First there
was Panda, and then there was Penguin, but is there now Ghost as well?
Webmasters will immediately know what I'm talking about as far as Penguin and
Panda are concerned: updates to the Google search results ranking algorithm
designed to make the search experience more relevant for end users by lowering
the rank of 'low quality' sites such as content farms and those who use
black-hat SEO techniques. Ghost, however, is not only rather spooky but also
remains unconfirmed by Google itself.
While anything
that makes search better for the user has to be a good thing generally
speaking, when you get down to the specifics of Panda there has been a lot of
collateral damage to sites such as DaniWeb. There's not a lot of point covering
old ground here in too much detail, save to say that a couple of years ago
DaniWeb founder and CEO Dani Horowitz became something of a poster girl for the
SEO world when she managed to recover from the Panda effect.
Google has
already made it clear that Panda will no longer be pushed out manually, instead
it will be integrated into the general Google algorithm and therefore become in
effect a rolling update. That doesn't mean that sites which are primarily
forum-based with mainly User Generated Content (UGC) such as DaniWeb, which
have managed to rebuild themselves (in SEO terms) to remain Google friendly are
in the clear. In fact, DaniWeb was hit hard by Google in November and is still
to recover the lost traffic. At first it was assumed that this was a result of
the Panda #22 update which hit on 21st November, but a closer examination of
the analytics data reveals that actually DaniWeb traffic was decimated the day
before on 20th November. This was, perhaps, no strike by the Kung-Fu Panda
after all; maybe DaniWeb traffic was spirited away by the Google Ghost instead?
According
to webmaster Brian Wozeniak, writing rights here on DaniWeb a "bunch of
forums and UGC type websites were hit hard" between November 16th and
18th. Brian continues "I believe you got affected by the same update that
many of us UGC type websites got hit by. As far as I know Google has not
publicly identified any update that took place during this time, but there are
many of us who were hit on these dates before Panda #22 actually really
occurred". Brian has a theory that 'medium quality' content was targeted
by this unofficial update.
Medium
quality content might be thought of as that which is still useful to readers,
and isn't thin (scraped and non-original content in other words), but isn't
exactly fantastic either. Medium content is par for the course at pretty much
every site where the majority of content is user generated. Poor grammar and
spelling mistakes from users whose first language isn't English might be
considered medium quality in this context. Some forum sites actively moderate
and correct (or delete) such posts, whereas DaniWeb doesn't. Penalising members
for not speaking English as well as a native seems a tad harsh, especially when
the actual meaning of the post is clear enough. Where the meaning isn't clear,
then the community will ask for clarification and the thread will effectively
be self-corrected. That's what a community of users is all about, and it works
well at DaniWeb.
Sure,
content that makes no sense or is just too hard to read can be problematical. Which
is why a team of DaniWeb volunteer moderators spent many hours per day, for
weeks on end, manually correcting no less than 80,000 posts made across a
period of ten years which were incorrectly formatted using the old BBCode
system that was replaced by a new Markdown system last year? The readability,
and hence quality, of the DaniWeb archive has dramatically increased as a
direct result. At least it has if you are human, and not an algorithm. Since
March 2012, when DaniWeb moved to an entirely new platform that was coded from
the ground up in-house, there has been just about no botspam, and a much
reduced occurrence of any spam at all in fact.
Others have
also noticed the Google Ghost effect, and a discussion is underway on the Google
webmaster support forums. Of those taking part, perhaps the most telling is
John Mueller, a 'Webmaster Trends Analyst' based at Google in Zurich,
Switzerland who states: "One of the difficulties of running a great
website that focuses on UGC is keeping the overall quality upright. Without
some level of policing and evaluating the content, most sites are overrun by
spam and low-quality content. This is less of a technical issue than a general
quality one, and in my opinion, not something that's limited to Google's
algorithms".
While not
confirming, or denying for that matter, the existence of the Google Ghost
update, Mueller does insist "making sure that all of the initially visible
pages of your site are of the highest quality possible isn't something that a
site-owner would do just for Google, it's really something that they'd probably
want to do for all users" and goes on to hint that perhaps there is an
algorithm policing UGC forums after all when he says that "putting your
best foot forward there is something that - imo - isn't just done for the
'algorithm' but really primarily for your new users".
However, as
Dani Horowitz points out "its one thing to figure out how to recover from
Panda (at least you know what you're dealing with) but it's a different animal
altogether when you don't even know what you're up against". And while the
Google Ghost continues to haunt UGC forums, without any actual proof that it
exists, this could be impossible to counter. Even if sites such as DaniWeb
manage to tweak things which, more by luck than judgment, manage to appease the
Ghost algorithm there's no guarantee of a quick fix to the decreased traffic
issues as Mueller confirms. "Significantly improving the quality of a
website will take time" he says "on your side, as well as on our side
when our algorithms work to understand the changes that you've made".
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