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Comment RSSGoogle Update Kills Affiliates and Marketers
Written by pacelattinNovember 12, 2011 # 11:27 am # Industry News, Specials # 28 Comments
For those sites that were affected by Panda’s big hand that slapped the daylights out of many marketers, there is something much worse coming. A new algorithm was just lauched, with little fanfare, that will basically remove stagnant pages in the Google search and replace them with more recently updated information.
According to Google:
Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old, -Amit Singhal , Google
Basically, if there is a news site that contains information about a topic, it will stasrt to show first in the search, over the sites that contain older information. The obvious result of this will be that news sites, especially larger ones, will start showing more often in Google than other types of sites. This gives a significant advantage to companies like CNN that already have have huge PageRank.
Of course, the other result is that marketers who work hard on ensuring that their content shows up on Google will suddenly find themselves kicked off of Google results, especially when it’s a new hot topic being covered by the news.
My buddies in Google wouldn’t confirm if this was targeting marketers specifically, but I got the idea that they were aware, that like the Panda update, the effect on article marketing will again be significant.
I’ve been told so far that as much as 40% of the search results will be greatly affected by this mechanism, meaning that results will be seen within days, if not immediately.
Is this an example of Google bowing to large news sites, or just trying to clean up their search to be more relevant?
Written by pacelattin
Pace Lattin is one of the top experts in interactive advertising, affiliate marketing. Pace Lattin is known for his dedication to ethics in marketing, and focus on compliance and fraud in the industry, and has written numerous articles for publications from MediaPost, ClickZ, ADOTAS and his own blogs.
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What is up with these scare tactics?
The internet is dead, OMG!
Affiliate Marketing is dead.
Making websites is dead.
Rubbish.
SEO is dead!
Daniel recently posted..5 Reasons To Purchase A Double Oven Today
None of it is dead.
Adam Saverian recently posted..Increase Feedback On Your Blog
I’m in the minority of those who are pleased with the Google Panda update. Like others, I felt it ridiculously cumbersome parsing through autoblogs and phoney review sites when trying to do research on products and services.
Heck, at times, the first 10 or 15 results were littered with crummy spam with little or no real value and small brick and mortar businesses have been struggling to get noticed online in large part due to those ‘gray hat’ and ‘black hat’ tactics. The Panda update has helped to clean up a lot of those problems and I am glad to see the results.
I’m all for innovation and great marketing skills, and some of the better online marketers have been very creative in their efforts to ‘beat’ the SERPs. But at the end of the day, if the value you bring is mostly marketing tricks, your profitable business days will be limited.
Google is right to clean out the crud and if news sites benefit from the change, so be it. Good marketers will eventually find ways to stay ahead of the changes and, unfortunately, so will the ‘gray hat’ and ‘black hat’ crowd. Either way, we all end up with a better resource.
Tim Dini recently posted..Trade Marketing Ideas For Success
As a content publisher with a great PR, this actually benefits me enormously.
pacelattin recently posted..CPAWAY and Thomas Dietzel Have it Their Way
Agreed
Tim,
You’re definitely not in the minority. Those harmed screamed, those who benefited kept quiet.
The signals for what constitute a quality site have definitely become more rigorous however and search marketers need to be come more adept at creating a branded site that people seek out and want to visit.
This is a little scary to learn about an update that might make hard earned page ranks disappear. I hope this update doesn’t affect quality sites. Maybe the algorithm can be tell if a site is quality. One way or another we’ll get to see soon, I suppose. When does this happen?
syerodriguez recently posted..Sherri Rodriguez wrote a new post, The Earthing 9
Scary. If this happens a lot more people will lose their jobs. Search Engine Optimization will definitely be dead if this will take effect.
Hi,
Thanks for a great read.
Online marketing is a constantly changing and we need to adapt our strategies all the time. I can say that recent Google algorithm updates -what is going on RIGHT NOW -actually improving our ways of marketing and although it may affect article marketing, though well planed article marketing campaign including content syndication and links building based on SEO techniques and keyword optimization, won’t be affected as keywords are not ‘NOW’ in other search engines. Affiliate marketers or online marketers shouldn’t rely only on Google and should submit a lot more press releases.
Best,
Ziki De Naim
I totally agree with this article we all know that Google holds that algorithm of each site.so they have the right to choose weather what site they want .I mean they control everything.
Kate Brown Wilson recently posted..שליחת SMS
It just shows the importance of social seo. I think that intent makes sense and it is based on keyword selection as well… similar to how keywords with local intent provide geo targeted places; this would take out rubbish that is not consistently reformed.. or “Stale”
OMG Daniel *lol*
Goggle is the Future… with or without Panda.
You must be clever and SEO isnt difficult
Grettings and success
There is hope! I did a post this week about SEMRush and some of my readers also made some great suggestions.
Ana recently posted..SEMRush: My Answer to Google Blocking Keywords
I believe that you can counter – attack this by renewing your content. Replace few words here and there and then ping the page again.
Radu recently posted..Dog day care
Hi,
Google is getting more powerful than the government. I used to be a powerseller on ebay but they kept catering to the big boys and they squashed the sellers who helped establish ebay. Google seems to be doing the same thing. I guess building a large list to market to is the way to go and try not to have Google control you.
Thanks,
Jim
Jim Calaman recently posted..The Blue Morpho Butterfly- One of Nature’s Disappearing Beautys
I sense a wider use of curated content containing recent event type snippets on the rise. This would be a strong tactic for keeping up with the algo change
Caleb recently posted..How To Post To Google Plus From WordPress
Hi,
On my blogs, I have a Google newsfeed which posts updated content and news from Google. It was very easy to set up. I hope this satisfies Google. Sorry about article marketing. I guess social media and news updates are the ranking secrets now.
Thanks,
Jim
Jim Calaman recently posted..Virginia Electrician- The Only Virginia Electrician You Will Ever Need
Wow! The new layout is EXCELLENT. I love it.
Thanks! I think its a lot easier to use now.
pacelattin recently posted..Empyre Media Launches 10% Commission Bonus
To me, this algorithmic change isn’t as scary as many people are making it out to be. However, I think it’s kind of niche specific.
If you’re in a niche that is constantly changing (such as entertainment), then I think this could definitely affect your sites if they aren’t updated on a regular basis. For example, you might want to keep adding posts to your blog about Justin Bieber if you want to continue to rank high.
However, if you own sites related to “how to make a cat tree”, then you probably don’t need to be too worried about freshening up your content because the methods for building a cat tree aren’t going to be changing on a regular basis.
Honestly I think this is a good thing because as Google has mentioned when someone searches for “olympics” they are probably interested in the upcoming olympics not in the olympics that happened 20 yrs ago.
I think these are the kinds of things Google wants to target. I don’t think they’re trying to purposely take another big slap at affiliates.
DJ Briggs recently posted..How To Make A Guy Melt – 2 Things To Focus On To Make Him Yours
I think Google is just trying to scare affiliates. Being an affiliate is one of the ways to achieve the American dream, and the big ‘G’ just keeps trying to thwart affiliate success. I smell a conspiracy. I say that because every time some big internet marketing guru makes some claim about the latest, greatest way to make money online as an affiliate, and it includes Google, a few weeks or months later, that ‘proven’ method or strategy goes bust, and isn’t viable anymore.
I say content is king, and regularly updated at that.
Agreed. This post is incredibly stupid. I can only see this applying to niches that need co.stant new content. This wont effect any site I own since i know to pick niches. And anyone ththat runs a site that is a constantly changing niche should know that their content needs to be updated regularly.
I don’t feel that article/affiliate marketing are dead per se, but I do think they’ll effected as they were with Panda.
Panda for me was a great day (I’ll duck the tomatoes later) as out of the blue it was like Google telling me ” we like unique content”. For too long I felt the higher ranking searches weren’t there justly. As a marketer yeah it could of stunk however as someone who also searches quite a bit for information it worked in my favor.
With Google also leaning toward the social aspect of algo.’s I think if an article is good enough that people would link to it, which could prove to help the article a little.
James recently posted..Customer Service and Internet Marketing
well, in a sense google might be doing things right.. because you need a site to be active, and those who setup a site and forget aren’t really serious in the business are they? I mean come on, is it once a week too hard to do when you start a blog ..
manjakani recently posted..China Shrink Cream Scam
Hi Pace, this is great info. Thanks for posting mate. When you combine this with the rise of Google raters it does make for scary stuff but that’s only if you don’t have many updates.
But truth be told, the writings been on the wall for a while now, its just that ppl were too busy to see it. One need only hop over to DMOZ to see a similar trend in action as far as how cms sites have practically taken over dmoz. I see this trend continuing to spill over into other parts of the web too. Guess we may as well suck it up and become more active or just get used to it.
[...] recent Performance Marketing Insider article, Pace Lattin had some very interesting things to say about the recent Panda updates. Mr. [...]
Great information for Affiliate Marketers who has been impacted by the Google Panda update, thanks.
Keep this going please, great job!