Recent Google Search Updates and How They Effect You
I’ve been getting a lot of emails from subscribers about the recent Google updates and how my methods are effected by it.
If you’ve bought any of my courses, you know I’m an advocate for unique content… and unique content that actually serves a purpose. I’ve been doing SEO for a number of years now, and I’ve noticed the number 1 key to longevity in search rankings is to do what the search engines want you to do.
They want REAL unique content written by a real person. They don’t want automatically spun garbage, auto blogging (I’ll talk about that in a sec), and any of the usual stuff that people try and short cut with.
The good news is, if you’ve followed what I taught you in any of my trainings you are 100% OK.
Here’s what it all boils down to… you ready?
Making your websites for the users, and not the search engines.
That’s right! All you have to do is make a website that YOU YOURSELF would want to spend time reading. How do you do that? Simple:
- Write content that has value (300 words or more). While you can get away with creating ‘common knowledge’ content, every extra bit of effort you put into your content creation carries it a long way. Actually write about tips and info that if you read, you’d learn something as well.
- Add images and videos to capture user interest.
- Proper formatting (while SEs don’t care about formatting, it makes your content more readable which equates to higher conversions)
It’s as simple as that. Nothing has changed – however one thing I would suggest you do is try not to overload your site with affiliate links. Occasionally publish an article here and there that is pure content. If you use affiliate links, make them no-follow.
Now…. Auto-blogging: dead or alive?
The recent Google updates were designed to weed out auto-blogging sites – however I’ve seen a number of Google updates in the past that were supposed to weed out those auto-blogger sites, yet they still continue to grab search traffic. Most of my auto-blogging sites are still getting organic search traffic, so clearly the update wasn’t as effective as everyone thinks. I did notice a couple lost their traffic, but those were very thin and crappy auto-blog sites that had very little content within.
While I think they did change their search algorithms a tad, something tells me all they really did was take on a few more manual editors to review search results to manually weed out junk sites as a short term effort to discourage people from auto-blogging. If you couple that with a ‘big announcement’ of an algo change, the effects ripple through the webmaster community. Some webmasters notice that their auto-blog sites were de-indexed, they freak out and associate it with the Google updates and then run to their favorite webmaster community to tell everyone about what happened. Other people start jumping on saying they also lost some traffic, and before you know it those threads go viral, and people start proclaiming that Google has “effectively eliminated auto-blogging”.
It’s another one of those ‘the world is ending’ mindsets IMO.
But the thing is… I’ve been hearing that for years, but yet people are still effectively using auto-blogging effectively to get traffic from the search engines.
Let me show you some of the traffic stats for one of my auto-blogs. The update was around the end of February. Look at my traffic which is organic search driven for March 2011 ( btw, I accidentally let the account expire for about a week during March)
Thoughts?
Hi Dan, I’m glad to read the expert’s thoughts about the new Google algo changes.
I’m a full time blogger and blog flipper, and this latest algorythm change didn’t do any big change, except for a couple of blogs.
One of them was in Google’s first position by at least one year, a full autoblog about healthy cooking tips.
It was really cured, well done and impossible to discover also to the eyes of expert.
Anyway, two days ago it was disappeared.
But if you do a search over Google for site:mydomain.com, it appears with over 20 pages of results.
Strange things, will it depends on algorythm changes?
I don’t know…
See you soon!
so the numbers say BFD, Google ain’t shinin; me LOL (once you take a week off out of the numbers)
Dude
Man I have been using your techniques for a while now
and, I got to tell you…
I got the laying on the couch part down pat.
Just kidding.
Wanted to let you know that I like your product
and I have set up some sites using your techniques.
But I think I made a mistake by not making my content
that unique. It pretty much says the same thing as the
Amazon page.
I need to go back and re-write a bunch of stuff and
possibly pick products that are not quite so mainstream.
So, lesson learned.
Anyway thanks for the info it was an interesting post
and line of thought.
Thomas
yes, I agree with you. Content is still the king.
I think that “content farms” were hit much harder than auto-blogs. I write (or did – I quit as of this month, unless something changes) for Associated Content. I write 100% original travel articles based on my experiences living in South America. My traffic there has dropped down to about 20% of what it was before the algo change – as has just about everyone else on the site.
Meanwhile, my personal blog – which has exactly the same type of information on it – has gone up in traffic by about 20% in the last few weeks. (It’s been steadily growing anyway, but it made a very obvious jump in daily average traffic).
It’s been pointed out that sites that have a lot of certain keywords on them – you know, the weight loss, get your girlfriend back, grow your johnson kind of stuff – are the ones that appeared to take the biggest hits (like Associated Content). Meanwhile, sites like Squidoo, which had been working hard to purge those spammy topics from their pages, saw much less of a reduction in traffic. And I will say my Squidoo traffic dropped a little bit, but not enough to make me sad. AC is a seriously lost income stream for me, though – bummer, that.
I actually think it is a good thing that Google is weeding out the crap! You are right – create content for your readers, not the search engines. Don’t always try to “sell” them and provide value. So many people just flood articles and blogs with tons of affiliate links and ads, not really thinking about giving the reader value – even if it is free!
If you create quality content, in the end, you should have nothing to worry about – the search engines will “see” that as well, but more importantly – your readers will.
Can only say in Sweden it is not any affect at all. 🙂
Thanks for assuring good content and SEO still works. Back to basics.
Hey Dan,
As always, good info here, thanks!
I try to make all my content from the point of view – if I were someone else, would this information help me or enrich me in some way? And so far, in spite of the latest algorithm, things are going ‘smooth’. But sometimes I do use an article rewriter. Even still I kinda modify the rewrite anyway. In your opinion, using an article rewriter on a regular basis would likely be ok in the eyes of Google? Would it depend on the quality of the rewriting software? Just for the sake of time, I would like to use it more for backlinking, but now I’m a bit apprehensive?
Dan I have to agree with you while I do not do much autoblogging I have several sites within niches and sometimes I use the same content from 1 on the other and I have yet to notice any my search engine rankings drop.
Tim
Dan,
Do you have any thoughts on the use of material from article directories, but which have had a few SEO-ed introductory paragraphs and a summary paragraph added?
That sound’s about right Dan… besides, 300 words of advice on most subjects are easy to come-by or even share from one’s personal experience, as long as it remains on topic with your blog theme or targeted keyword…
As always, thanks for sharing your experience..
Dennis
Hi Dan, I haven’t seen any change, then again I do only have 4 sites but they do have decent content on. I’m putting together another now which is going to be much smaller, 3 posts but well optimised for on page SEO. I’ll let you know how it ranks…
Yo Dan
The challenge is to make auto-blogs useful for visitors I think. For example Yahoo! does a good job of automating content with their news pages. I tend to visit them quite regularly to read the news even though it is syndicated content.
I think that there is a good side and a bad side to auto-blogging. The bad would be where full posts from other blogs are re-published, articles are stripped of their resource boxes, links are removed from syndicated content, the attribution requirements are ignored etc.
p.s. I am impressed by the traffic in your example stats.
Hey Dan,
I greatly appreciate someone with your kind of experience sharing what is going on, especially the do’s and don’ts. I am still pretty new, so have not written too much content yet, but I am glad for the warnings before I publish content that is less than quality.
My sites are all gaining traffic slowly, but am still focusing on building backlinks to get more. Have not made any sales yet, seems like the traffic so far has been a bit low quality, cause I’ve been getting a lot of spam.
Thanks again,
Ruth M
Hi, Dan, Like your remarks as usual. My question is: I am not quite sure what autoblogging is. Does it include automatic posts posted at different intervals from places like YouTube and Yahoo answers and similar sites. I recently started a project (the software for such was way too much money; actually the idea has some merit; I think.) What it does; go out on the web and find articles and YouTube videos related to keywords that you enter. Then the software does exactly that. Say you have a keyword, “health”. Articles and videos on health are then posted to your blog at intervals you set. You can put banner ads for a product related to your keyword. The content is always different. Would this type of putting content on a page or a post be considered autoblogging? Thanks in advance for advice and comments. I would like to include this in my Interenet Marketing efforts which so far have taught me a lot but no money. Still trying.
Dorothy
PS: The web site I listed is not an autoblog; I put all the content which I wrote on that site.
thanks for the tips, Luckily I’ve designed my sites to be content rich. Does anyone know where I can find decent on-site seo tutorials? I feel like that would help me out a lot. Thanks again.
Hi Dan,
Unfortunately I have to disagree with you here, I followed you LSA course to the letter, 48 pages of totally original review content, no blackhat, after 4 months I had 9 pages on page one and the rest between pages 3 and 5, and was starting to make some sales, after the Google update, all are now page 50 and beyond, after thousands of hours work Google has f***** me good, revenue now zero, it is so disappointing, so G has put another honest affiliate out of business, I am giving this site building up now and moving into an area that does not rely on Google at all.