It's Our First Pandaversary!

Luckily Panda did not effect specialty ecommerce sites like ours.

Our primary gripe is that Google still struggles with doing a good job of indexing dynamic content - where the detail of a product page reside inside a database. Google does a good job of indexing static content and content that it can reach through a link but not when content is dynamic and unless you know the make and model, you won't pull up that page.

I can't believe I never noticed you use Drupal. I've read your blog for *years*, and I have finally decided to accept some email spam from you, because I just *have* to comment.

I realize, you have to simply for a graphic to work, but for as much as Google has taken away from About, they have also given.... About is now owning PHP searches. In fact, their thin, worthless PHP posts rank either next to, or ABOVE the PHP.net manual for technical PHP searches.

In my mind, this is the perfect example of everything that's wrong with Panda.

While, much of About may have been stepped on, many subdomains with crappy, worthless content have appeared in #1 spots thanks to Panda updates.

Panda hurt, but it showed that you can't build your business *solely* on search. If you aren't getting word of mouth traffic to your site, then you don't really have a business... you're just capitalizing on the opportunity search engines present. With that said, there's a difference with running your website as a hobby vs. a business. If you're expecting to turn a profit from your website, you just can't rely on search. You need to engage with other people in your industry. I guess it's about RELATIONSHIPS... with your readers and your industry.

Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde did a webinar in December about Panda. They talked about how the algo takes snippets of content on your site and compare it to other snippets of the same content found across the web. The Panda algo then keeps score of sites that are found to be duplicating content from other sites. Once your site gets a reputation for simply duplicating content, it's likely to drop. I'm sure there's more to it, but that was the major takeaway. They discussed using rel=author tags to identify ownership of your content. I think they mentioned unique content abstracts in RSS feeds too. (Dan and Leslie: feel free to chime in if I'm getting it wrong).

I'm relying less on SEO these days. Just trying to build relationships with my industry and readers at the regular places: forums, popular blogs, and doing some paid advertising.

P.S.

It would be awesome if there was a "subscribe to comments" function. This blog attracts (and is run by) some of the smartest minds in the industry, so I love to be informed of what people have to say.