Google’s algorithms have been fluctuating quite a bit lately. It seems that the Panda algorithms are updating each month over a 10-day period. That means that your site could experience drastic changes in Page Rank each day during those 10 days. And that means your site could experience less traffic, or possibly more.
Google mainly seems to be concerned with spam links and low-quality or black-hat SEO techniques. That’s really nothing new, but if you read the blogs about SEO with any regularity you know that something happened this past week. Check here for how Google’s Algorithm changed in June.
Google mainly seems to be concerned with spam links and low-quality or black-hat SEO techniques. That’s really nothing new, but if you read the blogs about SEO with any regularity you know that something happened this past week. Check here for how Google’s Algorithm changed in June.
What Changes are Taking Place?
There’s nothing your site can really do during these Panda rollouts. You’ll see wild fluctuations in your traffic, that’s for sure. But why? It seems Google is trying to figure out new and better ways to put relative and user-specific content higher in the results.
You also may have noticed that Google has rolled out some changes to their Search function. Some of these are new; some of them are old ‘favorites’ which users delight in disabling.
You also may have noticed that Google has rolled out some changes to their Search function. Some of these are new; some of them are old ‘favorites’ which users delight in disabling.
- Easy Inline: One thing that I’ve noticed recently is that Easy Inline is back. Now, this is an advertising portal that’s been around for awhile. I’m not sure if Google decided to put it out there again or if my computer, or most probably I when not quite with it, downloaded the damn thing again. Either way, I had to get rid of it. For anyone interested in that, see the end of the article.
That’s Great, But What About My Site?
While Google may be trying to get other sites, and perhaps paid advertising sites, further up in the rankings, does that mean your content will be affected? Of course it does. Rand does a good job of discussing these aspects on his Whiteboard Friday on Google Search Results.
- Links: Google is looking for spam links. Are all of your links up to par? Now would be a great time to check them. Get rid of those links that point nowhere and make sure you’re only linking to sites relative to your own content. If you’re linking to something unrelated to you, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re thinking. It’s a bad SEO tactic because it’s clear you’re only trying to drive up traffic to your site. In the amount of time it took you to fiddle around with those links you probably could have produced some quality content.
- Sitemap: Perhaps it’s time to put up that XML Sitemap and submit it to Google as well. You should do this anyway because it’s a quick and easy way for Google to index your site. But now that there’s all these rollouts, why not submit it too? It’s kind of like going to the police and clearing your name before you’re a suspect.
OK, So...Now About My Content?
This is where things may get a bit thorny for some. Imagine you’ve got a serious e-commerce site that specializes in a certain niche, let’s say hunting gear. The whole site has been configured for that topic, certain keywords, headings, images, meta tags and descriptions – really the whole works. The site has been SEO’d.
It was so good, in fact, that it was routinely getting onto the top page of Google, perhaps battling it out for the top 3 positions with the main competitors. Now all of a sudden the rankings are throwing that hunting gear website onto page 2 or 3 of Google and back to page 1 regularly over 10 days. Pretty frustrating, huh?
Now that we know these rollouts are going to be occurring every 10 days out of 30, does that mean we should change our whole site’s content? And how would we do that anyway?
There are a few things that are being discussed:
It was so good, in fact, that it was routinely getting onto the top page of Google, perhaps battling it out for the top 3 positions with the main competitors. Now all of a sudden the rankings are throwing that hunting gear website onto page 2 or 3 of Google and back to page 1 regularly over 10 days. Pretty frustrating, huh?
Now that we know these rollouts are going to be occurring every 10 days out of 30, does that mean we should change our whole site’s content? And how would we do that anyway?
There are a few things that are being discussed:
- Partial-match Domains: These are called PMDs and they’re used a lot. Dr. Pete’s MoZ article on the June 25 Algo Update does a great job explaining this. Let’s say the hunting gear website is called cheaphuntinggear.com and that hunting gear is its main keyword. You can see that it appears in the URL and all over the site in various long and short keyword forms. It appears that sites like this are experience significant fluctuations in Page Rank and traffic. Do you need to change your URL then? I wouldn’t go that far yet, but don’t discount it entirely at this point.
- Targeted Keywords: It’s obvious that a site like our hunting gear site would be targeting it’s keywords effectively already. After all, it’s on the first page of Google most of the time. But now the question becomes where are they targeting those keywords? The geography aspect is coming into play where Google may be putting a higher priority on things like where your local market is. Let’s say cheaphuntinggear.com operates out of New York. If I’m looking for hunting gear in Montana those site closest to me may come up higher, perhaps even if their SEO isn’t as good as yours. Can you compensate for this? Sure, begin doing more regional SEO work by checking out relevant keywords not on a global level but as specific as you can get.
- Advertising: You can definitely place your ads more effectively and change the target language to get better results. Just like you might want to direct your SEO efforts toward a more specific set of regional markets, so to you might want to rethink how you’re operating one or more of your advertising campaigns.
- Content: And of course, nearly always listed last unfortunately, is content. Nothing is ever going to substitute for great content. If you’re providing relevant information that people are looking for, you’ll succeed. If you can find things from multiple sources and put them together succinctly, people will listen. And if you continue with relevant, site-specific, user-friendly, and resource-rich content Google will leave you alone or push you up higher with its algorithmic wave.
Disabling Easy Inline
Easy Inline isn’t your friend. So how do you get rid of it? Well, let’s take a look at some pictures. Here’s what your usual Google search will come up with when you type in “Google Algorithm Changes:”
Now, if you have Easy Inline running that page will quickly disappear and show you this stuff at the top of the page, taking up nearly the entire fold of the page:
Unfortunately what is so bad from a user-experience perspective is that you see the first link pop up and go to click on it. Instead you click on one of the Easy Inline ads that pop up a split second later.
They take you to a useless page that looks like this:
That advertising page helps me not at all. In fact it just makes me angry and lowers my estimation of that business, whichever one was unfortunate enough to come up and cause me grief.
You’ll also notice there’s a smaller line on top of those ads like this:
You’ll also notice there’s a smaller line on top of those ads like this:
That shows you lots of cool sites that will give you more information on your search. The thing is, if I wanted information from those sites I’d probably go there. Is this Google’s way of trying to make the user-experience better? I sure don’t like it.
Let’s say you click on the YouTube link, this is what you’ll see:
Let’s say you click on the YouTube link, this is what you’ll see:
So here are 3 videos of SEO guys talking about the latest changes to Google’s algorithm. That might be helpful to me if I liked getting my info from videos, which I usually don’t. It’ll have to go along with the rest of Easy Inline.
So How Do I Get Rid of This Monstrosity?
It’s quite easy to disable Easy Inline. I hate the thing myself because it slows me down when I’m looking for something. Over the past few days that it’s been up I’ve had to change the way I search. Instead of clicking on my link right when I see it I have to wait for a second for the stupid Easy Inline portal to disappear. Believe me, when you’re doing hundreds of searches each day, this is a huge pain.
The first thing you need to do is click on the little screw/bolt to go to the properties menu. Here it is:
The first thing you need to do is click on the little screw/bolt to go to the properties menu. Here it is:
By clicking on that you’ll be taken to a screen that looks like this:
Simply click the ‘Disable App’ button and you’ll be finished. When you go back to Google it will look normal again, like this:
Wow! Back to normal! Doesn’t it feel good? Now you can get back to searching like you did before. Hallelujah.
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