Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors

Content is king. You’ll hear that phrase over and over again when it comes SEO success. Indeed, that’s why the Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors begins with the content “elements,” with the very first element being about content quality.

Get your content right, and you’ve created a solid foundation to support all of your other SEO efforts.

    Cq: Content Quality     

More than anything else, are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond being a simple brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites?

Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?

Do you offer real value, something of substance to visitors, that is unique, different, useful and that they won’t find elsewhere? 

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These are just some of the questions to ask yourself in assessing whether you’re providing quality content. This is not the place to skimp since it is the cornerstone upon which nearly all other factors depend.

Read the Search Engine Land articles below on content quality to get you thinking in the right direction.

• Living Content: It’s What People Want

     

  Most web content is barely alive, even when it is first written. It is pumped out by content mills, optimized and uploaded. This kind of bulk content is often referred to as backfill content. I prefer the term “landfill content.” Dead and rotting from day one.

In sharp contrast, living content is quality content. It is shared quickly through social media—because it is worth sharing—and takes root across the web. Better still, true living content is updated and added to on a regular basis.

Let’s look at the attributes of these two types of web content.

Defining landfill content

Landfill content is written primarily for the search engines. Working from a list of strong keywords or phrases, marketers aim to create a new page of content optimized for each phrase.

The purpose of this content is to please or mislead the search engines, and achieve a page-one position in the search results.

The focus is on volume, and not on quality.

This kind of content can achieve its purpose very well, particularly if the strategy is employed by an authority domain. The site’s historical authority lifts the landfill content pages higher in the search results.

But there is one huge downside to this approach. It’s a customer killer, and a brand killer.

When a visitor’s first experience of your website is through one of these low-quality pages, they get a very poor first impression of your site, company or organization. They won’t become customers, they won’t return to your site, and they certainly won’t share the page through Facebook or Twitter.

That’s the fundamental problem here. Bulk content is written to impress the search engines, and not your visitors.

And, as you know, only people buy. The Googlebot will never become a customer.

Defining living content

The first thing to say about living content is that it is written for readers, and it is written well.

Beyond that, it falls into a couple of different categories.

Category one is content which is fresh.

It’s about what’s happening this week, today, this hour… right now.

You have only to look at the growth of Facebook and Twitter to recognize that people love to know what’s happening now, and now, and now.

Certainly, evergreen content has its place on most websites. As an example, a search for “how to descale my coffee maker” can lead to a page that doesn’t change much over the years, if at all. The answer to the question will probably always remain the same.

But marketers and editors should be aware that fresh content is immensely popular, and sharable. And this doesn’t mean simply adding a Twitter feed to your old pages. It means creating fresh, new and timely pages which address people’s desire to find out what’s happening, and what’s new.

If your content isn’t fresh, and living, why would people want to tweet about it? Spend some time on Twitter and Facebook and you’ll see that old content gets very little exposure.

Google also recognizes people’s desire for fresh content. Itsquery deserves freshness algorithm lifts fresh and trending pages in the search results.

Category two is content which is regularly updated.

Let’s go back to the search for “how to descale my coffee maker.” A page answering that question could remain the same indefinitely. But it could also be updated. A video could be added. New tips could be added for different types of coffee makers.

In this sense, living content means that no content page needs to remain static. New information can always be added.

Perhaps the best example of living content is Wikipedia. While traditionally, with print encyclopedias, the information was printed and permanent, Wikipedia entries are constantly being updated.

With living content you have a reason to create fresh links to old pages, as and when they are updated. You can tweet about them, and add links to Facebook.

In short, when a page is no longer fixed and static, it becomes fresh again—and worth talking about and worth sharing.     

User Generated Content Offers Significant SEO Benefits

• 
  
  In many previous columns, I’ve shared how to calculate important SEO KPIs like keyword reach, page yield, and non-brand traffic. In this column, I’d like to share how we used these metrics to inform our point of view around user generated content (UGC) as a tactic to increase organic search performance.
  The power of UGC reviews
  In recent years, multichannel retailers like Walmart, Best Buyand many others have embraced user-generated product reviews as an effective social media tool to increase conversion rates. The benefit is that in exchange for giving customers a forum to share their product experience (positive or negative), the merchant receives unbiased “voice of the customer” content that helps sell prospective customers. (And be honest, you have to respect a brand like Cabela’s willing to allow comments like “this thing sucks” live on the website.) All kidding aside, brands need to consider the risks with these systems and have a strategy to achieve high customer adoption. But in nearly every case we’ve encountered, the process works very well.
  The SEO issue for most retailers is that their UGC product review functionality tends to rely on AJAX, iframes or sub-domains for presenting the “voice of customer” review content. These methods make it difficult or impossible for engines to match up the rich user-generated content with the actual product pages themselves—eliminating nearly all of the potential SEO value. I’ve encountered this issue frequently over the years in helping retailers increase their organic search performance through our product which optimizes such landing page content for SEO benefits.
  So anecdotally, we had seen consumers adding descriptive phrases and shorthand to client pages as (crawler-friendly) UGC , which Google matched on when other consumers searched for the same phrases—apparently increasing long-tail organic search traffic at no marginal cost. For instance, one multichannel merchant’s “under armour hooded sweatshirt” landing page gets top rankings for about a half dozen derivatives of “UA Hoodie“—not because the merchant, or the Under Armour brand, use that shorthand on the page; this page gets found because end-consumers added the “UA hoodie” phrase to the page through their UGC product reviews. And that’s one phrase. Multiply by dozens of reviews per page. Across thousands of pages. Refreshed frequently… It all adds up to goodness, right?
  Some providers of this UGC review functionality argue for keeping UGC reviews off-page as a benefit, possibly because their technology tends to rely on AJAX for easier implementations. Some SEOs also favor this approach, as it theoretically preserves page keyword density and prevents theme dilution. But our hypothesis was that UGC may in fact be more useful embedded on-page to grow SEO results organically over time.
  We know the task of researching keywords is time-consuming, and a potentially infinite task for a large site. We also know optimizing pages for those phrases can take not only political willpower but months or years to actually prioritize and execute. So if outsourcing this content optimization to customers for free, through UGC, extends your brand’s reach up the funnel, acquiring the very people searching the web for your type of product, we would have a brilliant strategy. Unless adding this content to the page does in fact dilute keyword density and ultimately harms performance!
  Research results provide some clues
  We approached the answer to this difficult question using a three step process aimed at developing a data-driven point of view.
  First, we studied the SEO effects of UGC across 10,000 unique client product pages over a 30 day period. Roughly 33% of these had UGC reviews embedded on the page, 66% did not. What we found was that product pages with embedded reviews were crawled as much as 200% more frequently, with as much as 250% broader keyword reach, and as much as 200% more organic traffic. That was impressive on the surface, but not necessarily a causal relationship.
  To understand causality, we applied a suppression technique to the UGC reviews on a test segment of pages. Essentially we made the reviews invisible to search engine spiders. We compared the performance of these pages against a control group over 60 day period. The results after 60 days of suppression were clear: Removing the UGC reviews from the test segment pages caused significant performance degradation. The average quantity of referring search phrases to each page (“keyword reach”) decreased by 50%, and average non-brand organic traffic dropped by 31% per page during the 60 day period.
  To complete the process, we reversed the suppression technique at day 60 by re-embedding the UGC reviews on the page. 30 days later (day 90 of the trial), the average keyword reach of each page had rebounded to pre-suppression levels (offsetting the 50% loss during suppression). Meanwhile non-brand organic traffic also rebounded to pre-suppression levels, and even exceeded them by an additional 12% .
  Our conclusion
  Based on these side-by-size page comparisons, we believe it is reasonable to conclude that product pages with UGC review content embedded as HTML (as opposed to AJAX, pop-ups, subdomains or other) do indeed cause a page to receive greater crawl frequency, nearly twice as many referring search phrases, and two times as much non-brand organic traffic, as product pages without review content embedded on the page.
  Does this mean you should implement UGC purely for SEO benefits? Probably not. But the data makes a compelling case that UGC can act as a form of free keyword research, and create opportunity for large-scale advertisers to smartly outsource the “optimization” of their organic landing pages to the very people looking to find them—your customers.

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  Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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6 Content Tips: How To Write When You Have Nothing To Write About

When I tell a client/friend/colleague they need to add X pages of interesting content to their site, I typically hear one of three answers:

• 3% of the time: “No problem, I’m on it.”
• 75% of the time: “But I don’t have anything to write about.”
• 22% of the time: “No one wants to hear about my product/service. It’s boring.”

I’ll ignore the obvious replies, like “If it’s so boring, why does anyone buy it?” or “Then why can you talk about your product for 2 hours at a party?” I understand how tough it can be to come up with material. When you spend all your time working in your business, day in and day out, it can start seeming routine, mundane and so second-nature, you can’t imagine what people would want to know.

Here’s a list of a few ways I come up with material, and how I present them to give the most bang for the SEO buck.

1. Q & A / FAQ Sections

My favorite option can seem like a cop-out, but there are potential clients and customers out there with questions. Answering those questions can give you instant content.

Put a simple form on your website and invite folks to send you their questions. Then write a short article/post about each one. You’re not giving away your products or expertise for free! Your customers will still work with you, no matter how detailed you get.

In fact, in my experience, the more detailed you get, the more likely the reader is to hire you, because they realize just how much work they’d have to do. I’ve been blogging and writing articles for over 10 years now. Somehow, folks still hire me.

Get the most SEO value

To get the most value out of Q & A sections:

• Link from your answers to relevant services pages on your site, as well as to other answers.
• Check the phrasing of the question. Make sure the question uses the most common phrasing. If it doesn’t, edit it.
• Occasionally do a Q&A roundup: a single article, post or page on your site that lists all of the questions relevant to one topic.

2. Post Specifications

If you sell products, post your product specs, in HTML format. Link to the specifications from the relevant product page. That way, folks who want more information can drill down.

Get the most SEO value

• Do the specifications in HTML format! It’s tempting to use PDF, which indexes fairly well. But you want total control over title tag, in- and outbound links, etc. You can link to a PDF ‘printable’ version.
• Rewrite any paragraph text. If you’re using the manufacturer’s standard specification sheet, rewrite any detailed text ensure the page is as unique as possible.

3. Transcribe Videos & Podcasts

I’ve written about this before. Send your videos and podcasts off to be transcribed. Then post the transcriptions to your site as articles, or post them on the same page as the video or podcast in question. If you do any internal training sessions of 15 minutes or more, record those and get them transcribed, too. It’s like you’re writing without having to write.

Get the most SEO value

• If you’ve transcribed a video or podcast, be sure to place the transcription on the same page. That could boost the video’s chance to rank in universal search, too.
• Edit the transcriptions for readability. Sometimes the spoken word is riddled with slang and incomplete sentences that work perfectly when you’re speaking live. Tweak the language for a few choice key phrases, too.
• Link like with like. If a transcription relates to a product, link them together. Same with services, Q&A items and specifications. Don’t just throw content up on your site—make use of it.

4. Write About The Funniest Thing That’s Ever Happened In Your Business

Don’t be mean, but write about the silliest, funniest thing you’ve ever encountered in your day-to-day work. I don’t care if you’re a plumber, a purveyor of rubber gloves, a toothpaste manufacturer or a cashier at a grocery store; something funny has happened to you at work.

Example: I worked as a technical writer. What the heck would I write about?

The story: I was once sitting around with my colleagues, joking about what tech writers would’ve done during biblical times. The phone rang, and someone else answered it. She put the person on hold and burst out laughing. “Ian”, she said, laughing so hard she was crying, “It’s someone named Moses.”

And it really was.

It doesn’t always have to be directly relevant.

Get the most SEO value

• Try to tie the event in to your work somehow. In my case, I was at work, so the tie-in is pretty easy. But there’s almost always some relevant moral or lesson you can extract.

5. Write About The Best Thing To Happen In Your Industry

This is an easy one. Pick a recent event (in the last month – up to a year) that you feel has done a lot for your industry. Write that sucker down. Tell people why you think it matters. Solicit their comments.

Get the most… Oh, you get it by now.

• Be sure to contact other pundits in your industry. Get a discussion going. You’ll build links, and you might just learn something at the same time.

6. Rant

I don’t know much about this one (cough, lying… cough, cough). If something infuriates you, write down why, and how to fix it.

The only note I’ll put here: Do not publish right away. Ever. Let your rant sit, safe and sound, for 24 hours. Then reread it. See if you were offensive or downright nasty. If you were, rewrite or start again. Being a schmuck is not an SEO strategy.

The Bad News…It’s Still Work

Writing will always be work. But with practice and a sense of purpose, it gets easier. Hopefully, some of the above ideas will prove helpful. If you have other tips, leave them below in the comments. Or, even better, write your own set of strategies on your own website!

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Why Quality Is The Only Sustainable SEO Strategy

One of the most important takeaways after the Panda Update / Farmer fallout is to make your sites as high-quality and useful as possible. The next year should be interesting, as some sites invest in quality, while others try to game signals seeking shortcuts to the hard work. Both are valid, as long as you’re ready to accept the risk of shortcuts, but only the hard work will continue to yield results long-term.

Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal conceded that there are signals in the latest algorithm update that can be gamed. (Any algorithm can be gamed.) What are they? It will take time, but eventually some of them will be discovered.

If quality, credibility, and authority can all be algorithmically identified, then certainly they are based on distinct sets of factors that in sum create signals.

Things such as density of advertising, author names and titles, address and phone information, badges and memberships in known organizations, content density, the quality of a site’s link profile, maybe even W3C compliance (although that’s a stretch) are all potential areas to investigate. This advice is not just for the gamers, these are areas where high-quality, white-hat SEOs should be looking, too.

We are coming upon a graduation of sorts for SEO that will continue to bring various disciplines together: information architecture, user experience, even web design are all important in regards to SEO and how a site is scored.

How a site “feels” to a visitor, the credibility it portrays, these are areas that design plays an important part in, an area that John Andrews was already talking about at SearchFest in 2010.

Above and beyond the granular tactical stuff we SEOs are obsessed with, we need to figure out what users want, because that’s where Google is going. Chasing users, not algorithms, will have the best long-term influence on a site’s rankings.

After all, Google (and any search engine) is basically a means to an end, a way to capture audience share (the users) who depend on search to find good information. I’ve been saying exactly the same thing for about 10 years, and it’s more true now than ever.

What Link Metrics Translate To Higher Rankings?

The conference season is in full swing and I’ve spoken at a couple recent ones: SearchFest, where I presented on link building with Rand Fishkin, and at SMX West where I presented with Vanessa Fox, Dennis Goedegebuure and Tony Adam on enterprise SEO.

Building presentations is always a great exercise, because it forces you to distill your thoughts into actionable, quality information for conference attendees. I love the process and I really enjoy speaking at these shows.

My SearchFest presentation sought to communicate the following four points to our audience:

1. Traffic yield of the URL

While “people” need keywords to find what they’re looking for, keywords are just a proxy for the people who use them. As SEOs, we tend to obsess on keywords… after all, they’re where the money is. Right? Sort of. Keywords are a means to an end, they are bait on a hook. The hook is your quality resource which will attract and retain them. And that resource is best signified for SEOs by one thing and one thing only: the URL. In SEO, the URL is where all the value is, not the keywords.

Ranking reports are becoming even more meaningless than ever. Google appears to be throwing random results back for IPs and/or user agents that appear to be scraping for rankings. This creates a lot of noise and problems as reports are built for clients.

What matters is not the ranking (funny though how Google reports on “average rank” in Webmaster Tools), but the total traffic yield of the URL.

What is the traffic quantity in total keyword searches? How much volume do those searches have, how much traffic does the URL see? And what is the quality of traffic, such as bounce rate (hopefully low), average time on site or pages per visit, and conversion rate (hopefully those are high).

That is much better information than a ranking report. All this said, ranking reports are not going away because there is far too much education yet to be done on the client side. Ranking reports are comfortable, they are what’s always been used to track SEO success. That needs to change.

Getting back to the above point, the URL is where all the value is stored. Page scoring factors and many other criteria are rolled up into the URL, which is stored as a distinct field in the search engine databases.

2. Preserving the power of URLs

This is why it’s absolutely critical that URLs are preserved. Well-aged URLs will score best, unless they’re in News and QDF searches. Redirects greatly hamper SEO success. Any redirect.

Recent experiences have shown a great deal of equity loss when using 301s, and in some cases, a rel canonical tag appears to work better to transfer equity. The idea that one can “store” internal PageRank to be used later with a 301 is what basically introduced the equity rot that is occuring with permanent redirects now.

I still recommend using a 301 when you can. It’s the best possible way to permanently move content. Just be open to rel canonical, because it’s quite powerful and can be a very strong signal for Google at this time. It’s also well adopted across the web. Bing also supports it, but reports are mixed how well they’re using it.

3. Looking beyond links

It’s not only about links. However, especially prior to Panda Farmer, links tend to brute force top rankings on competitive SERPs (when overall domain authority, or the “wikipedia effect,”, doesn’t hold sway).

I took the time to analyze several competitive SERPs to see what factors really mattered when it comes to links: is it sheer quantity, unique domains, page-specific links, diversity, or anchor text? In my analysis, the biggest four factors were domain authority, total domain links and unique domains, page-specific links and uniques, and matching anchor text.

However, it was interesting to note that in several cases, prominence of exact-match anchors seemed to be very common in positions 7-10, possibly indicating up-and-coming competitors pushing hard for rankings using heavy anchor matching. Stronger competitors were benefiting from a more cohesive link strategy that also focused on sheer quantity, especially quantity of unique referring domains.

The below image shows the link profile for the SERP ‘marketing automation’ in unique referring links and matching anchor text. Can you find the Wikipedia entry? Bet you can.

4. Link factors in search algorithms

There are many link factors that could (and should) be taken into account by any algorithm. These include (at least):

• Recency (are links “come and go,” have there been a lot or very few links recently, etc
• Transience (do links disappear after a time)
• Anchor text (how much exact match is there)
• Context (is the link contextual)
• Relevance (how related to the site’s content is the link)
• Prominence of placement (is the link in a spot that maximizes its CTR, or is it lower left or in a footer)
• Other links on the page (what quality are the other links on the page, and how well do they match)
• Trends (what is the trend of links over time)
• Co-citation (what kinds of links point to the page)
• Frequency of linking (how frequently do the domains exchange links)

While the above is a fairly exhaustive list of link factors, in our analyses we’ve found time and again that there are basically 4 link factors that tend to influence performance:

1. The domain authority of the ranking URL
2. The quantity and diversity of links into the domain
3. The quantity and diversity of links into the URL
4. The amount of matching anchors

(“Diversity” here meaning the amount of unique referring domains.)

There are always exceptions, and in fact, every SERP is unique. Additionally, it’s impossible to isolate link scoring outside of on-page factors; rankings are more complex than links. But the result of link analyses tend to show the above factors.

How To Achieve SEO Sustainability

In industrial strength SEO, quality and scale must hold sway. On-page strategies, internal linking, and off-page strategies in social and link development, should always emphasize quality and scalable techniques.

As we’ve found with the latest Google algorithm shift, when quality and the user is kept in focus, performance can withstand even dramatic algorithm adjustments. The name of the game in SEO is change, but by keeping focused on users and not algorithms, negative consequences can be minimized.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t keep an eye on what the engines are doing. On the contrary, I recommend studying the algos like a hawk! It’s essential to know what’s happening and why. Just don’t build your SEO strategy around the algorithms. Build your SEO strategy around your users.

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

From Garbage To Gourmet: Fixing SEO Content Strategies

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before:

Site Owner: I want to rank higher in the search engines!

SEO: OK, you’ll need to fix a few things…
produces a list

SEO: And you’ll need to start a content strategy. That means 10-20 pages of new content per month, minimum, plus work to promote it.

Site Owner: OKAY! I’m on it.
Site owner goes away.

…

Two months later:

Site Owner: SEO, you totally ripped me off. I haven’t seen any improvement in my rankings.

SEO: Did you make all the changes?

Site Owner: Yes.

SEO: Did you start work on the content?

Site Owner: Yes.

SEO: Can I see?

Site Owner shows SEO their site. It has 70 pages of new articles.

SEO: Wow, that’s great… Wait a minute. This article is only 150 words. And the author used the wrong ‘your’ five times. And this article is almost identical to these other five…

Site Owner: So?

SEO: Well, this isn’t exactly great content.

Site Owner: Hey, you told me to get new content. You didn’t say anything about great content!

Search Engines Aren’t Garbage Disposals

I suspect that most people see search engines as a sort of content garbage disposals. You feed them a random assortment of leftovers, hard-to-identify and vaguely smelly things, and the occasional rotten egg in one end, there are some grinding and crunching sounds, and you’re all set.

Well, they’re not garbage disposals.

Half of SEO is a long list of things you must do to make yourself visible, help search engines classify your content, etc..

But, in the pre- and now more importantly, post- Panda world, the other half of SEO is all about differentiating yourself from competitors with great, unique information.

You know… Marketing.

No More Garbage

You have to stop serving garbage to your visitors, and to search engines. Here’s a couple ideas to get you started:

1. Write stuff that hasn’t been written before. There are already 999,999 articles about SEO and title tags. Try something else, or a new spin on your topic.
2. Be interesting. Put some thought into how the article is put together. Use visuals where it helps. Use humor, even.
3. Hire quality writers to write quality stuff.
4. Ask your visitors and customers what they’d like to read. Then write it.
5. Follow production best practices. Use good line spacing and typography. Place subheads to organize your story and make it easier to scan. A 500-word article vomited onto the page with zero formatting makes it look like you don’t care. If you don’t care, you don’t deserve to rank.
6. Brainstorm and maintain a list of headlines you can assign to writers.
7. Assign target topics and phrases to specific pages on your site. Think through how you’ll interlink new content with those pages to build authority.
8. Integrate content into your site. You probably won’t make much progress if you hang a bunch of lousy articles off your site like some kind of growth. Content has to be in the flow of a normal visitor’s movement through the site.

In short: think about it. Make content strategy part of your overall Internet marketing strategy and invest in it. You can’t outsource your writing to eLance for $5 per article and expect progress. Nor can you somehow automate or fake your way into the rankings. Yes, there are always the lucky few who manage it. But it’s not the norm.

But It’s Hard/Expensive/Time-Consuming!

I know, huh? If you want to gain a top ranking, you have to work for it, and invest, and really dedicate yourself to it.

But have some perspective: 20 years ago, the minimum required to reach a national audience was $250,000, a fantastic sales letter and a lot of luck. Now, you can reach a national audience with a well-coded website, one decent writer and a good idea. That’s nothing short of miraculous.

So switch your content strategy from garbage to gourmet. It’s worth the effort.

Hit By Panda Update? Google Has 23 Questions To Ask Yourself To Improve   

Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, published a blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog named More guidance on building high-quality sites  .                     

Amit’s goal with this post is to have those webmasters impacted by this Panda Update, which rolled out internationally about a month ago, with some direction and guidance to help explain what sites Google likes and which they dislike.

Amit said that he cannot document publicly the “actual ranking signals” but will share questions you should ask yourself and consider when trying to understand why a site was impacted by this update. Those questions include:

1. Would you trust the information presented in this article?
2. Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
3. Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
4. Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
5. Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
6. Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
7. Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
8. Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
9. How much quality control is done on content?
10. Does the article describe both sides of a story?
11. Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
12. Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
13. Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
14. For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
15. Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
16. Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
17. Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
18. Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
19. Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
20. Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
21. Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
22. Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
23. Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

More Stories On The Google Panda Update:

• Google Rolls Out Its Panda Update Internationally And Begins Incorporating Searcher Blocking Data
• New York Times: Yes, Google’s Panda Update Hit NYT-Owned About.com
• Panda Update: Google Lowers The Boom On eHow.com
• Winners & Losers As Panda Goes Global? eHow, Bing’s Ciao.co.uk & More
• 5 New Tactics For SEO Post-Panda
• The Farmer Panda Impact Nobody Is Talking About
• Yellow Pages SEO In The Post-Panda World
• Hitwise Data Pegs Panda Impact On Demand Media Sites At 40%
• Google Speaks More About The Farmer Update, AKA Panda Update
• When Pandas Attack: Online Retailers Need To React
• The Farmer/Panda Update: New Information From Google and The Latest from SMX West
• Lessons Learned at SMX West: Google’s Farmer/Panda Update, White Hat Cloaking, And Link Building
• Demand Media: Panda’s Impact On eHow.com “Significantly Overstated”
• Your Site’s Traffic Has Plummeted Since Google’s Farmer/Panda Update. Now What?

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