Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
Google Panda 2.5 A Different Angle
If you have a website, or if you use the internet to search, you have been effected by Google's Panda.
What is Google Panda?
The Panda updates are an attempt by Google to create a better user experience. The idea is that sites which give bad user experiences have certain things in common. Finding these commonalities, and reducing them to a mathematical equation which somehow downgrades these sites automatically is the idea.
Panda results
Depending on who you talk to, it either works great, or will destroy the fabric of the universe. In truth, the results are a mixed bag, but I can see how it could help in the long run after many iterations. Like antivirus program, it will have to be constantly changing to keep up with the people who seek ways to get around it. I am not here to praise Panda, or to attack it, I just wanted to make some observations.
Panda for business and branding
When Panda 2.5 was released into the wild, I noticed immediately. I have a site that dropped a couple of spots in the serps on all the major keywords for the niche. It frightened me a little at first. Then I took a look at which sites had been placed ahead of mine for those terms, and they are all businesses that sell the types of products I am offering help on. It would seem that this release was aimed at helping brands and businesses, and that information sites may have taken a little hit as these business sites moved up.
How business and information sites interact
My site is about practical matters like maintenance and repair, and shows individuals how to get the best deals on what they really need, and how to care for the product to keep it in tip top condition.
As an example, let's say it is "auto repair and maintenance". So now the car sale sites are ranking ahead of the car maintenance site. Fair enough. I may not like it, but I can understand it.
Pre Panda 2.5 the site ranked in the first and second slot for the search terms. Post Panda, it ranks third to sixth. There was a breif drop in traffic, and a commensurate drop in earnings, and then both returned to normal levels although the serp's remained the same. This leads me to beleive that people searching for a phrase like "Corvette" are about as likely to be looking for information on the care and feeding of the vehicle as they are to be looking for a place to buy one. They seem to be looking down the row until they find something that matches the query as they understand it. I am getting the same traffic for the search as before because the user seems to know what he, or she is looking for.
I might be selling advertisement or leads to the very dealers who passed me in the ranks. If that is the case, it is a little more difficult to convince them to continue to purchase space unless they look carefully at the stats and see that my site is still sending them the same amount of traffic. What seems to be happening is that the searcher types the phrase, looks at the serp's, looks down the page to the result he needs, reads about his chosen subject, and then decides to look into buying.
If the serps were segmented by intention, the user could go directly to the result they intended to find. Like "Corvette tail light" is just as likely to be a request for tail light repair information, like; Can I do it myself? and "How do I do it?" as it is for buying a tail light lense, and if the first is the case, the second would naturally follow after the user determined that they could in fact do the job. In other words, purchase follows information.
The same is true for other areas, for instance, "painting my home", is probably more likely to be a search for information than for paint stores. In this case the serps reflect this knowledge, but it is not true accross the board.
From where I stand, it looks as though users are searching for information more frequently than products, and that the product searches come after, and may even result from the information gleaned.
So, my question to Google would be: Why not offer them the information first?