Exactly 1 month earlier, on 24th Feb 2011, a major search engine algorithm update by Google on how it ranks sites was announced that has affected 12% of search results and halved many sites’ visitor numbers. Named the Google Farmer or Panda Update it’s only affecting US Google results as I write but if you’re outside the US it is coming to you soon. Google revealed that their internal name of this killer update was Panda, reportedly after one of the Google engineers.

The goal of Google Panda Update is noble and it is designed to get rid of “low quality” sites from the top of Google’s results pages according to Matt Cutts.

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on“, Google’s Amit Singhal said in the announcing blog post.

However, this is NOT the first time when an algorithm change from Google has causes stirs among webmasters! Despite of experts at Google claiming that only sites with ‘poor quality content‘ and those which are ‘low-value add for users‘ being trashed by the new algorithmic update, there are reports of blogs and sites belonging to medium-sized and small-enterprises, who are fully dependent on Google-driven online traffic for their survival, are getting hurt by the panda attack!

What to do if Your Site was Panda Slapped? [Top 10 Tips]

Even though the intention of this update was genuine, unfortunately, some good sites that target the US-visitors have been hit by the Panda update, as well. If your site is one among those, then here are the top 10 tips to survive the Google Panda Update:

1. Follow what Google suggests: “If you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.“
2. Get rid of any possible duplicate content from within your site. Make use of the robots.text to block Google’s bot from scrolling your categories, tags and any other page that might appear as duplicate content.
3. To help Google bots to get rid of the www and http://www confusion, add “rel=canonical” tags to block either of these versions of your URL structure.
4. Find out the pages that are affected the most by the Google Panda Update and if these pages have a higher volume of duplicate content then rewrite and tweak them to make them unique.
5. Stay away of too much advertisements on any particular page. The ratio of content vs. advertisement seem to have an impact on the overall ranking here.
6. Find out how much of your site (% of pages) is constituted by your lowest quality pages and consider using 301 redirects to point them at the best and high quality pages of your site.
7. Even if this doesn’t seem important, make sure you edit and ease up any pages that are ‘over optimized‘ [aka 'keyword-stuffed' in an desperate attempt to rank higher].
8. Work towards a faster and higher quality site/blog that the readers would find informative, filled with quality editorial content and easy to navigate.
9. For all those photo or video-centric sites or blogs out there, try ensuring that you include some meaningful textual content (related to the images) along with your photo/video galleries.
10. To survive the loss in traffic caused by this Google Panda Update, opt for social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Try using these social media platforms to direct traffic to your business site and build up your brand presence.
11. 11. If you’re sure your site is ‘Google friendly’ and still it was ‘Panda-hit’, let Google know about this mistake but if you’d ask me, don’t expect much out of this.

Source: TechChunks

I came to know this while creating a Google Analytics profile for one of my clients’ web site. Now if you create a new Google Analytics profile you get this message before profile creation:

(5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.)

This is also mentioned under new terms and conditions:

2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.
Google may change its fees and payment policies for the Service from time to time including but not limited to the addition of costs for geographic data, the importing of cost data from search engines, or other fees charged to Google or its wholly-owned subsidiaries by 3rd party vendors for the inclusion of data in the Service reports. The changes to the fees or payment policies are effective upon Your acceptance of such changes which will be posted at www.google.com/analytics (or such other URL Google may provide from time to time). Unless otherwise stated, all fees are quoted in U.S. Dollars. Any outstanding balance becomes immediately due and payable upon termination of this Agreement for any reason and any collection expenses (including attorneys’ fees) incurred by Google will be included in the amount owed, and may be charged to the credit card or other billing mechanism associated with your Adwords account.

The Section 15 Says:

15. TERM and TERMINATION . Either party to the Agreement may terminate it at any time and for any reason.
Upon any termination or expiration of this Agreement, Google will cease providing the Service, and You will delete all copies of Google Analytics’s UTM code from all Pages and certify thereto in writing to Google within three (3) business days of such termination. In the event of any termination (a) You will not be entitled to any refunds of any usage fees or any other fees, and (b) any (i) outstanding balance for Service rendered through the date of termination, and (ii) other unpaid payment obligations during the remainder of the Initial Term will be immediately due and payable in full and (c) all of Your historical report data will no longer be available to You unless a purchase or professional services agreement for the exchange and transfer of such data is entered into as a component of termination.

So now all online marketers need to be careful while using new Google Analytics accounts.

Google just dropped a bombshell: Eric Schmidt is out as CEO (as announced in the company’s earings report. We’ll be covering the company’s earnings call, which is sure to have more on this.

He will step down from the role starting April 4, and co-founder Larry Page will take charge of Google’s day-to-day operations as CEO. Co-founder Sergey Brin will devote his energy to strategic projects like working on new products.

Schmidt will assume the role of Executive Chairman, focusing externally on deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership–all of which are increasingly important given Google’s global reach. Internally, he will continue to act as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.
Source: WebProNews

Latest reduction could come Tuesday; would represent 5% of workforce

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Yahoo will lay off between 600 and 700 employees, perhaps as early as Tuesday. This represents about 5 percent of the struggling Internet company’s total workforce of 14,100.

This is the fourth round of mass layoffs by Yahoo in the past three years. Rumors of the latest round began swirling about five weeks ago, when reports surfaced that the company was preparing to eliminate 20 percent of its current jobs. Yahoo quickly dismissed these reports as “misleading and inaccurate,” but issued no outright denial. Now we know why.

According to the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets, the layoffs will be from Yahoo’s products group, which employs nearly half of the company’s employees. The group is responsible for Yahoo’s Web properties, including the finance, sports and news pages. Despite Yahoo’s inability to grow revenue in recent years, these destinations remain popular among Internet users. Yahoo is the No. 4 most-visited property on the Internet, trailing only Google, Facebook and YouTube.

Yahoo’s products division is run by Blake Irving, who joined the company in April. Irving had been corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Live Platform unit, but left the software giant in 2007 and had been teaching at Pepperdine University before taking the Yahoo job.

The layoffs represent the second round of job reductions under the tenure of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who has struggled to turn around the company since being hired in January 2009. Bartz laid off 675 workers in March 2009. In December 2008, under the tenure of former CEO Jerry Yang, Yahoo axed 1,500 jobs. Another 1,000 jobs were cut in February of that year.

Yahoo’s revenue and stock price have remained stuck in neutral while larger online advertising rival Google has continued to demonstrate impressive growth. Google announced last month that its more than 23,000 employees would receive 10 percent pay hikes and $1,000 holiday cash bonuses.

Article Resource: IT World

Author: Chris Nerney