The recent update made by Google (Panda) is the first major change since 2009. There were many blogs that were affected by this update. Some experienced a drop in their traffic, while some experienced a surge. Whatever change your blog experienced, I’m sure you have noticed a lot of buzz around these algorithm changes. What is Panda all about? Let’s take a look:

No gibberish

According to Google, the Panda update was made to enhance the quality of search results. This made spammy sites disappear from the results. Though there still are some gibberish sites on search results, there are many websites that were pushed down in the search rankings. The Panda update is not perfect, but it did make considerable changes.

The update targeted low quality sites with superficial and shallow content, and brought down their rankings. The websites that were hit the hardest by Panda were content farms and article sites.

Content farms

Talking about a content farm, many people generally ask what exactly a content farm is. This is actually a very hazy area. Following the definition on Wikipedia, a content farm is a website that uses a lot of freelance writers to write content in order to rank high on search engine results. These websites earn money by getting many page views and thus selling ads on those pages.

This definition brings all the article directories under the definition of content farms. There are many content farms that are still standing strong, though some were penalized.

If you allow guests to post articles on your blog, chances are that some people add low quality content just for some backlinks. If this happens, your blog might have been affected by the recent updates. Opening your blog for guest posts is a good way to encourage reader activity, but some level of moderation is required so that it does not become a content farm.

Keep it Panda friendly

There are some basic steps that you can follow to optimize your website for Google Panda. Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO, prescribes four steps that can work with the post Google Panda update.

1. Evaluate your blog for these characteristics: low informative value, short form, too many ads or duplicate content. If some part is being duplicated, just remove it. If the content is not too useful, add bits of information. Remove extra panels of ads. Make sure the person doing this has enough web development expertise and SEO knowledge.

2. For subsequent blog posts, focus on high quality useful content that is not duplicated from anywhere else.

3. Promote your content in such a way that it attracts links from other blogs. You can do it by providing content in a way that makes people comment on it. When people get interested in your website, they will talk about it, or post links to it on other sites. This will increase your page rank. But remember- keep it original.

4. Offer users a chance to share your blog on social media like Twitter and Facebook. Social engagement will popularize your blog faster than other mediums. This will be useful for both your blog and your readers.

Though there are some legitimate sites that got caught up in the Panda update, it has proven to be a windfall for real content marketers – the blogs that provide great content to their readers. Continue to feed the Internet with the best content with less stress on the sales pitch, and you will stay good in the eyes of Google.

If you are looking for something that would let the Panda update work in your favor then use all the organic SEO strategies that you know, and stop building low quality links. Maybe some content farms have been spared by Google, but judging by the direction Google is taking, their next update might not be so kind.

About the Author

June Buckley is an SEO specialist and avid blogger. She likes writing about social media, business blog hosting, internet marketing and mobile technology.

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A blog’s success is measured through both its number of active readers or of RSS subscribers and its performance in traffic: number of page views, of unique visitors, popularity, page rank and many others.

There are a few methods to obtain the needed statistics to track and measure such indicators.

1. Access and traffic statistics

Google, the most powerful and popular search engine in the world, provides bloggers with traffic statistics though its free Google Analytics service.

By choosing a free Google Analytics account, you can view stats regarding your blog’s page views, number of unique or returning visitors, keywords used to reach your blog, the most visited pages you have posted, geographical tracking of your visitors and much more.

Google Analytics is currently considered to be a very accurate and relevant tool. Other services you might consider are StatCounter or Woopra with its live tracking and analytics features.

2. Indexing statistics

The number of pages indexed by a search engine and their position in search tops reflect the indexing rank of a site.

Do you want to find what your indexing results are for two of the most important search engines are? Google and Yahoo offer you two critical tools for any website administrator:

1. Google Webmaster Tools (XML Sitemaps)
2. Yahoo! Site Explorer

You can check the number pages from your website indexed by Google by typing the following in the search box:

site:www.domainname.com

You can also check the number of outside links your website’s pages receive by typing the following:

link:www.domainname.com

3. Popularity statistics

Traffic, accessibility, search engine exposure levels as well as content relevancy and its focus on certain niches all contribute to your blog’s popularity.

The popularity is statistically tracked by a range of online services, of which the most relevant are:

1. Alexa
2. Compete
3. Quantcast
4. Technorati (Blog dedicated service)

4. Statistics’ relevance

A thorough analysis of your blog’s stats will help you identify its strong spots and the type of content best suited for its audience. It will also help you determine its weak spots or to improve your content and focus more on covering certain areas of interest.

Yet make sure you never forget that blogs are maintained through relevant, interesting and fresh content, not statistics!

This concludes the “Corporate Blogging Guide”! I hope you all found it useful and share it with those who you think might need the information provided here. A PDF version of the guide is also in the works and will include an additional chapter.

Other chapters of the Corporate Blogging Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction to Blogging
Chapter 2: Critical Questions Before Launching a Corporate Blog
Chapter 3: Setting up Goals and Blog Positioning
Chapter 4: Types of Corporate Blogs
Chapter 5: Blog Editors & Editorial Policy
Chapter 6: Blogging Tips to Get You Started
Chapter 7: Blog Performance Tracking Tools (current)

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Over the past few days many of us have seen a significant drop in our RSS subscriber count in our FeedBurner account.

The FeedBurner help group – if we can call it that way, as no one ever seems to answer – is filled with messages from users who have “lost” even thousands of subscribers overnight. What’s the answer these users get? The silent treatment. And it’s not the first time users report these drops and get no answer.

OK, we’ve seen a pattern in these drops and it involves the Google Reader subscribers. With Google Reader being probably the most popular feed subscription tool worldwide, there’s no wonder that the drop percentage ranges from 30% to 70% in some cases.

So, just for the sake of remaining optimistic about this situation, let’s presume that Google is working on a way to better integrate these two services (FeedBurner and Reader) to provide better statistics to us users.

Even so, this does not explain the lack of updates on the FeedReader Status blog or the lack on a 2 line message on the help board that would definitely calm down the spirits. And as the case is not singular, and the lack of communication seems to turn into a habit, I cannot help but thinking that ever since Google took over FeedBurner, the relationship between the project team and the users has gone from good, to bad, to worse.

A change of attitude is required in this age of instant communication, otherwise even if Google is running the service, competition will eat it up. “All this has happened before, and will happen again” as they used to say on my favorite TV show, Battlestar Galactica.

Update: After 3 or 4 days of madness on the boards, a Google team member addressed a short message confirming that the issue is related to Google’s Feedfetcher and has been reported to the responsible department. It took a while…

Update 2: An acknowledgement of the issue is finally made official on the FeedBurner blog. 3 to 4 days after users started to ask questions about it.

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Those of you interested in website rankings and SEO, you’d better check out your sites’ PageRanks. As we speak, a new update is in progress (one that has been rumored about). Over the past few hours I’ve seen pagerank updates on most of the websites I’m working on, going up, and back dow, and up again. Let’s see how and when it will stabilize.

And also, Alexa.com has just updated not only their design, but most probably their ranking system too.

New Alexa Design and Ranking System

One day ago, Blogsessive was still ranking around 70,000, and now the rank has been updated to 49,130.

Could it be the pressure of Compete and Quantcast breathing down Alexa’s neck? Who know. What’s important is that they seem to be taking steps toward perfecting their ranking system and updating their online image. And that’s good as it was about time to do it.

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Back in 2005, the folks at Google took on an “experiment” that later proved to be a very popular tool for webmasters and SEO people: the Google Sitemaps. Their exact words on the official Google blog were:

We’re undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike.

Ever since sitemaps where added, the Google Webmaster Tools became more and more used and useful, many new features being added over the time.

How do sitemaps help you?

Based on the main reasons that lead to this successful “experiment”, sitemaps are meant to improve the way your website is indexed and crawled by the GoogleBot.

Furthermore, through the Webmaster Tools interface and using sitemaps, you have access to vital information such as pages that could not be crawled, broken links, search queries that returned your website’s content, queries that drove traffic to your website and many more features worth discovering and using.

How do I build a XML sitemap?

As a blogger, you should not worry about that. Arne Brachhold developed a wonderful WordPress plugin that is very easy to manage and automatically generates a standards-compliant XML sitemap based on your blog’s structure. This is one plugin that I include in every WordPress blog I create or administrate, so, from my point of view, it’s one that I “could not live without”, so I highly recommend it.

Download Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin here.

Once you have the sitemap ready, it’s time to upload it to your Google Webmaster Tools account. In order to access these tools, all you need is a Google account. You can use your Gmail login info to access them.

Google Webmaster Tools

As soon as you log in to your account you’ll be taken to your dashboard. Here you can select through already existing website profiles, add new ones, add sitemaps and confirm your administrative rights (verify) for those websites.

Once you’ve added a new profile using the form on the top of the table – as indicated in the above screenshot – it’s time to verify your site. In the table, you’ll see your new website with two links beside it. One to add a sitemap and one to verify it. Click on the verify link and you’ll be taken to a new screen:

Here, you’ll be provided with 2 verification methods:

• By adding a specific, unique META tag to your website’s header;
• By uploading a HTML file into the root FTP folder of your website.

It’s up to you to decide which method will you use, the results are the same.

Now that your site has been verified, you can add the previously generated sitemap to its profile, either by clicking the “Add” link, near the website name on the dashboard, or by navigating the left side menu to Sitemaps -> Add a sitemap. Both methods will take you to this screen:

From the initial drop down menu select “Add General Web Sitemap“. This is the most common selection for text-based-content websites like blogs. In the form below, at point 3, enter the URL of your sitemap. This usually is something like: http://www.youblog.com/sitemap.xml, and click the button to submit it.

Allow some time for Google to process the information of your newly added sitemap. Once the sitemap is approved, your sitemaps dashboard will look like this:

From here, you will gain access to report about your crawling stats, sitemap and website status and many more interesting things that you will be able to access through the options in the left side menu of Google Webmaster Tools.

And that concludes this guide. You should now have your Google Sitemap up and running, nice and easy!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Some interesting things happened recently that are of interest to any blogger. Check out these blogosphere news:

Download Flock 1.2 Beta

Flock 1.2, “the social web browser” based on the Mozilla engine goes into beta stage. I’ve gave it a shot and I can say that for a person that pretty much depends on social networking, Flock is a very good solution. Social bookmarking and networking services, all your friends and all your stories under one roof seams like a good deal to me.
The only downside (and for me it’s a big one) is that the RSS feeds take TOO long to update. The “reload” option did not work any magic either, but I guess that’s why it is a beta right?
Get over there, download it, try it and share your experience. I’m sure they’d appreciate the feedback.

Mixx announced Twitter integration

The folks over at Mixx don’t like to waste time, and there’s not much time to waste when their community seams to grow very fast. They’ve recently announced a new option of automatically post a tweet on your Twitter account whenever you add a new story to Mixx. Useful, helpful? You decide, at least it’s better to have it, than not to.

You can find out more on the Mixx Blog, and while you’re there, check out Blogsessive’s Mixx profile.

Third-party ads on the Google content network

I guess pretty much everyone who uses AdSense got the email, but just in case you’ve missed it:

“We’re happy to announce that the Google content network now accepts display ads served from qualified third-party vendors. During this initial release, only ads in English are eligible, although we look forward to offering more options in the future.

If you’re currently opted in to image ads, you’re already able to receive third-party ads. If not, you can enable image ads to start receiving third-party ads immediately.”

Head over to the Google Blog if you want to read more.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive