The four main factors that we believe are causing penalties from Google penguin are:

• Using aggressive word-for-word anchor text.
• Overusing identical domains
• Low quality article marketing and blog spam
• Overuse of keywords in internal and outbound links

The overlap of Panda and Google Penguin and other influences imposed by Google makes it difficult for us to properly assess the situation. Throughout April, Google started issuing a large number of unnatural link notices via their Webmasters Tools, on the 16th of April a glitch caused many sites to be marked as “parked domains”, on the 19th of April Panda 3.5 rolled-out and lastly on the 24th Penguin officially rolled-out. From this we can easily see that April was a very unforgiving month and many sites were hit hard.

The above graph provided by SEOmoz shows the impact on search rankings over a period, and as we can see even Panda 3.5 was dwarfed by the effects of the Google Penguin algorithm.

What you can do:

The next question you should be asking is “What can I do about this?”. The following techniques apply to any Google updates and will equip you with the means of avoiding any potential threats in the future.

The first thing that needs to be done is an assessment of the damage that you have incurred by your site. Search through your analytics with a fine comb and determine the exact parts of your Website that may have incurred Google’s wrath. You need to segment your data and determine exactly which traffic streams you have lost.

Cross reference your losses to the current changes made by Google in order to narrow down the list of “violations” that you could have breached.

Make sure you have a full understanding of the SEO efforts within your company and the efforts of any company that you are outsourcing. Some SEO companies may employ black-hat tactics that will work in the short run (very short) and then come back to bite you later.

It is important to create valuable, well written content. Quality content enables Google to index your site and support their goal of providing the most relevant results for a given query. Once you have created solid content then couple this effort with making use of XML sitemaps. There are very effective in helping search bots crawl a site faster, enabling Google to discover and index more pages. Interestingly more than half of a 1500 person study done by marketing sherpa said that they view content as the most effective SEO tactic (as shown in the graph).

What not to do:

Because it is uncertain how Penguin is penalizing us, some SEOs have attempted to cut away at all of their SEO efforts, removing backlinks that may not be causing the problem. Not ideal.

Only “de-optimise” your site or a region or page within your site if it is completely necessary and you have looked at the bigger picture. If you have a page that is ranking high for a keyword you want to use for a different page then it would be detrimental to de-optimise it, rather just work more on the page you want to rank well for those keywords. If you think you have taken “too aggressive an approach” then step back and take a good look at the bigger picture and make sure that your content serves a purpose. If it does then leave it, if it “over-optimised” and there are keywords crammed into it until it is blatantly obvious, then it is time to “de-optimise”.

Lastly it is also important to keep your focus on factors that you are able to control – spend your time isolating the possible factors that have harmed your site and correct them while we wait for the next animal in Google’s zoo to be let loose ……

Here, we will discuss the most prominent changes arising from version 4.5. The changes to the Workload management feature will perhaps be the most noticeable, as these new features include the ability to capture, monitor, track and report against tasks across all of your websites.

The new additions to the Workload tab introduce key features of project management tools, meaning that you will not need to come out of Webgrowth anymore to project manage your campaigns in other third party software.

There are many new columns which you can use to filter the tasks that have been assigned, including the start/due/completed date. A strong point of this tool are the columns for estimated/actual/billable time, these mean that you can keep track of the time you are spending on different tasks or campaigns, enabling you to not under or over-service a client.

This will also assist in keeping a track of how long tasks are actually taking to be completed, meaning that we are able to predict how long each task will take, allowing you to quote for projects very accurately based on real world data.

In the my sites section there is a new field called “Created” that allows us to filter and sort sites based on when you added them to the platform. In order to enhance the performance of the software a couple of technical aspects have been included; such as new support for rel=canonical and the improved spider link detection which will improve the accuracy and performance of our crawler, that powers many of our components.

Here is a full list of the changes that have been made to the software:

• New workload management features
• Support for rel=canonical
• Improved spider link detection
• Improved Month on Month table CSV exports
• My Sites section now includes Site Creation date
• Enhanced email support for white label customers
• Improved front end message for no Google Analytics integration
• Enhanced PowerPoint support for white label customers
• Month on Month keyword performance data
• Enhanced link prospect harvesting not getting any prospects

Webgrowth Needs You!

We try to update our software as often as possible, as we are constantly working to provide our customers with the best software and service that we can. If you have any input regarding our software, we would love to hear from you. You can get in touch via email: support@webgrowth.co.za

Matthew Cutts stated:
“Hey Danny, there’s a pretty big flaw with this “winner/loser” data. Searchmetrics says that they’re comparing by looking at rankings from a week ago. We rolled out a Panda data refresh several days ago. Because of the one week window, the Searchmetrics data include not only drops because of the webspam algorithm update but also Panda-related drops. In fact, when our engineers looked at Searchmetrics’ list of 50 sites that dropped, we only saw 2-3 sites that were affected in any way by the webspam algorithm update. I wouldn’t take the Searchmetrics list as indicative of the sites that were affected by the webspam algorithm update.”

Searchmetrics summarised the losers as having some of the following characteristics: They use databases to aggregate information, many of them are press portals and aggregators and they have Heavily-templated websites.

Many people were very shocked to see some of the sites that took a hit. Digg, Techdirt, Paidcontent and Newsbusters are all big names, however, the most shocking site to take a hit was Cult of Mac. The site has previously complained about being hit and then they returned, arising confusion about whether it was manually restored, Google said that it was dropped for other reasons.

Occurrences like this remind us that analyses like these are not always perfect. Sites can have gains and drops for different reasons, they may be less visible this week because the previous week an event or a certain degree of media exposure happened, for example. The parked domain classifier that Google imposed a few days before Panda 3.5 is another example of an inconsistency that can affect the results.

The only way to be certain that your search results have been affected is to look at your search-driven traffic from Google itself rather than listed websites from an analysis that may be inconsistent.

1. Social media and PR are both mediums where the customer is in control, PR professionals are used to working within an environment that hands over control to others.
2. PR has always been about engaging with key audiences to establish mutually beneficial relationships, as in Social media campaigns.
3. Social media is no different to traditional mediums of communication (newspaper, radio, television etc.): the emphasis should be placed on building a relationship with and engaging in communication with the audience. It is not about technology, it is still about the people who use it.
4. Newspapers, radio and magazines are facing an uncertain future due to the rise of social media and the increasing functionality of the Internet. PR professionals have strong motivation to engage in new means of communication with their audiences.
5. Public relations is heavily reliant on content, such as photos, video and written content. Social media sites are an ideal platform to get a message across.
6. PR is now more than ever able to keep up to pace with an environment that moves at lightning speed.
7. Public relation professionals (if professional!) are the external voice of their clients, it is their practice to voice messages of trust and authenticity to their audience. The fundamentals of social media platforms are authenticity and to have the ability to trust people, making PR professionals the ideal people to manage it.
8. Both public relations and social media are about connecting people and ideas, so who better to take the task of using the technology to convey important messages than PR professionals?

Public relations is practically tailor-made for the social media era. PR is about building and maintaining quality relationships with the public. It is able to tell the truth in a way that the South African public can accept, which is very important in such a dynamic environment.

Tactically, PR has an incredible opportunity to take the lead on the content creation side. Social media sites, especially Twitter, can help us to devise blogging strategies, video blogs and podcasts. PR is also gaining a hand in search engine optimisation (SEO) approaches.

One of the biggest shortfalls in the South African PR industry at the moment is the fact that social media is being neglected or overlooked as a viable means of communication. The vast majority of South African Internet users are members of Facebook and Twitter. Many players in the PR industry are not taking full advantage of this when trying to convey their messages and perhaps the rest of us are put off by the Durex type disasters that cannot be removed from the ether!

Small steps and practise… the only way to accomplish anything worthwhile getting out of bed for, no?

There are many different ways to create author authority, depending on which medium you are choosing to gain authority on. However way you look at it, authority will improve the PR and brand of you and your business. Paul Yiu recently answered some questions about author authority on Twitter and Facebook and how it affects Bing’s search results. These were some of the factors that he mentioned are important:

• The ratio of people who are following you to how many people you are following. If the ratio is high (many followers, few following) then your authority is going to be high and visa versa.
• If your content is constantly retweeted then your authority will increase.
• The quality of your followers. If your followers have high credibility and contribute to the twitter community then by following them, you increase your own authority.
• By following good accounts, you also increase your authority.
• Tweeting about relevant topics will also boost your authority, however, tweeting about topics that are not relevant will not reduce your authority.
• lastly the authority of the authors that are retweeting your content will also affect your own authority.
• The amount of likes you accumulate. Not only does this give you value as an author but it also provides backlinks.

By gaining high author authority over Twitter, your content will likely appear on bing when someone searches for related topics to your content.

Content Creation:

SEO has traditionally worked in one major way: creating content that is highly relevant and interesting to the readers. There was a lot of debate about keyword density, position of keywords, titles, and so on. Of course, evolution takes hold and what was once targeted primarily towards text, now has shifted more towards social conversion. Where should we put the Like and Tweet buttons? There are calls to action to encourage users to share and like their content, creating social interaction. At the end of the day if your content does not intrigue the attentions of your audience then it will just be overlooked and lost with time, it won’t be liked or retweeted.