWords. Google is looking for long term market share which is the best way for them to maximize profitability.

The root of their market share is the fact that they get so many people searching all the time. The best monetary decision for the company is to ensure that searchers experience excellent search results. That’s the core that’s going to help Google maintain their market share which, in turn, is what will help them grow.

Eric Enge: I’ll paraphrase it simply and say they are totally selfish and they are being selfish by working on their market share.

Vanessa Fox: That is exactly right. Many people don’t believe that there is a wall between the organic search people and everything else at Google. If they didn’t have such a wall you would have a situation where someone on the AdWords team would be approached by a large advertiser saying “I am having problems with the organic results, can you help me?”

Of course, that person would want to help the advertiser. By having that wall, the AdWords person doesn’t have access to the organic search people. There is this protectiveness around organic search, which enables those engineers to focus on the search experience. They don’t have to think about AdWords, they don’t have to think about how Google is making money, or what the CPMs are. They don’t have to think about any of those things and are able to concentrate on making the best search experience.

The whole environment was built that way which is unlike many other companies. In other companies, no matter what part of the organization you work in, you have to always think about how does this impact our revenue. At Google this is not part of the search engineers’ focus, which is great. Another reason is that many of the search engineers have been at Google since the beginning. They don’t have to work there anymore.

Eric Enge: At this point they could easily retire and buy an island.

Vanessa Fox: They continue to work there because they love data and love working with large amounts of data and improving things. I think if someone said to them,”I know you work on organic search, but we’ve decided it’s really important to either give advertisers preference or hold advertisers down. Could you tweak the algorithms?” They would probably say, “I am going to buy my island now, see you later.”

That’s not why they are at Google. They are there because they get to do cool things with large pieces of data. I think these two big factors make it basically impossible for anything other than a search experience to infiltrate what’s going on there.

Think of Panda as a Platform

Eric Enge: What is Panda?

Vanessa Fox: Panda isn’t simply an algorithm update. It’s a platform for new ways to understand the web and understand user experience. There are about four to five hundred algorithm updates a year based on all the signals they have. Panda updates will occur less frequently.

Eric Enge: Right. In the long run it will probably be seen as significant as the advent of a PageRank update.

Vanessa Fox: Yes, absolutely.

Eric Enge: At SMX Munich Rand Fishkin heard from Stefan Weitz and Maile Ohye that it’s a lot easier to recognize gaming of social signals than it is to recognize link spam.

Vanessa Fox: The social signals have more patterns and footprints around them. Also, the code that search engines use has gotten more sophisticated, and they have access to more data.

Eric Enge: Another thing I hear people talking about is that over time Google is looking to supplant links with other signals. My take on this is that links are still going to be a good signal, but they are not going to be the only signal.

Links will continue to be augmented with more data, which will make the value of links less important because there are other signals now in the mix.

Vanessa Fox: Google has been saying that for years. I don’t think the value of links will ever go away. They’ll continue to be augmented with more data, which will make the value of links less important because there are many other signals now in the mix.

Google never intended to be built solely on links. We didn’t have social media and Facebook like buttons, and all these things in the past. We only had links. Google was based on how can we build an infrastructure that algorithmically tells us what content people are finding most valuable on the web.

Google and Bing as black boxes

Eric Enge: I think another key component of this story is that Google and Bing are increasing the obscurity of the details of the algorithm. That’s not perfect phrasing, but I think you know what I mean.

Vanessa Fox: I think it becomes harder to reverse engineer for a number of reasons. There are so many moving parts that it’s hard to isolate. People who have systems that attempt to reverse engineer different parts of the algorithm for different signals may come to conclusions that are, or are not, accurate. This is because it’s impossible to isolate things down to a single signal.

You find cases where people think they have but, in reality, it’s the tip of an iceberg because you can’t see everything that’s under the surface. By having more signals and knowing so much more about the web the artificial stuff becomes more obvious.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. If you’ve got twelve different signals and someone games two of them and the other ten don’t agree, that’s a flag.

Vanessa Fox: Right. Which is why it’s so disheartening to me to see that some SEOs continue to react to this by saying, “okay, how can we figure out the algorithmic signals for Panda so we can cause our pages to have a footprint that matches a good quality site.” This is very short term thinking because the current signals are in use only during this snapshot in time.

At this point it’s going to be as difficult to create a footprint of a site with a good user experience as it would be to just create a site with a good user experience. This, of course, is not only a better long term perspective and more valuable, but it will result in a better rate of conversion for most businesses.

I’ve heard some people say things like, they’ve done some analysis and found that you have to vary the length of your articles on pages, so make sure that all of your articles are variable in length. And this is craziness. Even if it works this minute, next week it won’t work and then they will say the sky is falling again.

I read an article where a person said Seth Godin writes really short blogposts so he is going to be impacted by Panda, and how does Google know that if an article is short, it’s not valuable. But Google’s algorithms are not as simplistic as that. Seth Godin has not said he’s lost ranking because of Panda.

I commented on the post, and said this is not true. Google isn’t saying that a short article is not a valuable article. Publishers should make blog posts or articles as short or long as they need to be.

There will be plenty of cases where the best article is a short article.

Eric Enge: There will be plenty of cases where the best article is a short article.

Vanessa Fox: Absolutely and those will continue to rank.

How Publishers should think about Panda

Eric Enge: What would you say to a publisher if they believe they were unfairly affected by Panda? This is a tough question because 98% of the people affected by Panda will say they are in this category. They believe they were a drive by victim rather than something that fell out of the algorithm.

Vanessa Fox: That is a complicated question. I will not dispute, and I don’t think Google would dispute, any algorithmic change from any search engine has the potential of causing some collateral damage. If what you are doing as a search engine is asking, ” are the search results better?” then if the search results are better that doesn’t mean that a site with good content doesn’t accidentally end up lower.

That’s going to be the case with any change a search engine makes. From a content-owner perspective that is not good, which we’ll talk about in a second. However, I talked to many people affected by this and 75% to 80% of the time they said I’ve been hit and I shouldn’t have been hit. There have been only a few occasions where people say, “yeah, I’ve gotten away with it for a long time and they cut me off.”

Eric Enge: You appreciate their honesty, don’t you?

Vanessa Fox: Oh, absolutely. But most of the time people say I shouldn’t have been hit. If you’ve been working on a site for a long time, you may not see the areas it can be improved. I suggest you get an objective observer to provide you feedback and determine if there are any blind spots you’re not seeing. I think that would be a good first step.

It’s not one signal that’s been used. You need to determine does this page answer the question, does this help someone accomplish something.

Essentially, this has become a holistic thing. It’s not one signal that’s been used. You need to determine does this page answer the question, does this help someone accomplish something?

As a business you have to make money. You also have to understand that if a site is optimized for making as much money per visitor from ads as possible, as opposed to being optimized at being useful to the searcher, this site is probably not what a search engine wants to show as the best search results.

You have to balance that. Does it answer a searcher’s question, but also does it answer that questions better than any other site and is the answer easy to find? Look at the quality of what’s being said versus the quality of the other pages that are ranking. Is it better or worse? Then you have to determine if the content is awesome and is that obvious to the searcher.

From a user experience perspective, when they land on that page is the content they need buried? The user experience becomes important because Google wants the searcher to be happy and easily find their answer.

Let’s say the content and the user experience are good for that page. Then you run into the issue of quality ratio of the whole site. The question then becomes if someone lands on your site and they like that page, but they want to engage with your site further and click around your site, does the experience become degraded or does it continue to be a good experience?

For example, last year Google had this emphasis on speed, because their studies found that people are happier when pages load faster and abandon sites that load slowly. I’ve worked with companies whose pages take fifteen seconds before they load. No one will wait around anymore for fifteen seconds to load a page.

I don’t think this is a big part of Panda, it is just for illustration purposes.

If you isolate that as a signal you can have the best content in the world and the best user experience in the world. However, if someone does a search and lands on your page but it takes fifteen seconds for anything to appear, they’ve had a bad experience and they are going to bounce off.

You have to look holistically at everything that’s going on in your site. This is what you should be doing, as if search engines didn’t exist.

Eric Enge: Right. There is another element I want to get your reaction to which I refer to as the “sameness” factor. You may have a great user experience. You may have a solid set of articles that cover hundreds of different topics, and they may all be in fact original. However, it’s the same hundred topics that are covered by a hundred other sites and the basic points are the same, even though it’s original, there is nothing new.

Vanessa Fox: Right. I think that’s where added value comes into play. It’s important to look and see what other sites are ranking for. What are you offering that is better than other sites? If you don’t have anything new or valuable to say then take a look at your current content game plan.

Eric Enge: So, saying the same thing in different words is not the goal. I like to illustrate this by having people imagine the searcher who goes to the search results, clicks on the first result and reads through it. They don’t get what they want so they go back to the search engine, they click on a second result and it’s a different article, but it makes the same points with different words.

They still didn’t find what they want so they go back to the search engine, they click on the third result and that doesn’t say anything new either. For the search engine it is as bad as overt duplicate content.

Vanessa Fox: That’s absolutely right.

Eric Enge: It may not be a duplicate content filter per se, which is a different conversation than this one, but the impact is the same. It’s almost like an expansion of query deserves diversity, right.

The search engines have always said they want to show unique results, diverse results, valuable results.

Vanessa Fox: Right. These concepts have all been around for a long time, but we are seeing them perhaps played out with different sets of signals, but they are not anything new. The search engines have always said they want to show unique results, diverse results, valuable results, all these things.

Adding Diversity to your site with User Generated Content

Eric Enge: One thing I hear people talk a lot about regarding diversity is doing things with user-generated content. In my mind that can be a useful component provided it is contextually relevant and has something useful to say. Do you have some thoughts on that?

Vanessa Fox: Yes. I agree with you, it could go either way. Since Google’s goal is to provide useful, valuable results then you can certainly find pages where user-generated content provides that. If you look at TripAdvisor, which may have its faults, one benefit is that there are numerous first person accounts of hotels and other experiences.

Any hotel or vacation destination you are thinking of going to, you will find authentic, real information from people who’ve actually gone there.

Forums are another example where user-generated content is great. For instance on stackoverflow people are interested in answering questions and having discussions and that’s valuable content. You might have other forums where people aren’t saying anything or are there to spam and put their links.

I think it depends on both the topic and how much you are moderating things, how much time you are spending in curation, how much time you are spending organizing things in a useful way so it’s easy to find.

For instance, let’s say you have a recipe site and people tag their recipes with different variations. If you have a curation process that cultivates that and puts it into topics that people could land on a landing page and see all of the recipes about a particular topic, that will be more useful than things scattered everywhere with random tag pages.

I think there can still be work involved in UGC, although it can be useful and valuable. When you begin looking at health information, for instance, it might become harder. If it’s a site about sharing your experience about an illness, that’s one thing.

If it’s a site about diagnosing people and telling them what they should do to fix their illness, that’s another thing. If it is a group of people as opposed to doctors, you get into this authoritative issue and how do you know it is credible.

Crowd Sourced Content

Eric Enge: There is a related topic that has a different place in the picture, which is the notion of crowd sourced content. Essentially, using crowd sourced data to draw a conclusion, for example, with surveys and polls.

Vanessa Fox: This boils down to the same thing. Is it useful, valuable, credible, authoritative, and comprehensive? Is it all the things people are looking for and does it answer their question better than anything else out there on the web? We can look to TripAdvisor as an example of a site that’s been able to create valuable content on a large scale.

At a larger scale you have to move towards automated processes and, at that point, the curation process becomes harder.

At a larger scale you have to move towards automated processes and, at that point, the curation process becomes harder. Wikipedia has editors that are aggressive towards making sure the content is accurate. However, not all sites have that.

When you do surveys it can be fine, but if you are not manually reviewing the results, because of the large volume of data, that’s when something can potentially go awry, so you have to be careful with it.

The same thing can happen with aggregating data from different sources. If you look at something like Walk Score, they’ve been able to aggregate the data of how close are schools, bars, and other facilities from your house. Of course, you see other examples where it goes poorly, and you look at the page and it doesn’t make any sense.

Eric Enge: Right. It’s a matter of the context, the effort, and the level at which you are trying to do it.

Vanessa Fox: Yes. I think ultimately there will be a fair amount of work involved with running a business that adds value for people. With this age of technology, you see many cases where people say, “look at all the cool things I can do with technology and it’s very little work on my part.” This is sort of the four-hour work week syndrome.

Often, that does not produce the most valuable results. For instance, if we examine travel and look at a site like Oyster, which was started by Eytan Seidman who used to work on the search team at Microsoft, they pay full-time staff writers with a travel background to travel to hotels, write reviews, and take pictures. They aren’t in every city in the world, and they don’t have every hotel in the world.

That’s a corporate example, but there are travel bloggers, and food bloggers, and other people who only write ten blog posts. However, those ten posts are very comprehensive on the topic.

At a large scale, if you attempt to cover every topic in the world, you are not necessarily going to be able to compete with someone who has written something manually.

At a large scale, if you attempt to cover every topic in the world, you are not necessarily going to be able to compete with someone who has written something manually, gone there, and spent time editing their article. It wouldn’t make sense that your automated content would outrank them.

Eric Enge: Absolutely. It reminds me of another thread which I am not sure fits in the interview, but I am going to say it anyway. When I grew up I watched the news with Walter Cronkite. He was completely trusted and authoritative. Today we have Fox News, which is entertainment.

That’s the design of Fox News and more power to them; however, you have to imagine that as a culture we are going to have a drive towards getting news from a source that you can trust.

Vanessa Fox: Right. Google did a blog post recently where they talked about the trust element. They said it is certainly one of the questions you should ask yourself when you are evaluating a site. Can you trust it?

Eric Enge: Right. Will you give it your credit card or will you trust it for medical advice?

Vanessa Fox: Would you follow the instructions to save your life? This is where brand comes in. I don’t think it has to be a huge brand, but brand does help the trust factor. Building a brand that people see over and over makes a difference.

This is a major reason why I do not recommend microsites. I know many people who want to do a bunch of micro sites but lack of a brand is one reason I tell them it’s probably not a good idea.

It’s hard to build a brand with a bunch of micro sites that aren’t branded in a unified way. If you build one site under one brand you can build brand engagement; however, you can’t do that with a bunch of micro sites that are branded separately.

Social Media and Branding

Eric Enge: Do you think an effective tactic for beginning to build the brand would involve social media?

Vanessa Fox: It depends on the topic and audience. Where is your audience, are they on social media? If you can engage that audience and build up authority with them that is great. I think social media levels that playing field a bit. In the past, you had to hire a publicist, do press releases, have relationships with reporters, and get on Good Morning America, or something on that order, to get your name recognized.

It still takes work but you can go out on social media, see where people are talking about your topic area, answer their questions, and be that authoritative source. I think it can be great but it doesn’t fit every situation.

SEO still matters

Eric Enge: One last question since we’ve been talking about holistic marketing. The search engines still have mechanical limitations because of how they crawl web pages. So being search engine savvy is still important,

Vanessa Fox: Absolutely. Search engines crawl the web and they index the web. Technical aspects, such as how the server responds, how the page URLs are built, and what the redirects are, make a huge impact. You can have the best content in the world but if search engines can’t access that content it’s never going to be indexed to rank. So, absolutely, all that stuff is vitally important.

Eric Enge: The other component is the promotional component which is to go out and implement programs to make people aware of your site and draw links to it, and social media campaigns.

Vanessa Fox: Yes. That’s absolutely the case. I think it goes with the idea you’ve heard from the search engines for a long time which is what would you do if search engines didn’t exist? You need to build your business and part of that is building awareness about your business.

I think the web makes it easier but you need to raise awareness so people know that it’s there. Whether it is through social media or other types of PR, there are many things you can do. You can’t think of your audience engagement strategy as simply SEO. All these other components help SEO, but there are things you need to do in business even if you weren’t doing it for SEO.

The Scope of Panda

Eric Enge: Any last thoughts on Panda?

I talk to many people who have sites that have been hit and I certainly sympathize with their plight. However, there is no quick fix in these cases.

Vanessa Fox: I talk to many people who have sites that have been hit and I certainly sympathize with their plight. However, there is no quick fix in these cases.

I talked to a site owner two weeks ago that said, “maybe if we change our URL so that they are closer to the root of the site instead of having folders in them that will get us back in.” This is the wrong way of looking at it.

Eric Enge: Yes. That’s a clear “no”. For sites who have been hit by Panda, I don’t think, for the most part, there is a quick fix.

Most sites will not be lucky enough to have one section of their site that is a total boat anchor that they can just not index and be done with it. Most sites probably have a real process to go through.

Vanessa Fox: Yes. It’s hard to hear because this is affecting people’s businesses. I think it is going to be a lot of work to figure out who your audience is, what they are they looking for, are you engaging them well, and are you providing value beyond all the stuff that we talked about. It is a process.

Eric Enge: Thanks Vanessa!

Check out Ramblings About SEO for more articles by Eric Enge.

One recent change in particular, however, has gotten some webmasters riled up. It’s being referred to as "Mayday," and some claim it is costing them money.

Do you think the update has affected your revenue? Comment here.

Ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, who spoke on a panel with current Googler Matt Cutts at Google I/O last week, quotes Cutts as saying, "this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back."

She also says Google told her that it was a rankings change, as opposed to a crawling/indexing change. This, she says, "seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before."

"This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with ‘item’ pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them," says Fox. "For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite."

She has more to say about it at Search Engine Land, offering some of her own speculation. One reader accuses the change of delivering "a real blow" to his revenue.

This is not the first we’ve heard about "Mayday". There’s been discussion about it around the SEO community all month, but this is the first we’ve seen it really addressed by Google.

Most savvy webmasters have learned by now that they can’t rely on Google rankings alone to drive traffic. This is why social media opportunities presented by networks like Facebook and Twitter have become so attractive. The way people search and obtain information is becoming more and more diversified, not only spread out around different applications (largely due to increased mobile usage), but also within search engines themselves.

For example, Google recently rolled out its big SERP redesign, which gives users a great deal more options for filtering their results (or at least puts these options in the spotlight). The importance of ranking in a completely natural, organic search has become greatly diluted over time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still nice, but it’s getting harder to rely on as well as less critical for discovery.

Stay tuned to WebProNews for our exclusive interviews with both Cutts and Fox from Google I/O, in which they talk with our own Abby Johnson about a variety of search-related topics. They should be posted soon.

Do you think your rankings have been affected by the "Mayday" update? Let us know.

WebProNews had a conversation with Google’s Avinash Kaushik and former Googler Vanessa Fox just after the State of the Search Union keynote at SMX West last week, and talked about this very principle. Kaushik put it well in that marketers who think of their strategies in terms of "and" will win, and those who think in terms of "or" will lose. In other words, your apt to find greater success in combining strategies than focusing too heavily on one.

This seems like a fairly obvious point, but it’s easy to get caught up in the hype of the moment, and place too much emphasis on the importance of whatever that hype may be centered around. That’s not to say said hype should be ignored, because new strategies can certainly increase brand awareness, conversions, etc, if you can leverage them in a way that makes sense for your business. However, it’s important not to shift too much focus always from channels that are already working well for you, or those you are still improving upon that show promise.

As discussed in the clip above, the lines are blurring among types of marketing, and it’s becoming more and more about simply "marketing" rather than just "search marketing" or "social media marketing" or fill-in-the-blank marketing.

We’ve just come through the most turbulent period in history for search marketers. Economic disruption, massive algorithm updates, the disappearance of a major player through consolidation with one of its former competitors… these events and others have reshaped the search landscape, creating both challenges and opportunities for search marketers. On this panel we’ve assembled some of the sharpest minds in search to discuss where things stand and where we’re going – you won’t want to miss the insights and recommendations from this group of super-savvy panelists.

I will liveblog the event below, when it starts 9:00am Pacific/12:00pm Eastern (please forgive typos):

Liveblogging starts:

12:00 EST: should be starting anytime now…

12:03 People are taking the stage…getting set up with audio…

12:04 Sherman: An interesting year in search. Often not a whole lot has happened, usually just Google, Google, Google. IN the past year, we’ve seen more radical change than in the past 15 years or so. no sign of change letting up…

12:05: A few questions: key question: when we were here last year, we were in the early stages of an economic meltdown…everybody uncertain….what’s going to happen…search itself was still relatively young/ what was going to happen to industry? so now, how are we doing? 

Sound problems…dave says as a search marketer, it gave oppotunities to show stuff and shift strategies. support business goals/shipping landscape. maybe used to optimize for ROI now different metric…shift back to SEO. not just paid side.

Misty: ecommerce still did well in some areas. some clients due to search, record breaking months at times. even in downturn. some marketers utilizing different techniques, driving revenue, and reoccurring customer loyalty. combined search with other marketing channels…flexible companies saw growth.

12:09: Vanessa: Super bowl – with pepsi, they decided to spend their money on social. interesing that some companies think online is a better way to go… one thing from super bowl ads…so many large brands seem to only just now understand that search is important. across the board, it was better than last year as far as big brands in search during super bowl. a lot of work left though.

12:10 Avinash:  emboss your brand on somebody’s brain (branding)..search can do this. at the end of the day. when people want to run a branding campaign…..what do you want out of it? one night stand? long term relationshiP? depending on what you want? search is a massively effective way to get to the right kind of people..

12:13: Microsoft/yahoo deal: Dave: since we got regulatory approval, the integration is on. huge project. lot of resources from both companies. proof will be in the pudding. advertisers start to migrate…i’m yahoo the advertiser. we’re going to continue to innovate around the customer experinece around search. products tah live outside of the index….

12:14 Sherman: anomisity? integration with cultures? Dave: just beginning. large amoutn of resources at yahoo to be moved over and work with MS. will be a portion of yahoo that stays at yahoo. a lot remains to be seen. clearance still to new…people hard at work. everybody on the project understands that this is critical. it absoultely MUST work.

12:15: Misty: clients excited about deal. allows viable number 2. may not drastically change how they upload campaigns, but it does allow to shift focus stategy for bing….60/40 time split between google and bing…excited about volume…reach….

12:16: some changes in showing results will open up some new ways to utilize Bing to advertise. new customers…cashback is a big driver. marketers in geneal have been slow to adopt….

12:17: Sherman: 2 major players: shrinking? couple of giants? no 2 strong players. market growing. Avinash: competition is a good thing. gets everybody to innovate. important to realize…prudent to have portfolio strategy with acquistions. think about content network, youtube ,search, doubleclick. poeple get far too obsessed between microsoft, yahoo, and google. you should have already had a very effective strategy across all search engines.

12:18: Avinash says a blog post of his got way more traffic from bing for the word analytics than google.

12:19: You will find new customers and use dollars more effectively with the portfolio strategy.

12:19 Vanessa: waiting to see how things shake out with integration. searchmonkey? boss? waiting to see how it works out…yahoo did try to make a play for innovation. don’t know how much they’ll be motiviated.. it will be great if they do. reserving judgment.

12:20 Vanessa: hopefully we won’t lose all the yahooness.

12:21: Caffeine: rolled out after holidays? no. still just one data center. sherman talking to vanessa: what impact is caffeine going to have on SEO? is Google going to continue in spirit it always has to provide tools/insight…Vanessa: changes – social, real-time,local, etc. things will ramp up more and more. caffeine specifically. i don’t know it’s going to impact seo that much. just back-end. on their side, a better way to crawl the web. their hope is just to do it better. that’s a benefit for site owners. it’s not a rankings impact, except in more of an indirect way. i don’t think from an SEO perspective, there’s much you need to do. I hoep they  keep reaching out. when i was there i loved being able to go out and see what people needed. don’t see a reason why they would stop doing that. they have kept doing it. 

Avinash: if every googler woke up and for the entire day, they would answer questions for webmaster, it wouldn’t answre all questions. how can we help people at scale? webmaster tools. a number of tools thag google puts out. just a few more releases for wm tools over the last six months. you’ll continue to see google keep puting out tools that allow this kind of self help at scale. help you make better decisions with search data. orgasmic about amount of data google has put out there in terms of your ability to make better decisions. love access you have to google’s organic search data….insights for search, ad planer….etc.
 
12:26 with google ad planner you can look at certain demographics and sell to them, but who have done a particular search….target with very relevant display ads using search data. we’ll continue to put tools like this in your hands.

12:27 Sherman: back to dave on microsoft/yahoo: Dave: yahoo’s staying committed in search. in sales side, very experienced in search and display. maintain high touch with big customers. small businesses and self service customers more directly managed on microsoft side.

The goal is to work on the acenter platform and make it the platform of choice on microsoft as well as yahoo.

12:29 Sherman: Yahoo search in dna? Dave: rich data from search, now idea is what can we do with the data we have and the assets to create a better ad for the consumer…behavioral, targeting, etc. teams of people focused on new ad products…

12:30: Sherman: social media – replacing search as the way people interact on the web? i don’t see it, but Facebook has huge stats. what’s happenign with that and what can search marketers do? Vanessa: reporter last week said search is so old news, so why still do search? she said people are still searching and they’re searching more and more. and thy’re going to keep doing so. doesn’t mean don’t think about social media, but it’s about audience. it’s not an either/or thing. misty agrees.

12:32 MIsty: with social you can do traditional things outside of search. boundaries are dissolving between different marketing strategies…

12:33: Misty: social/real-time can drive search volume. marketers will find new ways…it’s a new beginning for search.

12:34: Dave: big companies look for search marketers for expertise in this. Avinash: media loves all stories, facebook/google/twitter/…world’s is all about one thing or the other ….video killed the radio star…it’s not like that here.  once said twitter was the dumbest thing on earth….now he uses it and thinks its the coolest thing since sliced bread.  important to realize that as you think about different elements, you use them for what they’re good at. the worst strategy is the tv strategy…to shout at peopl…thats why most big brands have pathetic number of followers…they’re not having conversations like danny sullivan.

12:36: Sherman: Managing info overload? how to make advertising legitimate business? will search be absorbed? siloing? Avinash: what we do today is try to influence people….there are many ways now to do that…one emerging way is to have these conversatiosn (is it going to survive)….single greatest reason for google’s success is relevance……….advertisers (madmen style)…that way is dead.

12:37: Avinash: when i work with some of the largest companies….the small ones will use search to get people to raise money, brand awareness…very broad range…Dave: Siloing? exactly the opposite. social media is finally…we used to talk about the promise of engaging with a consumer. social media is the first channels that’s accomplished this. it’s forcing the breaking down of the silos. who should own social media in your organziaton? Who owns the paper in you organization? It’s breaking down the silos.

Misty: everybody wants to own a piece of that because it can be so influential. PR, marketing, brands, search all involved. all can communicate more effectively. in the end we’ll win, because w’re tapping into what the consumer is truly looking for. customers can tell stories for us…make the pieces of our brand that they love more accessible to them…

12:41 Vanessa: we have to go the opposite way of silos. If you think about the data side, if all the areas of marketing can share data, there’s going to be so much more engagment…

12:42: Sherman, people are engaging and being social…but we’re still in the young, naive days in terms of black hat use…unethical marketers using data? What’s gonna happen if gov. steps in and says privacy is an issues…we don’t understand the issues, but will legislate it anyway:

12:43: Misty: thanks the gov. for paying attention to privacy (over healthcare,etc.). Avinash: talks about spam comments in egyptian tombs….spam has been a problem for a very long time and will continue to be…just try to use intelligent ways to surpress it as much as possible and provide incentives to do the right thing.

12:44: Misty: yes there will always be spam….marketers are always going to find a way to use/exploit media…years ago it was different people screaming "you’re a black hat"…now it’s the users who are policing the good/bad. consumers can sniff out the authenticity. the hard part is being so authentic that you don’t get called out by the consumer…

12:46: Dave: regulaton – a fair degree of risk…double edged sword. potential to do unehtical and criminal things. ….mentions recent product from Google that raised privacy concerns (doesn’t blame google necessarily)…not enough understanding in regulation to deal with it….some degree may be needed, but capitol hill’s understanding of the internet is frightening…..education is required…. fears that legislators aren’t up to speed.

12:48: Sherman:  shift from US perspecitve to global. what is the opportunity for search marketers to go global, and how do you deal with restictions in other countries like China…..Vanessa: you’ve always had to understand your audience whree they are. it’s not just about geography/translating…understanding the culture. government stuff is a whole other set of issues…starts with understanding the market before you go into it.

12:49: Avinash: there tend to be very sophisticated marketers in other countries. those that are doing web are sophisticated….just not enough of them. many countries extrememly young. opportunities in these countries…like vanessa’s point…you have to truly engage and understand the market. Misty: some other countries are doing more cool and unique things in social….

12:52:  Dave: a lot to be learned from other countries. some are leapfrogging…some not even using email, but going straight to Facebook, etc.

12:52: Mobile is here, but maybe it’s not what we thought it was gonna be….we’re about to see things change very drastically…iphone was a game changer…heading very quickly in a direction we didn’t anticipate a few years ago…

12:53 sherman: changes for search marketers? Avinash: story about being with his kids wanting to see something and using his nexus one….used google search and transcribed what he said through voice search, used location, gave him driving directions fast….i wonder as SEOs/marketers, if we’ve thought of this as the use case. sites optimized so they can do these things….for their business….not just on google….i really think…i have to rethink my search strategy…not even a fragment of marketers in search business are thinking about that as search. encourages marketers to think of mobile like that…not just a WAP version of a web page.

Misty: are all your local listings up to date, ready for navigation, prodcuts easy to access? then think of advertising things…usability of site in mobile…

12:56: Vanessa: Avinash is right. ubiquity in mobile opens door for a lot of new opportunities. it’s not that new ways of searching will replace google, but it’s just presenting different ways. people don’t think about using some things as searching, but it is….urbanspoon, etc.  Look at where the new opportunities are.

12:57 Sherman and audience thanks panel. It’s over.

A lot of Internet users spend a great deal of their time socializing or using social media sites in one way or another, whether that is to connect with others or simply to obtain information. Information is a key component of social media that often takes a backseat to communication in discussion of social media tools.

The fact of the matter is that more and more people are getting more and more of their information from social sites. That could be in the form of following a news publication on Twitter, following company updates on a blog or a Facebook page, or something as simple as a friend sharing a link.

Given that people are getting more info from social media sites, of course search engines want a piece of that, because their whole reason for existence is naturally to help users find what they are looking for on the web.

So, it stands to reason that if you want people to find information that you are producing, it can help a great deal to publish information and participate in conversations on social media sites. Never mind that users of those particular sites will have access to it. The general public will as well by way of search, regardless of whether or not they are a part of any particular community.

In an interview with WebProNews, Vanessa Fox, who used to work for Google, talked about reasons that businesses should be thinking about social media with regards to search. It’s about visibility. If you are having discussions out there about relevant topics, they could appear in search results not only in real-time search, but further down the road as well.

In other words, if you have a conversation with a peer on Twitter about some topic related to your niche, there is a good chance the resulting tweets of that conversation could appear in search results for that topic on Google, even a year from now, if that tweet happens to be relevant enough. That’s just an example (note: it’s hard to say at this point, just how tweets will impact search once the Google-Twitter deal starts showing results).

There are a variety of ways in which a social campaign can contribute to your performance in search engines, regardless of what these recent deals might produce. Like Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing recently discussed with WebProNews, you can optimize your social content.

The web went blog crazy a few years back. Marketers found out that blogs were great for achieving search engine visibility because of the content and links that can come from them. It’s not that different with social media now. The web has largely moved into a social media-heavy phase, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Search engines obviously know this and care about it.

As Fox says in her interview, it’s getting to the point where more businesses are starting to realize that they need to be involved with social media. However, surveys still frequently suggest that many are reluctant, and even if they do engage to some extent, they are still holding back, and not reaching the potential they could be.

You know search is important to marketing on the web. Really, it’s important to marketing, period. If you operate on the web or off, your customers are on still online, as Fox noted. Social media is growing increasingly important to search. And search is only one aspect of online marketing. There are many more benefits to social media than that.

How important is social media to search? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Facebook/Twitter Use May Now Mean More for Google/Bing Rankings

> Social is Only Going to Become More Important to Search

> Where Social Media Fits Into the SEO Equation

I managed to catch up with Vanessa Fox at the SMX Advanced show in Seattle last week.  We talked at length about some of the things you need to keep in mind in terms of assessing the search viability/index status of a website.  You can watch the video obviously to get the entire scoop, but I thought I might bullet point some of the more important topics in a separate article.

More WebProNews Videos

Important point number 1:
A traffic problem is not always a ranking problem.  Many of us are too quick to assume that a drop in traffic is an indicator of some sort of issue with our search rank. 

You may not have a ranking issue at all (per se).  You could have a crawling problem, there could be parts of your sites getting crawled but not indexed, you could have some sort of extraction issue…  any number of things. 

The thing here to keep in mind is that you need to develop some sort of infrastructure to diagnose problems.  Start with some ranking report benchmarks.  Generally speaking, you want to be able to know about where you stand in the rankings for some of your top queries.  Know about where you stand in the SERPs for those queries and that will give you a general idea of any significant ranking movement.

Important point number 2:
Organize your pages into categories.  Analyze your server logs for search engine bot activity on a per category basis. This will help you have a better idea about how well the bots are spidering/indexing your content.  You may find that categories ‘A’ and ‘C’ are being actively crawled by the search bots, but ‘B’ is getting very little attention from them.

These various category pages may also have significant variation in terms of their crawl rates.  Some of your category sections may be crawled at a rate of 10 pages per day, some at 100 pages per day.  Being able to see how many pages the crawlers pick up from the individual categories gives you a good idea about how long it takes the bots to get through your whole site.

Important point number 3:
Search Engines aren’t going to spend all their time crawling all your content.  Crawl efficiency is the name of the game… If you have a lot of pages you need to be able to let the crawlers know what pages are the most important for them to crawl around on.  If you don’t want registration pages, error pages, things like that -all non productive pages.  So you would want to keep the engines off of things that are not productive for you so they can spend more time dealing with the ‘good stuff’.

Important point number 4:
Create comprehensive, canonical .xml sitemaps for each of your categories (the categories have to be declared canonical before you can do this).  In other words, you can create a sitemap index file that links your multiple sitemaps and submit it to Google Webmaster Central. 

This gives you a very granular and accurate assessment of how well Google is crawling the various parts of your site.  Better yet, you get access to all the cool little graphs and tools in Webmaster Central sitemap reports.  This will allow you to identify not only how much and what areas of your content are being crawled, but also how much of that content is being indexed.

So if you see that Google is crawling everything you have in category ‘A’ but only indexing 20% of it, you have a solid spot to start looking for reasons why. 

Important point number 5:
Make sure you actually have a problem before you start running around trying to fix a problem.  Seems like it should go without saying maybe, but as Vanessa points out, a decrease in your overall indexed pages for example, doesn’t necessarily mean you have a problem.  Google may have simply de-iindexed some of your ineffective or duplicated pages for example. 

If you haven’t had a drop off in search traffic, then you probably don’t have a significant search problem.  Changes are not necessarily problems.  Seems like quite a folks in this business have a little trouble with that distinction.

So there you have it.  5 pretty solid tips from one of our favorite former Googlers.  I would of course urge you to check out our video to get it right from her – she says it all a lot better than I do. 

Let us know what you think of the video. Did you find Vanessa’s advice helpful? Discuss here.

He highlights what Yahoo and Google (respectively) search engineers Priyank Garg and Greg Grothaus had to say about the matter:

Priyank, when asked about best practices for "localizing" English language content across domains, noted that Yahoo! does not filter duplicate content out of their results when the works are found on multiple ccTLD domains. Greg confirmed that this is also how Google’s engine behaves and, with the exception of potentially spammy or manipulative sites, reproducing the same content on, for example, yoursite.com, yoursite.co.uk and yoursite.com.au was perfectly acceptable and shouldn’t trigger removal for duplicate content (assuming those sites are properly targeting their individual geographic regions).

Fishkin also notes that for usability and conversion reasons, it’s best to localize languages anyway, just to create a better user experience. Vanessa Fox (formerly of Google) has a very in-depth article on "Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers," which also discusses the issue. She recommends the following:

- Putting content for each country on a subdomain or subfolder. (Either is fine; but  if you’re starting from scratch and have a choice, I’d generally suggest going with a subdomain.)

- Including location-specific terms in internal anchor text. For instance, you might want to create an HTML site map that links to each country’s “home page” on the domain.

Fox’s article contains a ton of additional useful information on international SEO, an important topic for any business looking to expand their customer-base around the globe.

Country-specific TLDs can contribute to relevancy factors that potentially make your site rank higher according to Fox. While there are exceptions, the subject is something definitely worth giving some thought to.

O’Reilly Found will be a search-centric gathering aimed directly at developers, designers, and entrepreneurs.  At PubCon in Las Vegas, Fox told our own Mike McDonald, "This conference we’re going to have a lot of developers speaking, so it’ll be very technical."