How Did The Panda Update Affect Adult SEO

As most webmasters are probably aware since February some strange things have been going on the search engine ranking positions (serps).

This is due to the so called “Panda” algorithm update. Lots of people have lost traffic and revenue because of these recent changes and adult websites were also effected.

Adult seo strategies need to change just as normal seo strategies need to.

A common phrase is now being used by a lot of disgruntled web masters – “I’ve been Pandalized” or “pandalized sites”

Google updates its algorithm all the time, but this update is thought to of added some more machine learning and social factors and on page layout factors.

To get a really good idea of what 132 SEO guru’s think has happened check out this brilliant presentation from the guys at seomoz (You will have to scroll down the page to get to the The 51 slide presentation)

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-edition-ranking-factors-for-2011-live

The panda updates so far have occurred on the following dates, check your stat programs to see if you were effected.

• Panda 1.0 – Feb 23rd
• Panda 2.0 – March 24th
• Panda 2.1 – April 11th (Worldwide roll-out)
• Panda 2.2 – May 1st
• Panda or other update ? – June 7th

The best way to see these updates in action is to look at two of the large sites that were harmed by the update. The image below shows ezinearticles and ehow losing traffic using alexa user reach data (which is pretty accurate for large sites).

The chart shows ezine getting hammered in pretty much every panda update, ehow escaped until panda 2.1 when it suffered a massive drop, ehow was relatively unharmed overall in comparison to ezine. It now appears that both sites have started to stabilize around current traffic levels, so i would imagine they will start to follow there normal increasing trends due to the addition of new content on a regular basis.

Like all of the updates google makes, they are not completed instantly they may take many iterations to get right.

So if you have been effected in a bad way don’t totally redo your site, wait until the dust settles before doing anything drastic.

But do try and understand the changes, this is fortunately easy to do, simply load up your favorite serp competition tool and have a look what is actually in the serps.

Use current ranking sites to get an idea of what yours need to be.

For more panda madness check out this forum http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/

Adult SEO defensive measures

Some tips to defend against panda and future google serp updates.

1. Inbound link factor

Ensure your website has a varied and plentiful supply of inbound links, these must also be targeted at deep pages within your site (not just the homepage)

The inbound link profile must be carefully nurtured

2. New school inbound link factor

This is the same as above but the new way of looking at this is that you should target facebook, twitter and other social links as well as traditional link building links.

Facebook and twitter need to be in the mix.

3. Freshness factor

You need to keep adding content so that you always have something fresh. The homepage of your site need to continuously change

4. Buzz factor

This is the what’s “hot” factor it has not been proven but it is suspected that if your site is generating “buzz” i.e. people are talking about your site via gmail, facebook and other chat clients that google is measuring, this will effect you rank.

5. On-site social factor

Try and get some user interactivity embedded into your site, user comments give google social proof that your site is important

6. User experience factor

Above the fold user experience

It is thought that google now “sees” your page as well as crawls it – this is not too hard to believe, most people are aware of the preview images that are shown in the google results. (These are recorded images of what you site pages look like)

Adult SEO recovery measures

To this end, people have reported that after getting pandalized they did the following to recover

A) Reduction of the page header size, reduction of the text font size, removal or adverts above the fold, removal of affiliate links above the fold and raising the position of the first line of text on the page.

All of these changes result in more user content above the fold, and remove distractions.

Above the fold is the term used to describe what a visitor sees on his screen without scrolling

This image analysis shows that 92% of clicks are above the fold and 8% are below the fold, you can easily do this for yourself using google analytics

7. Get your on-site adult seo right before you do anything

Without onsite seo optimization you are going to struggle, make sure you get an “A” score for your target keywords using seomoz.org onsite serp checker here its free here – http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

8. Penalties, penalties, penalties

Sometimes it seems that whatever you do in life there seem to be more laws, regulations and penalties for everything, well getting a site to rank is a little like this as well.

Some things that create serp penalties that you should look out for

Exact anchor text keyword link building
If you want to rank for “buy mortgages” you should vary your anchor text to be “buy mortgages here” “buy cheap mortgages” “buy mortgages today” as well as “buy mortgages”
Gradually you will rank for the target keyword.
If you run an 1 million link seonuke and xrumer blast with the sole anchor keyword of “buy mortgages” you are going to get penalized.

Adverts and affiliate links - minimize these in the primary above the fold hotspot (top left of page)
Aggressive link building on new sites – creating lots of links in the first three months of a new domain will get your site sandboxed
Over optimization – don’t optimize your pages too much, keep the keyword density down!
Canonical – ensure you have a canonical meta tag on every page
Duplicate content – if your site looks the same and has the same content as another site then you will suffer, mix it up with unique stuff
Black hat stuff – cloaking, invisible text, spam and doorway pages will get you a penalty

There are many more penalties but I have just listed the most common ones that people usually receive.

Adult seo can seem like a game sometimes, but get these factors correct and your traffic will increase and you will also protect yourself from future vandalizing pandas.