Orange County SEO Dave Keys

Panda isn't just an update, it's an algorithm change- a game changer. Panda rolls through town like the machines in the Matrix or the Borg in Star Trek. Once Panda comes through your town or your type of web content, things are never the same. If you're a spammer or a content spinner, your time, if it hasn't already come, is just around the corner.

Every month, this algorithm collates everything it has learned while crawling the Google index, reports home to Google and gets an update or 2 million from Google's engineers and its own learning algorithm. Then, it is unleashed again on the Google index with its new knowledge and new "understanding" of content that people like. If yours doesn't fit the bill, your website is going down in the search results-no questions asked, and no prisoners taken. You are simply gone from your former position because Panda has figured out that people don't like your content.

More about Panda: real estate SEO expert

So, you wish to be found quickly in search engines? You're not alone by any stretch depending on what you want to get found now for, you will often find that you have thousands or even sometimes millions of competitors. Just have a peek at that number of search results and you'll see just how many pages are vying for attention for any particular search term. This means you must do something different and better to get them 1st-but what is it?

Often you find SEO advice comes from 2 camps:
#1 The On-page Camp. Do more on your website. Make it more exciting, create wondrous content, make a movie that captivates your audience's attention. Build it they will come is the mantra of Camp number 1. You could call them Matt Cutts cultists-"create great content and people will naturally want to link to you.", I can hear him saying. Just a good talk to them about back links. They will hear none of it. You can talk to them about how Adobe reader ranks number 1 for the phrase, "click here" even though it does not appear anywhere on the page but they won't listen. It doesn't matter that Adobe has 8 million links say click here to download Adobe reader. They will sell and height the notion of on page content being the all to end all for SEO. The truth is you have to create decent content and you have to create links to that content. In most cases, people are not going to naturally do this for you. When is the last time you found a great real estate website and linked to it because you thought it was so wonderful? Unless you are prompted to do this for reasons like SEO, you probably never thought of the idea. And, neither does anyone else generally speaking. This is especially true if your website is a business-a little less true if your website is very entertaining, which most are not.

#2 Ah yes, then, there is Camp Number two, the back link zombies. Everything is about back links. Put up a webpage. In the title and some keywords and throwing a half dozen affiliate links and hawk your wares like a snake oil salesman! They put a crappy content and get back links from absolutely anywhere by any means, even if that means spamming 10,000 blogs with "This post was very helpful. I have been thinking about it all day!"

As the quality of these links degrade, and their performance decreases, links zombies create even more of them. This is an inflationary system that must be controlled.

This is why Google's has launched algorithm after algorithm, the latest being Panda, in order to curtail this inflation and wholesale manipulation. Honest SEO promotes honest content. SEO turns black hat when it starts being a liar. Generally, people click on a search result they should get something close to what they were expecting or at least something beneficial and an answer to a problem they were trying to solve by searching. This does not include most pharmaceutical products. That would fall into the category of solving a social problem with technology much of the time.