A lot of sites have been critical of Google for returning results that are scraped versions of their orignal content. Cutts is quoted as saying in a liveblog of the session, “A guy on my team [is] working on that issue. A change has been approved that should help with that issue. We’re continuing to iterate on Panda. The algorithm change originated in search quality, not the web spam team.”

He says there’s another change coming soon, and that he still doesn’t know when Panda will be launched fully internationally (in other languages). He also says they haven’t made any manual exceptions with Panda.

You may recall that the Mac blog Cult of Mac was hit by the original Panda update, and then after exchanging some dialogue with Google the site ended up getting some new traffic. Matt says, however, “We haven’t made any manual exceptions. Cult of Mac might have been confused because they started getting all this new traffic from blogging about it, but we haven’t made any manual exceptions.”

Yesterday we looked at some poll results from Search Engine Roundtable that found 4% of sites were saying they had fully recovered from the Panda update. Some other sites have been finding partial recovery.

Image credit: Search Engine Roundtable

On the prospect of sites having recovered from the update, Matt is quoted as saying, “The general rule is to push stuff out and then find additional signals to help differentiate on the spectrum. We haven’t done any pushes that would directly pull things back. We have recomputed data that might have impacted some sites. There’s one change that might affect sites and pull things back.”

You may also recall Google’s list of questions that webmasters could use to assess the quality of their content. Cutts talked briefly about those questions, saying, “It could help as we recompute data.”

He also said that what is being called “Panda 2.2″ has been approved but has not yet been rolled out. “If we think you’re relatively high quality, Panda will have a smaller impact. If you’re expert enough and no one else has the good content, even if you’ve been hit by Panda that page can still rank.”

That says a lot about original content.

Do you have a strategy for Bing SEO? Yahoo? Discuss here.

WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo out at SMX, who presented on this topic. As she notes, some businesses actually see better results from Bing than they do from Google, and when Yahoo starts using Bing for search, Bing’s share of the search market is going to grow dramatically (it also powers search in Facebook, let’s not forget).

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Janet discusses a tool Bing has in its Webmaster tools that lets you see the types of links that point into you, and lets you look at their value, so you can go after similar links.

Bing is actually redesigning its Webmaster Tools, however. WebProNews also spoke with Bing’s Eric Gilmore about this.

The point is, Google’s Webmaster Tools have been very helpful for site-owners over the years in their conquest for better rankings. Now that Bing is growing in significance, its tools are going to be helpful as well.

Have you used Bing’s webmaster tools? Did they help your rankings? Comment here.

Do you think the update has affected your revenue? Comment here.

WebProNews spoke with Google’s Matt Cutts at SMX Advanced, and he talked a little bit about Mayday, saying that it was designed to try and spot signals of quality on pages and sites that would be good for users.

He noted that the update was not part of his Webspam team’s efforts, but was part of general search quality, and that human intervention is not involved. It’s strictly algorithmic.

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Note: Mayday is not the only thing Cutts talks about in the interview above. He also talks Caffeine and video sitemaps. If you have a response to any of this stuff, please feel free to chime in, in the comments.

Cutts says auto-generated pages and content farms tend to get hit the most by Mayday. His advice to webmasters affected by it, is basically to improve quality. He says to make sure you’re returning the highest quality content for users. Stuff that’s not available anywhere else can be helpful – stuff that’s not duplicate or scraped or lower quality.

Based on the reactions we’ve seen from disgruntled webmasters, I’m guessing that advice isn’t going to satisfy everyone. Here are a few samples of reader comments from our previous coverage of the update:

"In conjunction with the drop in Google traffic, I have seen a matching drop in clicks out from my site to other sites. So it’s real, and it’s not been rosy to deal with."

"Yes I have worked hard trying to rank and it keeps changing. Decided to go to other mehtods and forget about Google and their ranking."

Even Cutts says you shouldn’t just focus on search engines.

Bruce Clay, who runs a highly regarded marketing firm had some interesting things to say about the update (about 12 minutes into the video):

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Gerben commenting on the interview at our video blog says, "Well, having a portal completely based on User Generated Content is affected by #mayday also, don’t think the explanation is completely correct."

One reader offered some sound advice: "Never forget the first rules in SEO: It changes all the time. So, Google has made a change, which is not the first one. Do the basics right and you will have a sound long-term strategy."

I don’t imagine taking Cutts’ advice about improving quality can hurt either way. The worst thing that happens is that the user benefits from better content.

More on Mayday (including comments from affected webmasters) here. 

Do you think your rankings have been affected by the "Mayday" update? Let us know.

 Highlights include:

- The Bing Webmaster Tools have been re-engineered from the ground up to offer more data, including enhanced charting functionality, through a modern, improved user interface. The new tools remain web-based, and basic functionality will be available through most web browsers.

- The tools assess performance in several key areas, including crawl, index and traffic. Each area will offer granular data going back as far as six months with enhanced, on-the-fly adjustable charting, enabling webmasters to focus on the timeline trends that are most meaningful to them.

- The update also includes a new experience built with Silverlight, featuring rich visual charts to help webmasters quickly analyze several months of data to identify trends and drive insights.

Update: Bing’s Eric Gilmore tells us about the new Bing Webmaster Tools in the following interview:

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 More here.

Bing also announced social search, which uses public updates from Fan Pages and aggregated data from public updates to deliver real-time results. Doug Caverly talks more about this here.

Caffeine, it should be noted, does not change how Google ranks content. It’s all about the speed at which Google can index content. Cutts says you’ll start seeing fresher results. This is separate from Google’s real-time results. You’ll see fresher results outside of that box as well.

He compared it to having a limo waiting for you to take you where you want to go when you arrive at an airport, as opposed to standing around waiting for a bus to pick you up (the bus would be Google’s old system in this analogy).

Caffeine allows Google to do a larger amount of indexing, with the capacity to scale it up much more. It helps in letting Google add richer data to go along with other data, meaning not just links and anchor text, but any info Google deems useful.

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Cutts also discusses the recent "Mayday" update, video sitemaps, and more.

You can read more about Caffeine here.

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I caught Brett Tabke, founder of WebmasterWorld, shortly after the session to get his take on some of the high points of the discussion. It looks like this social media thing is doing nothing but growing and it’s impact is being felt across the board in ways most of us never imagined.

Realtime Search:
Realtime search is one of the biggest concepts to talk about in terms of social media. Brett brought up the example of the French airliner that crashed in South America recently. Information about the incident was available instantly through Twitter.

More significantly, this information wasn’t simply in the form of Tweets about the crash, there was new content being created and linked to in Tweets. This new content, created on the fly and accessed in real time, wasn’t available through Google, Bing or Yahoo yet, but it was in Twitter.

The concept of content discovery in realtime hasn’t really been done (at least not very well) to this point. This is why you’ve been reading weekly rumors of this company or that company being interested in purchasing Twitter.

Marketing:
Social media marketing is entering a whole new level. Business interest in social media started out a lot like business interest started in blogs. When blogs were first coming into vogue, businesses were, for the most part, looking at blogging from a public relations/reputation management standpoint. Of course, as blogs became more and more prevalent businesses increasingly incorporated them into their marketing mix.

The same thing is happening with social media, just a little faster. Take a look at BestBuy and their ‘Twelpforce’ Twitter strategy. They have over 500 people signed up, scouring Twitter looking for folks with questions about plasma TVs and various gadgets.

Social media, particularly Twitter, is moving more and more out of the realm of the ‘optional’ for business. Managing your identity in social media is becoming just as important, if not more, than managing your .com domain. GoDaddy is even going ahead and registering your Twitter accounts along with your domains now.

Just like with your domains, if you aren’t ‘you’ then somebody else is apt to become ‘you’. Twitter registration has evolved to the point that account creation there is just another step in responsible brand management.

Evolution of Twitter:
Now that Twitter has become too big to be ignored and (for many) too important not to use, what comes next? Just as with anything else new on the web, it hasn’t taken spammers long to get into the mix. Spammers have hit Twitter like 7 year locusts. Anyone who has been using the service of a significant amount of time can tell you that the peddlers of porn, mortgage ‘deals’ and pharmaceuticals have arrived en force.

Twitter by nature is completely opt-in so you would think that the spammers would have a hard time with getting much done. Fortunately for the spammers however people are, by nature, just greedy. The currency of Twitter is (for the most part) your follower count. Whether it’s to increase the effectiveness and reach of your tweets or just to stroke the ego, for many, the Twitter game is largely about growing the follower number.

This has given rise to countless "add 500 followers per day" schemes and mechanisms in order to game the system. The rationale being, if you find somebody with 3000 followers, you are apt to think, "hey, this guy must have something cool to say". It’s logical enough but unfortunately not necessarily the case.

So, how can you tell if somebody is worth following? That’s a question a lot of people are asking. What is authority? How can you tell if someone is an authority? How do you know the person you are following is even who they claim to be?

Twitter has started verifying accounts for some of the A list set. Celebrities are finding their way onto Twitter in increasing numbers. Prompted in large part by a lawsuit filed by Tony LaRussa, Twitter has started a program of verifying the accounts of celebrities. It’s a step in the right direction which will likely make it’s way from celebrities to businesses soon enough but it’s really just a start. What if you want to find twitter people to follow within niche industries, or within your local area? 

Finding people to follow is easy enough. We have Twellow and Twellowhood (shameless plug alert) just in the way of examples of sites you can use to find interesting people. How do you tell who is worth following though once you’ve found them?

Brett and I talked about this a bit in the interview. We are starting to see some sites and services pop up to ‘grade’ Twitterers in an attempt to assign some sort of authority or rank to accounts.  Sound familiar? It should. This is essentially what search engines have spent years trying to figure out for websites.

Personally, I think there is something a little unsettling about the concept of having rank or some arbitrary authority assigned to Twitter accounts, but I suppose it’s probably inevitable to some extent. You can check Klout.net for an example of such a service. Here you will find an algorithmic number value assigned to Twitter accounts.  The ingredients and factors of the algo are (of course) secretive and mysterious, but we’re all used to that by now aren’t we?

So in some regards, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. There’s still a lot of ground to cover with this whole social/Twitter thing.  Remember search? How many search engines did we go through before we got Google? How many Google-killers have come and gone since then?

Social Media is still an area very much in it’s development. There will no doubt be plenty of twists and turns as we move along. However, there is one thing you can absolutely take to the bank: if aren’t in it, you need to get there. For better or worse, "wait and see" strategists have no place in this world.

Ever tried PR Sculpting?  Did you find it effective?  Let us know in the comments section.

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Now, PR sculpting is a fairly advanced concept a lot of folks may not fully understand.  So, I figured I would try to provide some explanation of at least the general ideas involved.  That seems like the best way to go about explaining why Google is looking to make some sort of change in their treatment of no-follow.  If you understand PageRank sculpting, on other words, you will get why Google might not like it so much.

I expect I will have at least 5 people ‘way smarter than me’ hop in the comments or rip me in Twitter for leaving out ‘this’ or ‘that’ in terms of the subtle nuances of PR sculpting. My response to this would be; for the purposes of this article, the subtleties are immaterial.  So simmer down.  I would be remiss however if I didn’t add a little warning in here for people to thoroughly read up and make sure you understand PR sculpting before you start slapping no-follows all over your site.  You really can screw your site up if you do it wrong.

So what the heck is it anyway? I’m so glad you asked. We’ll start with the concept of your Page Rank ‘power’ or ‘authority’.  This is the overall ‘value’ of a given page in terms of how much ‘authority’ that page has to pass along via it’s outbound links.  You have no doubt heard people talk about ‘link juice’, that’s what link juice is.  The more important (in Google’s eyes) a page is, the more link juice it possesses.

Now think of your website as a bucket (or maybe an elegant punchbowl or some kind of fine china bowl if a bucket is too base of a mental image for you). Your bucket contains all of your link juice.  Now think of your outbound links as tiny holes in your bucket.  Your link juice flows through the holes and passes on your page’s authority.

Now, the PR sculpting theory holds that the more holes you have in your bucket, the more your link juice is spread around or diluted.  This is at least in part supported by the search engine accepted and approved concept of Crawl Efficiency (see the Vanessa Fox video or article for more on that).  Search engines aren’t going to spend forever crawling and indexing every link on every page, so the concept of crawl efficiency basically means you prioritize the important stuff for them.

How do you do this?  Well you stick no-follow attributes on non-important links.  PR sculpting theory takes this one step further and says that ALL outbound links count as a hole in your bucket, so you would then want to make more liberal use of no-follow to help direct the flow of the link juice.  For example; if you had navigation links at the top of your page, in the side bar and again in your footer, PR sculpting would say you add no-follow attributes to all but one set of them.  Less holes = more juice flowing through the holes that are left.  Get the idea?  Good.

Now, the hullaballoo at SMX Advanced had to do with some rumors or suggestions that Google may be going to change how they look at no-follow in relation to how the link juice is passed along.  So if you had, for example, 10 outbound links on a page and no-followed all but 2 of them, effective PR sculpting would funnel all of your juice through those 2 and not dilute it over all 10.  Google, being… well, Google, doesn’t like to have situations where people can ‘control’ the value of links – especially for the purposes of ranking better in Google.

Does Google need to make changes to manage the effectiveness of PR Sculpting?  What do you think?

So much buzzing and grumbling ensued when it was suggested that Google might not look at no-follow in quite the same way moving forward.  If you have 10 links and no-follow 8 of them in other words, they were still going to count you as having 10 holes in your bucket instead of sending more love to the 2 regular links you didn’t add no-follow to.

By the end of the show, there still hadn’t been much at all in the way of an official word from Google on the subject.  However, I very strongly suspect we will have one soon.  The implications for counting no-follow links ‘against’ you in terms of authority passing ability raises all sorts of difficulties. 

For one, let’s say you have a popular article that gets 500 comments.  Most everybody that leaves a comment also leaves a link.  Generally these links are no-followed.  If more links = some sort of diminished or diluted authority of a page, that would seem to suggest your fantastic article that got 500 comments was maybe not as good as an article that only got maybe 5 comments. 

Second, the whole no-follow thing was Google’s idea to begin with.  It’s very existence is arguably not much more than a Google helper to assist them in managing the whole link economy they created out of their heavy reliance on links as a ranking factor. 

Google hates paid links because paid links have the potential to impact search results and if you can buy links you can essentially raise your result in Google.  The problem is, paid links have been around longer than Google….  we used to just call them ads.  So, Google decided if you slap a no-follow attribute on a link, it meant you were not trying to pass your page authority on to that link and therefore weren’t being paid to elevate said link in their index.

Now, it seems like Google is starting to see people using no-follow to emphasize links via the PR sculpting thing and they want to do something about it.  A cynical person might say they sound like they are trying to have their cake and eat it too…  but a Google person would just say they are just trying to protect the integrity of their index.  Personally, I’m all for Google protecting the integrity of their index…  but I think it gets to a point when maybe they need to do something about their index’s over-reliance on inbound links as a ranking factor. Maybe then they wouldn’t have to sweat this sort of thing quite so much and/or dump the burden of link formatting and management off on the webmasters and the SEOs of the world.  Those guys have enough on their plate as it is.

Do you expect Google will make changes to the way they handle no-follow? Comment below

I managed to catch up with Vanessa Fox at the SMX Advanced show in Seattle last week.  We talked at length about some of the things you need to keep in mind in terms of assessing the search viability/index status of a website.  You can watch the video obviously to get the entire scoop, but I thought I might bullet point some of the more important topics in a separate article.

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Important point number 1:
A traffic problem is not always a ranking problem.  Many of us are too quick to assume that a drop in traffic is an indicator of some sort of issue with our search rank. 

You may not have a ranking issue at all (per se).  You could have a crawling problem, there could be parts of your sites getting crawled but not indexed, you could have some sort of extraction issue…  any number of things. 

The thing here to keep in mind is that you need to develop some sort of infrastructure to diagnose problems.  Start with some ranking report benchmarks.  Generally speaking, you want to be able to know about where you stand in the rankings for some of your top queries.  Know about where you stand in the SERPs for those queries and that will give you a general idea of any significant ranking movement.

Important point number 2:
Organize your pages into categories.  Analyze your server logs for search engine bot activity on a per category basis. This will help you have a better idea about how well the bots are spidering/indexing your content.  You may find that categories ‘A’ and ‘C’ are being actively crawled by the search bots, but ‘B’ is getting very little attention from them.

These various category pages may also have significant variation in terms of their crawl rates.  Some of your category sections may be crawled at a rate of 10 pages per day, some at 100 pages per day.  Being able to see how many pages the crawlers pick up from the individual categories gives you a good idea about how long it takes the bots to get through your whole site.

Important point number 3:
Search Engines aren’t going to spend all their time crawling all your content.  Crawl efficiency is the name of the game… If you have a lot of pages you need to be able to let the crawlers know what pages are the most important for them to crawl around on.  If you don’t want registration pages, error pages, things like that -all non productive pages.  So you would want to keep the engines off of things that are not productive for you so they can spend more time dealing with the ‘good stuff’.

Important point number 4:
Create comprehensive, canonical .xml sitemaps for each of your categories (the categories have to be declared canonical before you can do this).  In other words, you can create a sitemap index file that links your multiple sitemaps and submit it to Google Webmaster Central. 

This gives you a very granular and accurate assessment of how well Google is crawling the various parts of your site.  Better yet, you get access to all the cool little graphs and tools in Webmaster Central sitemap reports.  This will allow you to identify not only how much and what areas of your content are being crawled, but also how much of that content is being indexed.

So if you see that Google is crawling everything you have in category ‘A’ but only indexing 20% of it, you have a solid spot to start looking for reasons why. 

Important point number 5:
Make sure you actually have a problem before you start running around trying to fix a problem.  Seems like it should go without saying maybe, but as Vanessa points out, a decrease in your overall indexed pages for example, doesn’t necessarily mean you have a problem.  Google may have simply de-iindexed some of your ineffective or duplicated pages for example. 

If you haven’t had a drop off in search traffic, then you probably don’t have a significant search problem.  Changes are not necessarily problems.  Seems like quite a folks in this business have a little trouble with that distinction.

So there you have it.  5 pretty solid tips from one of our favorite former Googlers.  I would of course urge you to check out our video to get it right from her – she says it all a lot better than I do. 

Let us know what you think of the video. Did you find Vanessa’s advice helpful? Discuss here.

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A couple tactics discussed by Van Wagner include:

- Determining what your competitors are paying for their ads, and approximately what their quality score is by doing a little "competitive analysis."

- Pulling reports from the search engines periodically and using excel to generate a an optimized bid list. He says this does 80% of what a lot of the good tools out there do – for FREE.

Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos.  Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.

 

Kelly Gillease, Viator‘s marketing director, kicked off "Proving and Improving ROI in Paid Search" by talking about capturing key metrics.  Take a look at actual numbers vs. estimated averages and marginal revenue vs. gross revenue, for starters.

Don’t forget to fully credit search engine marketing for ad revenue per pageview or visit, email signup value, and latent transactions, too.

Next, Ryan Gibson, the Rimm-Kaufman Group‘s director of marketing, discussed tracking.  "Javascript tracking may cause the misallocation for 10 to 30 percent of sales," he noted.  So to more accurately catch PPC connections, consider adding tracking to any call center applications you’ve got.  For PPC clicks that convert in-store, look into dynamic coupons, email capture at the point of sales, and customer feedback surveys, as well.

Alex Schultz, who’s an Internet marketing manager at Facebook, then spoke.  "Data is your key advantage as a search marketer," he stressed.  Schultz also pointed out, "Most companies don’t take a look at the true, long-term value of a new customer."

Finally, Kelly Thomas, a group product manager for Microsoft, suggested maximizing your ROI with better targeting.  Go after your best customers, certain types (gender, age, etc.), and be willing to pay a premium.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.