‘Cause I’m seeing right now a huge improvement on one website that was quite severely penalized by Panda 2.5.

The only change that I made on it was to improve the bounce rate, as I was counselling here (yup, with some simple design tricks anyone can improve this parameter). Before the Panda 2.5 the bounce rate was constantly around 85%, now it is constantly around 75%. Of course, by improving the bounce rate automatically I improved the page views stats, too.

Now, since this morning, I’m seeing on this website some 25-30% extra traffic, which is very encouraging. In fact, taking into account that Panda updates are coming approximately once per month, it is about time for Google to rollout the Panda 2.6 update.

In the next hours and days we’ll find out more about this.

The usual bullshit. Blah blah.

Unfortunately, the Panda update is much more difficult to deal with, because, as I said here, Google started to consider into its algorithm some usage factors that normally aren’t under the webmaster’s direct influence. Technically, to recover from Panda you should:

• try to keep the users more time on your website; try to engage them somehow (maybe with movies?… online games?… p%rn pictures?…);
• try to make the users to visualise more pages; more page-views / user is better (you should split the content into several sub-pages – I know this sounds totally anti-Panda 1.0, but it seems that Google now has a different view than 1 year ago);
• try to make the user to return to your website several times after the initial visit coming from a search; with every search visit, Google places cookies in the user’s browser and then tracks the returning rate, which then uses as an indicator of a website’s value;
• try to lower the bounce-rate.

Don’t forget: Google has a lot of usage tracking mechanisms. Analytics, Chrome browser, search cookies, social media sharing monitoring etc. … you really can’t trick Google into thinking that your website is more beloved by the users than it really does.

Good luck with your Panda 2.5 recovery!

Well, after carefully reading a lot of personal experiences and industry reports (such as this one from SearchMetrics) I think that I’ve found a pattern of the affected websites, and this is usability-related.

More affected were the following websites:

• websites with a low pageviews per user average;
• websites with a high bounce rate;
• websites with a short time-on-site metrics.

More favoured were the following websites:

• websites with a high number of pageviews;
• websites with low bounce rate;
• websites with nice time-on-site metrics.

If you scan the Alexa data related to the websites listed by SearchMetrics blog, you can see that the affected websites are all struggling with these parameters: bounce rate, pageviews per user and time-on-site, while the most favoured websites are displaying, all, strong data. However, some losers display good numbers.

For example ActressArchives.com is cited with 62% positions loss after Panda 2.5. In Alexa, the usage parameters are quite good: ~6 pageviews per user, ~50% bounce rate and ~29 minutes on site. This is much better than PerezHilton.com or TMZ.com, but PerezHilton has a very nice bounce rate: 39%. And PerezHilton is cited on the winners’ list. So, it seems that the bounce rate was the essential metrics to be taking into account.

[However, I suspect that Alexa's data on ActressArchives.com are erroneous. On Google AdPlanner they are much different: 3,9 pageviews per user and only 3 minutes time on site.]

If confirmed, it is a clear sign that Google started to melt the search data with data gathered from its other products: Analytics, Chrome, Plus etc. Since not all the webmasters are using Google Analytics, I suspect that the Chrome browser’s usage statistics are the main factor that triggered this Panda 2.5 update. But I am also sure that Google will release very soon an update to this update, simply because it’s quite stupid to link the relevance of a search with the users’ behaviour. That’s why we are seeing now a lot of excellent, unique websites that are hit by this … failed Panda Update 2.5, so don’t despair. I’m very confident that the Panda 2.6 update will come in 3-4 weeks and will repair the damage.

In short, I wanted to link within a conditional comment a special stylesheet inside the head of a document. Usually, this is a very simple task.  I made it a lot of times before, but I never noticed the strange requirement explained below.

My code was something like this:

<!--[if lte IE8]>
<link type="text/css" related="stylesheet" href="blabla.css">
<![endif}--> 

To my surprise, IE did interpreted correctly the code from "blabla.css" but displayed the following line on the top of the page:

<!--[if lte IE8]><![endif}-->

which was a totally non-sense. It was a triple non-sense, because a) this expression is a comment, b) anyway, this comment was inserted in the head section, and c) the IE interpreted the css code.

If you don't believe it, just use the following code and see it for yourself:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
  <title>Test</title>
  <!--[if lte IE8]>
   <style>
   h1 {color: Red;}
   </style>
  <![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
  <h1>This should be red in IE8</h1>
</body>

The example above will output a red H1 in IE8, preceded by… a strange line that displays the conditional comment’s expression.

After scratching my head and trying to find a solution to this uncomprehensible situation, I finaly managed to deal with it. The problem was the name of the browser. When writing the comment, one must carefuly obey the syntax recommended by Microsoft and write <!--[if IE 8]> instead of <!–[if IE8]> (with a space between “IE” and “8″). This is all! The following example will output a correct page and will stop triggering the abnormal behaviour, despite the fact that the only difference is given by a space between IE and 8.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
  <title>Test</title>
   <!--[if lte IE 8]>
    <style>
     h1 {color: Red;}
    </style>
   <![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
   <h1>This should be red in IE8</h1>
</body>

When we had to cope for the third  time in a row with such an incident, I decided to study the log files and I was amazed to discover that in the hours preceding every single incident the server was “attacked” from 3 IPs, coming from the same C-class: 216.104.15.* There were a lot of automated tools that were requesting non-existant pages from our website, by running into an infinite loop that was requesting something like this:

www…/list-services/js/functions.js
www…/list-services/js/js/functions.js
www…/list-services/js/js/js/functions.js

It was obvious that these requests were coming from some sort of search bot too stupid to understand the <base> tag.

Digging more into this, I discovered that this C-class pertains to Trend Micro, a shitty anti-virus producer. Then, searching more on Google, I found out that this shitty anti-virus installs on users’ computers a bullshit tool that “verifies” if/whether a website spreads malware or not. Unfortunately, their tool seems to be quite stupid, since it cannot correctly parse the HTML code of a page.

That’s why I decided to ban with .htaccess all the requests coming for the said C-class. And digging even more, I discovered that they are using a second class, too: 150.70.64.* and that a lot of people are starting to complain about them.

Everybody knows that high authority backlinks are the essential ingredient to obtain good positions on search engines. Unfortunately it’s very hard to obtain authority links, however there are some links that are easy to get.

I had to find recently some authority backlinks for Pinbud. We all know the theory: high authority links can be obtained only from:

• educational domains
• government-related domains (including foreign governmental websites)
• high PR websites
• established, old domains with content related to your website’s content

The theory is easy to learn – but the practice is a nightmare.

There are only 2 ways to get a backlink from an educational or a governmental website:

• the legitimate way: you get the backlink because you’ve done something and you deserve the backlink. This is very hard to attain, because 99.999% of websites have nothing in common with any educational resources;
• the “hacking” way: you can find a website that’s vulnerable to XSS (or better) so you can place a hidden backlink. While this is a feasible scenario, it requires tremenduos efforts. You must check websites one by one and do tests. In my opinion, it’s simply worthless.

Governmental links are very, very powerful. 2 months ago, intrigued by a post from WebmasterWorld, I’ve made some research and I discovered some highly positioned websites that had only 4-5 backlinks. But all these links were coming from some Chinese secondary governmental websites, and that’s why these websites were occupying really good positions. It was amazing!

High PR websites can be anything, from news to free classifieds, but the most common are the news-related websites. A news-related website will always feature at least PR 4-5, but the most important websites, even the websites of local, minor, newspapers, easily reach PR 8-9. Links can be paid or obtained for free.

After carefully reviewing a lot of possibilities, I finaly decided to pay some bucks, but to ensure some trusted backlinks. Remember, your time costs money: the timeframe required to obtain for free such backlinks can be so huge, that it’s simply worthless. So, I’ve decided to pay links from:

• Yahoo! Directory. Yahoo! Directory has PR 8. A link from Y!D is $300 / year. Choose carefully your category page. Choose a page related to the content of your website, preferably featuring some competitors, and with a good PR (at least 3-4).
• BOTW directory. Best Of The Web is another old, trustful directory. It has PR 7 and a backlink costs $299.95 (one time fee).
• Business.com is the third major directory, featuring PR 7. Price: $299 (one time fee).
• JoeAnt. JoeAnt directory has PR 7 and a backlink costs only $39.99. However be very careful, because JoeAnt doesn’t seem to be fully indexed by Googlebot. You should submit only to a category that’s indexed by Googlebot.

Thus, paying only $940, we’ve got 4 authority backlinks. But this is not all: Yahoo! listed PinBud not only on the main directory (http://dir.yahoo.com) but also on several subdomains. The same with Business.com. I submitted the website to a category and the editors placed our link on an additional (but relevant) category. In fact, the $940 price paid us not only 4, but 8 authority links.

Beside these we’ve got some backlinks from some minor directories that are probably getting information from Yahoo! So, the money were well spent.

Another precious backlinks that we’ve got in the last weeks are 2 links from Microsoft. As anyone knows, PinBud is powered by Microsoft Bing Maps technology. The coding itself is not Microsoft related (the platform is a classic LAMP – Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP) but the core function, companies listing and positiong, is build on top of Bing Maps integration. So we were entitled to submit our company description to Microsoft Bizspark and now we have a live profile on Bizspark and a link from Microsoft Platform Ready.

And finaly, another worth to mention authority link source is the DMOZ directory – but, unfortunately, it’s very hard to get there. Just submit your website and forget about it. Come again in 4-5 months and, if you don’t see your website, submit it again or try to find on Elance or another marketplace an editor that will agree to let you in for few bucks.

We have seen almost immediately the effects of these backlinks: the traffic on PinBud.ca went up like crazy. And there are enough signs telling us that PinBud.com will be soon out of the infamous “sandbox”. So, the conclusion is crystal-clear: start to build authority links with the most easy to get!

In short,  Google’s engineers have read a story from New York Times that raised some (good) questions: knowing that link popularity is the basis of the Google’s algorithm, is it fair to rank high a website that has a lot of negative reviews?

That’s why they have decided to  perform a sentiment analysis and to position websites according to these results. So, now it’s more difficult to position a website that only enjoys negative reviews.

Unfortunately, in my opinion this approach – sentiment analysis – opens  largely the door to the most unorthodox tactics for search positions manipulation. In fact, to unfair competition.

One of  Google’s most respected principles was that “there’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.” According to the official Google Help Guide,

“Can competitors harm ranking?
There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages. [source]”

But now, if Google’s takes into consideration the so-called sentiment analysis, it’s clear that anyone wishing to destroy your website can make it very easily, just by posting some negative reviews on review websites.  Let’s look at this page featuring reviews for DecorMyEyes, the online shop that triggered Google’s reaction: it’s really full of negative reviews! And this page too! And this page! The reviews for DecorMyEyes.com are really awful, but, by commenting on this issue, Google simply showed to everyone the way of harming the competition.

I think that we’ll experience in the next months a growing demand for SEO’ers specialized in reviews writing !

The information is organised in 4 big tabs: “Home”, “My Ads”, “Allow and block ads”, “Performance reports”.

Under  the “Home” tabs you can see a short summary of the account. Like in the previous version of the interface one can see the earnings over the day, the last 7 days and so on. There are also some links towards important areas, such as Payment, Messages, Account settings, Resources. This areas were subject to a simple redesign.

The “My Ads” tab is a simple redesign, too, of the area that lets you define and modify ad units in the previous interface.

The user experience is better addressed with the new interface.

But the true innovative factors appear with the other tabs. With “Allow and block ads” tab one can have a fast view over the running ads and can block and allow the ads or the publishers with a single click. It’s much more convenient and easy to use than in the previous version.

A big change can be seen under the ‘Performance’ tab. Now, Google shows us graphics. The graphics are highly relevant, with data about channels, displayed ad types (text, flash, dynamic, image, html) and many more. Thus, you can see very relevant data, such as click through rate (CTR) with every type of ad. Data can be drilled down with CTR of ad types over URL channels. This is a big step further!

In short, the new interface is definitely a nice improvement and it’s worth exploring the new options. I’m sure that the new data can help any publisher to improve his ads performance and earn more from his Adsense account.

For example:

• site:domain.com – Google instant points to the traditional search (with “enter”)
• link:domain.com – the same
• inurl:[word, page.php] – sometimes works, sometimes is broken (works, but it collapses)

Thus, it’s obvious that Google’s engineers waited to launch the Google Instant, but as long as  Google Instant isn’t fully working and some searches still need the old way of search, this is a sign that Google’s search infrastructure still has to be fully updated. Including the Page Ranks.

1. Establish your objectives. What do you want to obtain with this campaign? More sells? Awarness? Newsletter subscribers? Any of the above? All?

2. Break your objective (or objectives) into themes. What are you trying to do with your Adwords campaign? Do you want to sell one or more products? Do you want to sell one ore more services? Do you want to gain users? Do you want to get subscribers? Etc. Try to understand what do you want to get from your campaign. If you want to sell several products, each one is a “theme”. If you want to sell several services, each one is a “theme”. If you want to get users, some ads and incentives should be used with users A, and other with users B. And so on. Try to understand as deep as possible the niches of your market. Each niche should be the basis for a single “theme”.

3. Define different keywords for each theme. Don’t mess the keywords. Use “plumbers” for ads related to plumbing and “cars” for ads related to cars. Add variations related to your offer: “plumbers in calgary“, “cheap cars” etc.

4. Create ad groups for every theme and create at least 3 ads for every ad group. Google Adwords system uses a very nice feature called “optimized ad rotation”: the ads are rotated until the system determines which one is the best performing. Then it will display only this ad. You can delete the other ads and write another ads,  and the system will start assessing again. Never ever write a single ad and keep that ad running without revisions!

5. Pay attention to the landing page. As a rule of thumb, try to include keywords in ad title, ad text and on landing page. For example, if you have an e-commerce website, send “blue widgets” users to the page where they can buy “blue widgets”, and “red widgets” users to the page where they can buy “red widgets”. More the landing page is related to your ads, more your ads’ Quality Score will increase. If you don’t have a page suitable to act as a  landing page, just create one from scratch.

6. Measure your results. The great tip about online advertising, compared to TV ads or print leaflets, is that results can be measured very easy. Setup tracking codes on your website and establish clear objectives: do you want to sell a product? Then you probably have an e-commerce website, so you can measure how many times the “thank you!” page have been accessed through Adwords. Do you want to sell services? Then you can measure how many times your visitors accessed the contact form coming from Google Adwords. And so on. People contact you always by phone? No problem: open an online profile with Google Local (and in order to strenghten your Google Local position, you can open one with PinBud.com, too – and many other local search engines), fill in a dedicated phone number and link this account to your Google Adwords campaign.

7. Always improve. Don’t set up the campaign and then wait for the results to come in. Improve, innovate and try! Make changes at least once every 4-5 months (I would recommend once every 3 months). Keep an eye on competition and see if one’s ads are constantly better positioned then your ads. Either the competitor pays a much bigger amount of money for each click, or his ads are simply better and you could learn from them.

Have a profitable campaign!