Introduction

The Google algorithm is a hard thing to pin Unfortunately, many websites attempt to down. It’s incredibly complex and is updated find loopholes in the system in order to rank in one way or another an estimated 600 their websites higher on Google’s search times a year. Every once in a while, Google results pages. A good example of this is the will roll out a major update that it will name - practice of keyword stuffing. Back in the such as, Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird and day, Google’s algorithm tracked the use of Pigeon. keywords in content and used it as the basis for determining search engine rankings. These updates add drastic changes to their Websites caught on and began stuffing algorithm that can have a huge effect on content with irrelevant keywords to increase websites. For example, when the Google their ranking. Panda update was first implemented, it ended up affecting upwards of 12 percent of all To counteract black hat tactics like this search results. and to ensure the quality of their search results, Google continuously develops and Why does Google do this? implements updated algorithms. Information about these algorithms can be found Because they are continuously fighting bad whenever a Google patent is published. content. In order to maintain their reputation as the best search engine on the Internet, they have to ensure that only the best content gets ranked highly on their search engine results pages. If the links shown on their search results lead to poor quality content, their users aren’t going to be happy.

1 Learn About Google’s Algorithm Updates

One thing to keep in mind about Google’s things the right way, i.e. to create valuable algorithm updates is that Google doesn’t and original content for its audience. exactly send out a list explaining what they have changed. This means that it’s The algorithm updates are meant to punish up to us to discover what the updates those that try to use black hat methods in do and how they will affect the way that order to obtain a high search ranking. By online marketing works. One of the ways providing us with information on what the that this is achieved is by going through algorithm will do, Google would basically the patents that Google has applied for be giving black hat practitioners pointers and received in order to break down on how to avoid being penalized. the function of its new algorithms. The thing is, knowing what Google’s updates Why doesn’t Google share information will change can be helpful for anyone that about its new algorithm updates? doesn’t engage in black hat tactics as well. And this is why we delve into Google patent Because they want you to focus on data in order to find useful information creating good content, not on obtaining to help increase search engine rankings a good search ranking. They want their and reduce the risk of being penalized. algorithm to reward websites that do

2

Google Panda

So why did Google wait so long to apply for a patent?

Probably because they wanted the update to weed out the bad content before people got wise to what the update actually changed. A smart play by Google - and it had its intended effect. While the specifics of Google Panda are still not fully known, we can ascertain by the effect that it had as well as the data revealed in the patents related to Panda that it was created in order to reward websites with good content and punish websites with bad content.

Black hat content development techniques So let’s talk about Panda in particular. such as content farming, article spinning, Panda is usually considered the content scraping and spamming are all most important and game changing heavily penalized due to Google Panda, not of Google’s algorithm updates. to mention that it also looks down upon thin content and duplicate content as well. The Panda update was actually released back in February of 2011, but a Google Panda was so effective that it was patent wasn’t applied for until September nicknamed the “farmer” because it had such 28 of 2012. The Google patent was finally a negative effect on content farms (which granted last year, on March 25th, 2014. implement back hat tactics to rank better).

While we know that Panda punishes bad content and rewards good content, how exactly can we know that these specific black hat tactics are targeted by Panda in particular? It’s because you can find patents related to Panda that help provide more insight on what Panda actually does.

3 Article Spinning

Article spinning is the practice of rewriting the same article over and over again. These rewritten articles are submitted to hundreds or even thousands of other websites.

Why do people spin articles?

Because these rewritten articles will contain links back to the main website, thereby helping to boost that website’s search result ranking.

Basically, these articles are all 90 percent plagiarized or duplicated. Now, it’s practically impossible to have an actual human rewrite the same article hundreds of times, which is why websites that use the article spinning strategy will use software programs to automatically spin content by replacing nouns and verbs. This usually ends up in poor quality content full of gibberish - but they still have their intended effect, at least until Panda was released.

Google actually has a patent for the program that enables the Panda algorithm to punish article spinning.

The patent, which is named — “Identifying gibberish content in resources,” does just what the name says it does. In order to detect keyword stuffing, Panda While this program actually targets combs through content and not only keyword stuffing, it also happens to target checks for an unusual amount of keywords, article spinning due to the fact that it but also for gibberish - meaning text that uses the same strategy to detect both. doesn’t combine to make proper sentences.

4 Article Spinning

If it detects a large amount of gibberish, However, that’s not to say that all article Google will assume that the article is being spinning is bad. One way to use the article used for black hat purposes, whether spinning strategy in an effective and it’s keyword stuffing or article spinning non-black hat way is to write one large (since the software that automatically in-depth article and then use the main spins articles often produces gibberish). points to create separate, smaller blog posts. For example, writing an eBook and Google then generates a language model then rewriting the different sections as score along with a query stuffing score and blog posts. If the content you’re spinning combines them to calculate a gibberish doesn’t result in duplicate content or score, which is then used to determine gibberish, then you shouldn’t be affected. whether the original ranking score of the content needs to be modified. If the gibberish score is high - which is likely if you are spinning content using a content spinning software, then the gibberish score can result in your PageRank being demoted.

5 Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest Orlando.” This is a perfectly fine sentence, black hat tricks in the book and one that grammatically speaking. But it’s stuffed worked incredibly well until Google rolled with the keyword in an unnatural way. out its Panda algorithm update. Keyword stuffing is simply the practice of putting According to Google’s patent, Panda now as many keywords as possible into a has a query stuffing score that it assigns to piece of content so that it will rank highly the content it’s combing through. The query in Google’s search results. It got to the stuffing score (along with the language point where websites were simply filling model score) are what Google takes into content into the empty spaces between account when determining the gibberish keywords, resulting in horrible gibberish. score, which can lead to your page being penalized with a demoted PageRank score. The same method that Google uses to discover article spinning is the method This isn’t the only method Google’s Panda that was specifically developed in order algorithm uses to identify keyword stuffing. to counteract keyword stuffing. The According to another patent, entitled language model score is effective in “Detecting spam documents in a phrase pinpointing websites that aren’t even based information retrieval system,” trying to write content that makes sense Google is able to index documents - they’re primary focus being to rank based on their included phrases, their website as high as possible. which are often keywords.

However, you don’t necessarily have to write gibberish in order to stuff content with keywords. You could write a perfectly good article that is grammatically correct that just happens to use a keyword a dozen times in the space of half a page.

Let’s take the keyword “used cars in Orlando.” We could use this sentence — “If you are looking for used cars in Orlando, then be sure to check out our wide variety of used cars in Orlando by contacting us for information about our used cars in

6 Keyword Stuffing

This allows Google to identify content as spam based on the number of related phrases that are included in a document. So basically, if it identifies your content as having dozens of the same phrase, it will assume that you’ve created spam content for the purpose of keyword stuffing.

So how do you avoid keyword stuffing?

Just focus on writing good content that is valuable for your audience. The keywords should come naturally. Use LSI keywords in order to compliment your keywords and provide context instead of simply repeating the same keyword over and over again.

7 Duplicate Content

Duplicating content is a tactic in which the As a user, the last thing you want to do is same piece of content is farmed out over and click on a link on the results page, read over as a link building strategy. This used to the resulting content, go back, click on the cause serious issues with Google’s search second link, and be brought to the exact engine since it couldn’t figure out which same content but on a different website. version to index or which version to rank for And that’s the last thing Google wants too. query results, nor could it figure out whether to direct the link metrics to one page or to So what does Panda do about it? keep it separated between several versions. If it’s web crawler identifies two pieces Not to mention that the strategy of using of content with the same document duplicated content is as black hat as content identifier, it will process the score they come. Google’s patent, entitled information and choose the document “Representative document selection with the highest PageRank to display for sets of duplicate documents,” on its search engine results page. explains how their Panda algorithm deals with the issue of duplicate content. Basically, the algorithm prevents duplicate content from showing up on their results page.

8 Duplicate Content

One of the big worries that bloggers had when this part of the algorithm was revealed by the Google patent was that they would be punished for posting duplicate content when the intention wasn’t to farm links.

For example, if you wrote a guest blog on another website and want to post the content on your website as well. You may just want to expose your readers to the same content, especially if your readers don’t frequent the website where you wrote the guest blog. There’s nothing wrong with this and you shouldn’t be punished for it.

9 Duplicate Content

Fortunately, you have a few options:

One of which is to use a rel=canonical tag. By using this tag as part of your HTML head, you’ll tell search engines to treat the page as a copy of the URL so that the links and content metrics applied by search engines are credited towards the URL you provided.

You can also make the pages noindex pages to prevent them from being included in search engine indexes.

If you syndicate content, ask the websites that use your content to link back to your page and to use noindex meta tags. This will allow your original content to be ranked on Google’s search engine and will prevent a website you syndicated to from ranking instead because of a superior PageRank.

10 Content Scraping

Content scraping is very similar to the Basically, it identifies content that is tactics of using duplicate content and duplicated on a website. It then combs article spinning. The main difference? through the website in order to possibly It’s a method in which the website doing identify other duplicated content (content the duplicating or spinning isn’t even scrapers don’t generally just steal one performing the tactics on original content. piece of content and call it a day as this doesn’t have much of an effect on their Basically, they are stealing content from traffic - they need to scrape for a lot of other websites and posting it on their content to obtain a substantial increase own website without the knowledge or in traffic). Panda will then establish a site permission of the content’s owner. Content originality score for the website based on the scrapers will often attempt to pass off the amount of duplicate content discovered. content they have stolen as their own. Content scraping is a strategy that is easily Why do people scrape content? avoidable. Just don’t steal other people’s content! And if you quote another piece Because it’s easier to steal good of content, credit the original source! content that’s rich in proper keyword To avoid having your content scraped, use in order to drive more traffic to their make sure you use internal links. websites than it is to create such content themselves. Stealing is obviously a big As you can see, reading through a Google no no, no matter where it takes place. patent is an excellent way to inform yourself about how their algorithms work. The The Google patent entitled — information gained from the patents related “Detecting content scraping” to Panda are invaluable to ensuring that you describes the system in the Panda are running a legitimate content marketing algorithm that was specifically designed campaign and that you won’t be penalized. to identify content scrapers. The program works in a similar way to the one that identifies duplicate content.

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