Panda 4.1 – Reading Between the Lines

So Moz.com put live some suggestions based on a compilation of various Google documents published throughout 2014 and named it a guide to Panda 4.1. Its insightful stuff however like other ‘official’ Google guidelines it appears to be a set of rules that may or may not have any bearings on how your website will rank in future.

Moz’s mozcast can be viewed here. It was based on an original piece of research by Josh Bachynski which you can find here.

We’ve taken some time to look through the list of do’s and don’t and as with all things Google it’s open to some wide interpretation. There’s no doubt this is all best practice information however in the real search results which are marauded by black hat listings, automated link spam and other techniques, simply taking these as gospel will at best prolong the time it takes your website to rank in Google for your terms and at worst keep your website completely off the radar.

Below you will find our thoughts on Josh’s short list. We’ve retitled things to remove any wooly language:

Offer complete information that minimises instances where the user returns to Google to click the next link in the index. A user’s objective should be complete by the end of your content.

This is going to cause lots of problems with businesses that only think outwardly about their content. As with previous Panda updates, it is best to approach your content inwardly, from your customers perspective. Draw up a shortlist of the top 5, 10, or 20 questions asked about the topic on each page and completely give the game away with your content. Answer the question and win!

Summaries above the fold

To engage customers as quickly as possible you should display a text snippet that manages their expectations. This should be above the fold so they stay on-page and don’t bounce back to Google’s search results.

Get relevant links, positive mentions in forums, shares, likes etc

This is basic link building however the document suggests Google has fixed its relevancy issues. This has yet to be clarified as at present Google is terrible at determining the topical relevancy of your link sources.

Get Yelp, Zagat and Google+ reviews to improve listing trust

This is always tactically difficult. We advise using marketing automation tied to Email to quickly get feedback into these 3rd party systems. These can be triggered from ecommerce systems, and for the service sectors when users download documents or request information.

Add address and phone number to every page

Speaks for itself. Just make sure you use microformats. I wonder if Amazon will do this as they’re notorious for hiding methods of direct contact.

Add up to date copyright, about us info and other trust signals

Our guess is that this is designed to combat affiliate marketeers and domainers who hide their contact information and are wholly focused on referring traffic in exchange for commission.

Do not hide contact information

Make sure you have a contact us page. If you’re following the advise above verbatim you should have address and phone numbers on every page in any case.

Link out to supporting content (sources, citations)

As a rule we advise against linking out from your website. You’re probably linking out hundreds of times already to sites like Facebook and Twitter which is already a massive hemorrhage on your websites internal Page Rank (not to be confused with Tool Bar Page Rank). If you’ve used source information in your website content then linking is the right thing to do. Just make sure its nofollowed. The same goes for your Social Media links.

Manage keyword density

This is old news now. Don’t keyword stuff. Pay attention to synonyms and pander to Google Hummingbird’s natural language algorithms.

Ditch local landing pages

This is the first point where we’d advise against these guidelines. If you want to rank for your term across different locations then this is the only way to do it.

Ditch all landing pages

Reading between the lines the guidelines advise that you don’t create content purely for search engines. Our interpretation of all website content is that it should be optimised to achieve significant saturation and attract traffic from as many keywords as possible. Our advise is just don’t go mad with landing pages, creating a new page for every long tail variation. If you’re clever with synonym research you’ll probably find that you can cover 10 different keyword combinations on a single page.

Check your spelling and grammar

This goes without saying.

Check your websites structural integrity i.e. 404s, canonical’s etc

Implement on page SEO audits and fix problems, don’t patch them.

Add last updated info on every page

Really?

Domain history

You can’t fake this however we suspect lots of domainers will be raising the profile of domains that have been around for a long time.

This is just our initial knee jerk reaction to the original Moz post. I’m sure when Panda 4.1 launches that most websites won’t have that much work to do to maintain rankings.