So Google Panda has hit across all English language sites and we’re currently experiencing indexation as SERPS bounce around as kinks are valued and data across data-centres are normalised. So far so good.
The only issues I’ve seen are with select ecommerce websites where products light on content have been effected… a quick trip to Hitwise shows that our clients are not alone with hits being down throughout March (partially possibly due to seasonal and external financial factors too)… however a few sites are bucking the trend and have shown growth throughout this time.
What do these progressive sites have in common? Well firstly they don’t rely on article marketing for the bulk of their link building activities, secondly they invest heavily in on-page content and have really gone to town to make their sites useful and resourceful for their visitors.
So i guess Rand was right… content is finally king.
For those of you who are despairing about the demise of article marketing my advice is to turn to blogger outreach and sites like myblogguest.com where you can place good content across a wide pool of domains… just get your content sorted out and for gods sake stop spinning those articles… that’s just madness now.
Google Panda Update was I think another invitation to all people making money online or at least living on the benefits of SEO to really stick to the basic. That is, provide quality content, use white hat techniques, etc. I have heard a lot of people who got affected sorely by this update. They learned the lesson the hard way.
Eric
I am torn with Panda. You say that content really is king, but plenty of people are seeing duplicate content outranking the original, as well as bookmarking sites and other scraper sites outranking them.
At the same time, I think a lot of innocent victims have – as you have said – suffered because they relied too heavily on “content farms” such as article directories for their backlinks. Those links have now been devalued, and as a result they need to seek fresh links from a diverse range of places.
Many of the high quality sites that have suffered, the BMJ, Maxim, etc, have simply placed a few too many eggs in one basket or been unlucky in that a large proportion of their organic links have been posted on sites which were affected justifiably.
Exciting yet slightly scary times for many. Ultimately though we have seen a shift in $1bn of annual revenues from small and medium sized business to corporate business, leaving a smaller slice for most websites to fight over, so interesting times ahead.
I think people should move to guest posting and other forms of in-content link development as this would not only llow them to fill the hole left by article marketing, but also build new links on fresh domains. its just a shame that this takes a loooooong time to do.
interestng times indeed. clients budgets are getting tighter, their tollerance for lack of growth is retracting. I fear that many will be won over by the ‘guaranteed SEO’ solutions providers despite their frequent lack of ability to achieve the results.
So i guess Rand was right… content is finally king. Totally agree.
I heard that now is even worse than before for some sites. The scrapers and syndicaters rank better than the original. I think I read thin in the seomoz blog.
Yes you are right , content is king . but how can i restrict anyone to copy my web content .