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More SEO Nuggets for Small Business from SMX: Panda Posted: 10 Jun 2011 10:00 AM PDT The Wisdom of Chairman Matt In the world of professional SEOs, Google is the Ten Commandments, Emily Post's Etiquette and Mao Tse Tung's little red book, all rolled into one. And Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, is Moses, Emily and Mao. The SMX Advanced session with Matt was extremely well attended. Easily 2,000 people sat in the conference center's largest hall, hanging on and tweeting his every word. Danny Sullivan, Panda & Matt Cutts at SMX. Photo by Dana Lookadoo. The main topic: Panda. This update to Google's ranking algorithm, released earlier this year, was squarely aimed at sites that publish content of questionable value, heavily larded with keywords, for the sole purpose of hosting ads.   Panda has caused some sites – even some offering good content – to lose significant traffic, while offering a leg up into higher search results for small, content-rich sites that are tightly focused on a specific topic. Google will continue to develop Panda, but for now, here are the high points of Matt’s session, and what they mean for small business owners: Panda 2.2 is coming. This update to Google's Panda algorithm will roll out soon. Its purpose: to demote from search results any website that "scrapes" the content of other sites, and whose scraped content ranks higher than the original. Panda affects the entire site, not just individual pages. Google will no longer consider pages separately from the entire site. If the algorithm identifies pages of "scraped" content, Google will demote not just those pages, but the entire website. Rel=author. Google has introduced this new tag to help website owners identify their original content to Google.  It’s a new way to help Google understand that anyone’s republication of your content – authorized or not – isn’t the original, and that your piece should rank higher. The rel=author tag must point to an author page on the same website. (If you'd like to see an example of an author page, you can take a look at the articles in the Learn section of AboutUs.org. Click the author's name on any of these articles, and you'll be taken to his or her personal profile page on AboutUs.org.) User experience matters. Panda is designed – and will be continually updated – to assess whether a site is a good experience for people. While Matt said Panda is not targeted directly at usability, you can bet that Google is working hard towards being able to judge more closely whether a site's content is truly useful to someone, or whether it's been designed solely to rank well in search results. Create your site for people, design it for ease of use and understanding, and you'll be on the right side of Panda. Why did Google introduce Panda? As we’ve explained before, Google introduced its update – also called “Farmer” by SEO (search engine optimization) professionals – to weed out sites known as “content farms” from search results. These sites, designed to rank high for searches on specific keywords, were crowding more useful sites out of the top spots in search results pages. Google is highly sensitive to criticisms of the usefulness of its search results. The company has also lost market share to Bing and Yahoo, which is powered by Bing's search engine. Because it’s striving to maintain and grow market share – and to be fair, because of its core values – Google will continue to groom its algorithm to more faithfully mimic human judgement. SEOs and website owners may groan, moan and struggle to parse Google’s labyrinthine guidance – but the Big G’s standards and practices will continue to dominate the Web for a long time to come. What’s a website owner to do? If you’re a business owner, your website is part of your marketing plan, your brand, and it’s your presence in the digital marketplace. Take care of the SEO basics, pay attention to social media sites and use them if you are so inclined, and learn what you can about Web marketing. Unabashed pitch: The Learn section of AboutUs.org is a good place to start. You’ll find articles on the top things you can do for your site’s SEO, how to market your business on Twitter and Facebook, and a whole swath of other tips for busy business owners.

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