Keyword Country Blog

Google’s latest Penguin Update has fuelled a lot of confusion and headbanging in the SEO community. And the discussion boards are filled with cries of webmasters who’ve apparently lost everything with this algorithmic change.

If you too are wondering over this update, if it makes you run for the hills & convinces you on drinking 2 liters of red-bull; Relax! In the following paragraphs, we’ll be taking a very easy take on ‘how’ this whole Penguin update works and ‘what’ you must do to escape its effects. But before we get cracking on ‘Penguin Survival’, let’s first understand what this update is all about:

What is Google Penguin Update?

Announced on 24th April, 2012, the Penguin Update (formerly called the ‘Over-Optimization Penalty’ and later the ‘Webspam Update’) aims at fighting webspam, and punishing those violating Google’s quality guidelines. Close on the heels of Panda update, Penguin works to improve the quality of Google’s search results and controlling squeaky SEO tactics.

“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.” – Matt Cutts

Owing a mixup of Google updates released lately, April has been a cruel month and has had many webmasters look understandably shaken and worried. Beginning with the news of an ‘Over optimization penalty’ in March, erroneous tagging of parked domains on 16th April, Panda 3.5 data refresh on 19th April, the official webspam update release on 24th April and Panda 3.6 refresh on 27th April; there’s been great chaos in the SEO community. The chain of updates has left webmasters wondering if Penguin is the mother update covering all baby updates released in 2012 or is it an independent  ranking factor feeding on multiple variables. Of what is evident, Penguin is the official improvement to the combination of over-optimization and webspam updates.

Here’s Googler Matt Cutts clearing some air on this curiosity:

“I think ‘over-optimization’ wasn’t the best description, because it blurred the distinction between white hat SEO and webspam. This change is targeted at webspam, not SEO, and we tried to make that fact more clear in the blog post.”

The update has gone live for all languages at the same time. Google says Penguin roughly affects 3.1% of English queries, 3% of those in Chinese, German and Arabic and around 5% of those in “heavily spammed languages” like Polish. Here’s Rand Fishkin explaining how Penguin works.

How to know it’s a Penguin Attack?

Analyse your Google referrals…If your organic traffic and rankings have dwindled on or after 24th April, 2012 and your linking wasn’t quite natural; odds are good you were hit by the Penguin. WPMU.org’s analytics is an example in point:

Here’s a detailed post on why WordPress Mu was ‘Penguinalised’ even with 10, 000+ Facebook likes and backlinks from big guns like Technorati, Huffington Post etc.

But they say it’s not necessarily an off-the-cliff drop for all. Some would notice an approximately 1/3rd drop in their organic traffic spanned across two weeks after April 24, 2012.

Yes, my rankings have suffered, what NOW?

Penguin is an algorithmic change which means submitting a reconsideration request won’t help… which further means if you make right changes in your site and Google bot recrawls and reanalyses it, your rankings should be fine again. Let’s discuss what Google means by “making the right changes”…

If I were short on time and I had to summarize the whole Panda survival in one line, I’d said –
Fix any onsite over-optimization, have all junk backlinks removed and diversify your anchor text in backlinks. But since I have ample time on my hands, I’ll better detail

Get rid of unnatural linking

Unnatural links to your site are like ticking bombs. These days search engines are no more a robot you can fool. Very recently Googlers ‘manually examined 1 million sites trading in links and issued them warning notices.

Here’s a great video on link pruning (identification and removal of artificial links) with Bruce Clay neatly explaining the concept and helping you get out of it. They say it’s great to investigate in your link profile every fortnight and request webmasters to remove low quality links. In case these webmasters act pricey, it’s great to have Google discount these links. The search engine appreciates this effort

So what kind of links alert Google? According to Randfish,

“I see cruddy, link filled footers all the time. Also comment spam, especially those that are sent through automated software blasts, so you think of your XRumer or your SENuke, the article marketing robot, or whatever, that’s going to submit your site to tons of places or find open holes in the web where they can leave comments and link spam and that kind of stuff. Forum signature links, this is actually one where I suspect it’s one of the places where Google really gets to know, hey, this guy clearly is a manipulative, black hat/gray hat SEO”

Which means the definition of unnatural links includes:

1 Inlinks, footer links & site-wide links with exact-match anchor text

Make sure that over 50% of your links contain anchor text that isn’t a keyword you are trying to rank for. – Microsite Masters

A natural link profile will contain many types of links, including URL’s, brand names, image links, etc.  It won’t contain 99% exact match anchor text from article sites, comment spam, etc. – GSQI

Image Courtesy – Microsite Masters

2 Acquisition of a large number of links in a short period of time (unnatural link velocity)
3 Backlinks from dangerous sites/ penalty sources (sites been flagged for malware, various pop-ups or other spammy issues)
4 Reciprocal links
5 Links from low quality article marketing sites
6 Links obtained by guest blogging on questionable sites

Here are 6 nice ways to remove such bad links. But sometimes you have no control over bad neighbourhoods linking to you and if you can instead focus on positive link building more, it should be totally okay. All you gotta be careful is the usage of exact match anchor text…Exact match and Phrase match anchor texts are uncommon with top rankers. For a quick snapshot on how a strongly branded website diversifies its anchor text, here is one analysed by Search Engine Journal. www.ezloader.com (ranked #1 on Google for ‘boat trailers’) has:

- 215 linking domains (53% of total) for branded anchor texts
- 53 linking domains (13% of total) for phrase match anchor texts
- 147 linking domains (37% of total) for partial and broad match anchor text
- 1 linking domain for exact match anchor text (i.e for keyword ‘boat trailers’)

So the bottom-line is kinda same as that suggested by Geoff Kenyon. An ideal ‘natural linking profile’ should look like:
- Approximately 10% Exact Match Anchors (or even less)
- Approximately 30% Broad, Partial and Phrase Match Anchors
- Approximately 60% URL and Brand (+Keyword) Anchors

Remove hidden text/ links

If you’ve:
- Set some text/ links as the same colour as the background
- Hidden text/ links behind an image
- Used Display:none in your CSS
- Adjusted font/ hyperlink size to super small

you’re playing with fire. This has been around for long now but its only recently Google has gotten serious with it. Inclusion of hidden text/ links can have your website totally deindexed from search results. Make sure there is no deceptive information solely for search engines that your visitors can’t access.

Avoid keyword stuffing

I believe there is nothing called ‘optimal proportion’ when it comes to keyword density. No formula like that for baking pancakes… The best you can do is read aloud your content to see if it reads naturally where the reader isn’t gonna be annoyed…Unnecessary keyword stuffing in titles, descriptions and content can have Google to send your website to no-mans-land.

Remove purposeful duplicate content across multiple pages/ domains

As cliché as it may sound; original, quality content is the first on-page optimization factor that users and search engines look into. Google’s black and white bear was all against it and Penguin has just re-emphasised on it. Make sure your website does not offer anything that will cause utter displeasure and disgust to visitors.

And it’s not just about content but about adding value. Include some external links and informational videos as a follow-up content. Build a website where you can proudly leave your photo and phone number! Check these 4 killer SEO tips straight from the horse’s mouth.

Remove sneaky redirects or doorway pages

Cloaking is a shady practice of displaying one page to search engines and an entirely different one to users…say you’re showing flash to your users and HTML text to engines. Google has a clear stand on doorway pages and it’s better you don’t try game them.

Avoid creating malicious webpages/ files

Google has its own ways and procedures to identify sites distributing badware. Keep a check on your Webmaster Tools for any warning notices. If you’ve already been busted as being malicious, take your website offline immediately, remove all bad stuff and once that is done, request a malware review.

Avoid using cheap SEO services

Sometimes what happens is webmasters with severe lack of time and passion hire 3rd party SEO services without fixing any accountability. A good number of these providers sometimes bring you undeserved quick traffic using BlueFart SEO techniques (automated commenting, article spinning etc). It’s only when the website vanishes off the search results completely, the webmasters run around cluelessly.

It’s not bad to outsource your SEO work. You just got to be a little careful with what you choose.

What are the choices that I have now?

Fix spammy stuff

Nobody wants to see a cold and impersonal website. Clean up your website of all spam and over-optimization. If you’ve improved it going by Google standards, it should reposition itself well after Google’s next crawl. If you have 9 more minutes, I’ll leave you with Google’s latest video on 5 common mistakes and 6 good ideas in SEO.

Request Innocence

If you didn’t indulge in any of the bad stuff stated above and are not convinced on being Penguinalized, shoot a message to Google. (Mandatory: Include the word penguin in your note)

Kill the Penguin

Scream out loud – “We don’t want no Penguin!” and sign a petition to Kill Penguin Update.

As I wonder what’s the next Google algo named after a black & white animal (Umm a zebra, orca?) O_o I’d appreciate you contributing in with your comments below.

Note – Please don’t put this highly important ranking factor on a to-do-someday list.  If you do not make this blog actionable soon, you’ve simply wasted 10 minutes of your day reading this massive post! As Nike says ‘Just Do It’!

Okay guys, hold on to your seat and lean in a little forward….because what we are disclosing below would most certainly knock you off your feet! Given beneath are 4 killer tips straight from Matt Cutts’ mouth (literally!) Wondering how on earth did we manage that?

We kidnapped Matt Cutts, the anti-spam head at Google! Oh yes! Practically picked him up from Bay Area, California, cupped his mouth, blindfolded and gagged him AND more importantly…elicited it all out of him! Just for you! Kaboom, isn’t it?

He wasn’t too willing to let the cat out of the bag…but then we are nothing if not persistent! He was made to drink cranberry juice (he hates it) till he started talking. Get reading quickly before he gets to know of this printed version and scraps it from search results altogether!

So, Mr. Matt, what’s the first SEO secret?

1. Improve your website’s page-loading speed – “Faster sites create happy users”

There is an inverse relationship between your website’s loading speed and ROI. The longer it takes for a web-page to load, the lower your ROI and vice-versa. And there is a very reasonable explanation for this…slow loading pages lead to bad user experience, bad user experience causes missed leads, missed leads cause high bounce rate and high bounce rate causes poor SERPs.

A study conducted by senior Google researchers suggests that if the search results page is slowed down by mere 100-400 milli-seconds, it impacts 0.2% – 0.6% searches per user. While this may seem small, it is of great consequence at Google’s scale.

“One thing I would pay attention to is optimizing for speed…It is a slight factor in google rankings but lots of people have run tests and discovered that if you are able to decrease the speed…the latency when pages are returned within your website, customers end up doing more things… more purchases, more browsing and so you can definitely increase your ROI if you decrease your speed or latency…”…..Matt Cutts

Why does page-speed matter?

Think of a visitor who is in desperate need to know how to make Cuban sandwiches and what he sees is the time bar/ revolving circle moving at turtle’s speed…He’ll wait for a few micro-seconds but as his patience begins to dwindle…zip, zap, zoom..he’s gone! Websites with excellent content but hopelessly horrible page loading speed are useless!

Visitors don’t like a website that takes an eternity to load, nor do search engines! If your web-pages take more than four seconds to load (as independent tests show), it’s slow, dog slow, and really needs a boost! Page speed is an important factor in Google rankings and the page loading speed of most top ranking websites usually lies between 0.1 – 1.0 seconds. So, how can you get to this speed?

“Minifying your javascript, css, trying to merge includes, trying to optimize your images…all relatively simple things but they can really affect your bottom-line when you think of end-user behavior.”- Matt Cutts

If you want to dig deeper into it, here’s Google offering a fund of information on how to make your website run faster. Google also enables you to measure your website’s loading speed with the help of ‘Page Speed’ that accords a ‘Page Speed Score’ on a 1-100 scale

Thanks Matt, moving to the second one now…

2. Get an excellent website architecture, internal linking & CMS

“Think about the look of your website, good internal CMS practices and good internal education”

Site architecture is all about how easy/ difficult is it for search engines and users to find their way in/ out of your website. It’s about presenting the most relevant and valuable text in front of your users in minimum number of clicks. It includes everything from design and lay-out to navigation and deep linking.

An excellent website architecture is one that is easy on eyes and mind, both!

“Think about something like an Apple product, when you buy an Apple product you open it up, the box is beautiful, the packaging is beautiful, the entire experience is really wonderful.”- Matt Cutts

Matt also suggests that you be careful with your internal linking structure.

“Make sure your internal linking is consistent, when you do make internal links…make sure that there are good keywords but not spamming…”- Matt Cutts

How many clicks to your deepest pages from your home page?

Now, what would you prefer as a visitor? 6 clicks to the deepest level of information or just 3?

“Well, this is not SEO advice, this is just behavioural advice…If you have stuff within fewer number of clicks from the root page, visitors are more likely to find it…If someone has to click 8 times to register for your conference compared to register on right home root page, fewer people are going to find it, if it is that many clicks away…”…..Matt Cutts

So, rationally thinking, it’s pretty evident that a topical funnel website structure (that has many clicks to deepest pages) leads to poor user experience. By flattening the structure i.e reducing the number of clicks to the deepest pages and increasing the quality of links on each page, we can make it easier for human visitors and search engines to identify the most relevant content.

Image courtesy: SEOGadget

Furthermore, Matt suggests you have full control over your CMS. Your CMS should be not be super technical so that even non-geeks can use it without much difficulty.

So, how to build an excellent website?

Whoa! We can’t believe, we managed to extract 2 tips out of him! Quickly to the third one please…

3. Be a social animal – Try social media optimization – “We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking”

With Google validating social buzz as a prime ranking factor, there is all the world’s sense in striving for an excellent social media reputation.

“We are also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook…Don’t necessarily say to yourself…Aha! Now I am going to get a tonne of followers, just like people get a tonne of reciprocal links….You need to know who are the followers who mean quality…”- Matt Cutts

Try to envision something like…I tweet a post (say a link)…Now, Google will evaluate my Twitter account reputation (my overall activity) by conducting a deep sentiment analysis…This will tell Google how I feel about the link, how relevant it is and what others think of the same…From there, Google will accord me a ‘Social Score’. And it is this ‘Social Score’ combined with my SEO factors that will determine my overall raking.

Also make sure you offer some useful service so that you increase the probability of being linked, discussed and bookmarked.

We had somebody that was doing a language translation site and they were wondering “Why don’t I rank No 1?” and so I checked out their site and it was literally like a brochure – 5 pages, contact us, about us, this is what do we do…and then I looked at who the no 1 site was and the number one site was talking about Japanese to English translation and had a lot of tutorials…Here’s how you can write your name in Japanese…and all these facts”- Matt Cutts

Social media marketing techniques include everything that lets you, as a webmaster, build direct contact with your present customers and prospects. It includes social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, guest posting, blog commenting, forum posting, community building, image/ video posting etc. Matt Cutts suggests that if your posts are clear, relevant and compelling, social media can get you better visibility and high-quality inbound links.

Image courtesy: Marketing Shepra

So cool that was, the last one please and we’ll let you free, promise!

4. Optimize your images in a web-friendly manner -
“Introduce more textual content and you can rank a little higher in search results”

We had long been agonising over the fact that if Google cannot read images, what’s in for photographers? How should they promote their website? Now, this was the time, Matt was sitting in front of us and that’s when we drew out of him the ‘Secret to image optimization’

“I would advise you to look at ways in which you can incorporate the data around the image. It could be in the meta information within the image, it can be the title, the name of the image or a paragraph of text around the image…”- Matt Cutts

Another good thing is to include a feature like “User comments” on your site. This helps you unknowingly target those keywords that the end users will type in their comments.

“One tip I would give is introduce a place where people can leave comments…because if you’ve got a picture, we might not know what that picture is but when you have 30 comments below it….and just in the process of users talking about the picture, you often end up with targeting the keywords…”- Matt Cutts

Let us now tell you that all throughout, our heart was pounding wildly inside our chests. We understood what it meant to be abducting “a senior engineer at Google”….But thanks heavens, all went as planned!

Four-fold SEO strategy as suggested by Matt Cutts: Your winning SEO strategy

The world of SEO is constantly evolving…getting more dense and complex. Bounce back quickly…Make the most of these simple yet electrifying tips and get ready to explode the World Wide Web!

Improve your website’s loading speed, build an efficient website structure and CMS, get an excellent internal linking strategy, optimize your images properly, participate in social media discussions actively and everyone will be happy – you, your visitors and search engines!

So, go and tell search engines you are ready to conquer search rankings!

P.S – Sorry your highness, Mr Cutts. We sincerely apologise for the above narrated cock-and-bull story but we were doing exactly what you want every writer to do…Adding soft humour to gain more readership…! And since these tips actually flow from you…we hope to be spared in all sense!

Google recently changed the rules of high rankings by introducing a new update that targets ‘low quality’ websites. And its time for you to change your SEO and marketing strategy accordingly.

Millions of webmasters and SEO geeks are loosing traffic (and sleep) due to what Google calls ‘PANDA’ or ‘Farmer’ update which targets ‘content farms’ and de-ranks them. ‘Captain Google Panda’ is sailing against the Pirates of Content and punishing those who have been creating huge waves of content in their ‘content mills’ or writing only to capture a sea of keywords on Search Engines.

Impacting more than 11.8% search results worldwide, too much of noise, speculation, opinion and coverage over this update has ultimately caused too much of confusion in SEO community.

Here is a complete guide on what you are up against, how to shape your high ranking strategy for future and a detailed survival guide against the wrath of Google Panda update.

What is Google PANDA update?

The experimental Panda Algorithmic change was updated in US on 24th February, 2011 (Panda 1.2). It was rolled forward globally to English Google users on 11th April, 2011 (Panda 2.2).

By means of this update, Google expressed its wrath against low-quality websites (those with duplicate, irrelevant or worthless material). All the same, it expressed appreciation for high-quality websites (those with original, relevant and useful material).

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

- Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts
Google’s Search Quality Engineers

So what does Google mean by “low-quality” website?

As per Google, it means content:
- that visitors don’t want to bookmark
- that is mass-produced or spread to multiple sources
- that lacks original research, reporting and analysis
- that has factual, stylistic or grammatical errors
- that is hollow / irrelevant for end-users
- that is contrived / keyword-stuffed just to drive traffic

“In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail”
– Google representatives

Out of all the websites hit by Panda, a good number have experienced a dip in their long-tail keyword rankings. Websites that relied excessively on long-tail pages to attract link-backs have been adversely affected by this update.

So, it goes into saying that via Panda update, Google has reinforced the importance of long-tail keywords as well.

Learning from the mistakes of Big Publishers

‘Captain Google Panda’ is sailing against the Pirates of Content and punishing those who have been creating huge waves of content in their ‘content mills’ or writing only to capture a sea of keywords on Search Engines.

Here is a list of big publishers who were hit by the recent update. Closely observe and learn from what they did WRONG or what they did RIGHT and where they stand after PANDA update.

Ezinearticles.com -

The magnitude of poor-quality content (most of which was clearly spun) on this website was too much to cheat search-engines. Long-tail keywords were not targeted properly and there were too many anchor text links directing to other sites…primarily because writing and editorial guidelines were too lenient to check ‘shallow’ content. Clearly, the website’s traffic was affected by both Panda 1.2 and Panda 2.2.

eHow.com -

eHow was hit just by the global roll-out of Panda update. eHow has a history of being openly criticized by search engine companies like Duck Duck Go and Wired magazine, labeling it as a ‘content mill’. eHow trains an army of writers (poorly paid) to write low quality content designed to rank high on search engines.

Apparently, it was the poor internal linking strategy, irrelevance of topics and the inability to target long-tail keywords properly that pushed eHow down in search engines. The website, otherwise, has stricter content guidelines (as compared to ezinearticles.com and hubpages.com) and has recently (post PANDA) shut down new author signup.

About.com -

In contrast to eHow, this company is known to recruit one of the best writers that actually have domain knowledge of what they write about. The compensation of the writers is tied to the performance of the content (in terms of traffic and advertisement revenues). At one point of time, search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and AOL were interested to acquire About.com but The New York Times won the bidding battle.

Inspite of so much concentration on content quality, the how-to giant lost on page views, although it gained on long-tail keywords. This is why it has remained stable throughout. Guess Google likes whoever plays by the rule: ‘Don’t be evil’

Blogspot.com -

Blogspot.com got a positive hit from the Panda attack. The website (both Google’s own blogs and other user created blogs) have experienced an  approximately 22.80% visibility increase post the update and why not? It targets long-tail keywords effectively and provides fresh, relevant and valuable information to the end-users. Google loves such websites!

Google has nothing against articles, but against low-quality articles and their repetition

Google has waged a war against low-quality / duplicate content AND NOT against articles particularly! Since, a lot of such ‘low-quality’ content was previously available on many article directories, it’s these directories that were hit THE MOST!

“Google’s recent search algorithm update did have an impact on our traffic, It was to the tune of about a 10-35% decrease.” – Christopher M Knight, CEO Ezinearticles.com

And for that matter, such content copying may also exist within the website, what we call internal duplication. Would you stop writing for your own website also?

Google urges webmasters to invest in high-quality content – it may be an article on your own website, a blog, an article submitted to top-notch article directories, a Google knol…whatever…

What NOW? Time to consider other facets of article writing

In a way, article writing is similar to the realty sector. Its all about the most profitable LOCATION! So, where do you put your articles now on?

Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam mastermind, recently pointed a clue by saying that when there are better alternatives available, why stick to the fuddy-duddy ones?

“I am not a huge fan of article marketing. I will lean towards great content that naturally has links… do social media marketing so that people are linking to it organically for the reason that they actually love it.”

So, what is he exactly talking about? Good blogging and social media marketing, eh?

Of course, yes! Blogging is just another facet of article writing, a better one you can say…! The online world seems to be abuzz with this new form of writing…

Start a blog (meaty, juicy and UNIQUE )

Include a blog in your website and optimize it for both short-tail and long-tail keywords. Keep it alive and kicking by adding fresh, catchy and relevant posts. You may even link it with other high-quality relative websites, if you wish. But if your posts are actually rich and juicy, they’ll be worthy of being linked and bookmarked naturally.

Guest post on niche-related blogs

Guest blogging on other blogs can get you authority linkbacks (and followers) to your website or blog. Every blog has its own guest posting guidelines. If you send a niche related blogger your post and it meets their posting guidelines, whoa! You’ll cyber-meet many new people and get a chance to improve your website’s visibility. Even better would be to cross-link all your guest posts together.

Invite guest posts from niche-related bloggers

Inviting someone to guest post on your blog is like inviting a star on your talk-show. Say for example you have a health related website…Wouldn’t it be great if you can loop in a professional diet expert to write a guest post for you, on your blog obviously? Remember, you must invite guest posts from only those bloggers whose interests are related to yours…

Submit your blogs in premium blog directories

If you submit your pulpy blog to a premium niche related directory, it will work! But ONLY if its your own, and not a stolen one! And that reminds me of BlogCatalog and Google knol…No, its not a blog directory but it lets you share your thoughts on just any topic under the sun! And since these are reputable content-sharing platforms, it’s a worthwhile consideration…

Use Social Media Channels for promotion

You need to inform your followers about your new story, isn’t it? And what better medium of promotion than social media! Nearly half of the world in active on social media sites and hence….if you know how to bell the cat right, your blog is right there where you want it to be! And with Lord Cutts making it clear that Google considers social media reputation while according rankings, you should be doing it even more rigorously!!

I am already PANDA hit. How can I improve my condition?

Concentrate on content:

You need to concentrate on better content from now on and post more frequently. Write genuine content, without copying from other sources. Structure your content properly by using more headlines and optimizing it for keywords organically.

Deleting overly used sources of content (like an RSS feed) may help (but it is entirely upto you). The duplicate content penalty exists on page level and makes your website more prone to it if you are copying content in masses. However, there is no indication that the penalty exists at domain level.

Build more backlinks

Since PANDA is about improving user experience, concentrate on the only feedback from users that search engines dwell upon – the backlinks. Get genuine backlinks to your content. Engage in deep-linking whenever possible. Structure your website so that every page is approachable within 3 clicks and easily crawlable.

Socialize your content

Make your content easily shareable, use Facebook comments, engage with people on Twitter or just entice people to digg or bookmark your content. Ofcourse, your content should be worthy enough for a bookmark, digg, ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ on social networks.

Google can now read & understand shortened URLs & accounts them as backlinks (Dont get started with spamming twitter now). Google even launched its own URL shortening service to read the pulse of users. Google is about to launch +1, which works like Facebook’s LIKE button. All these are indications of how closely Google is following its users. Socializing with these users is a nice strategy.

Panda (emic) Attack : A battle against stale content; not against article directories

It ultimately boils down to the fact that search engines LOVE unique, relevant, informative and grammatically correct text. Call it an article, blog, knol…or whatever you will!  And it’s not just about the quality of your content but also about the quality of the location where you intend to post it!

Google is clear in its message: Websites that do not pay importance to uniqueness of content and user engagement will be filtered out of search results.

Mr Panda that is big and fat, has NOT had article directories fallen flat!
It’s all about quality and location, and your site’s social media reputation!