Hi everyone, today I want to give you a heads-up on what may be coming down the track this year from good ol’ big G. It’s always best to be prepared.

Panda Revisited
It wasn’t common knowledge at the time but a few savvy SEO experts predicted that Google would be looking at banning sites using either spun or questionable quality content over a year before Google’s Panda update hit the market and look at the fallout that caused with many thousands of websites tossed into the supplemental index. There were people who’d basically quit their jobs to manage their online businesses which were making good money

The Use of Automated SEO Tools – Beware!
Some have already noticed that their hosting companies are banning sites either generated or updated using software like SEnuke or XRumer and as it stands, Google is quietly sitting back, watching and waiting but they know exactly what’s going on. Once the algorithm gets changed (and it will), it’ll be Panda all over again and many thousands of websites will get thrown out of the SERPs rankings so if you’re one of the people involved in gaming the system, you’ve got to ask yourself, is it worth taking the risk on a website that you’ve maybe invested years in developing?

History of Scrape and Spin
For those that think it won’t happen to them, you’ve only got to look back and see what the trends have been doing before. In the early days of SEO way back when, webmasters tended to provide really good content and as a result, their search engine rankings were completely natural. Some would say unfortunately that as soon as people realised that content was one, if not the, most important part of a successful SEO campaign, some bright spark developed a piece of software to scrape content from other sites and then spin it to fool the search engines into believing that it was unique as it wouldn’t be found elsewhere on the web.

by billjacobus1 under CC BY  with wpseopix.com

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Human nature being what it is, i.e. inherently lazy, meant that some webmasters completely overdid their ‘scrape and spin’ campaigns such that the quality of content available on the Internet went completely downhill and it was obvious that it wasn’t going to be very long before Google would have to take action and who can blame them?

Literally millions of dollars previously invested in scrape and spin operations went down the plughole and in fairness, Google was indiscriminate in its’ approach to the problem. Some absolutely massive sites (you know the ones!) got stripped of their PageRank and got thrown off their top spots despite having been there as authority sites for years. No-one was safe..

Now What?
Well the last couple of years and particularly now is all about Web 2.0 and although there may not be an official definition of what Web 2.0 is, the fact remains that people have discovered in their droves that there are some really great sites that can be used to upload content to. However and once again, site owners have gone completely over the top with it by taking advantage of push button, automated software to create hundreds, if not thousands of user profiles on the social networking and social bookmarking sites.

If we observe the trend, it’s obvious that there are similarities so it doesn’t take half a brain to figure out what might happen next. For all those who use XRumer, SEnuke, Scrapebox  and any number of other scripts, software and WordPress plugins in the back linking game, you may have a bad hair day just around the corner! Now I’m not being the professor of doom here and that doesn’t mean Web 2.0 won’t work anymore because when it’s used correctly (i.e. without gaming the system), Web 2.0 properties are fantastic sources of back link authority so what’s a solution to averting the inevitable Google slap?

Blog SEO – The Next Step
I’m sure the blackhatters would disagree but for me, I can’t see the point of investing valuable time, money and effort into gaming Google with software and techniques that are likely to get your site thrown to the wolves in the end. Maybe it’s lucrative to take that risk and rake in the money while you can, I don’t know but it’s a risk I don’t personally want to take. For me, it’s far easier just to write content naturally and most of the time I don’t even bother doing any keyword research because that can take up an awful lot of time as well. So here’s some important tip to consider:

• Blog posts should be of the highest quality you can deliver and give valuable content to the readers
• Blogs should be hosted on your own account that either has or will gain genuine Page Rank
• Blog posts should be backed up by additional well-written content on other Web 2.0 properties that link to the original blog post and forms what is known as Tier II SEO
• We can create another SEO Tier (Tier III) by linking in additional support from the best Social Bookmarking and Social Networking sites on the internet
• We can also get additional authority to our sites by using the traditional route of article submissions, press releases and so forth as long as they’re all manually submitted and verified.

In other words, it’s back to basics and if we do these things well, our rankings will show it and we can sleep at night without worrying about yet another algorithm change and our empire wiped out.

Until next time…

Best regards,