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» One Year Later: How Google Panda Changed Our Business
One Year Later: How Google Panda Changed Our Business
الأحد، 4 مارس 2012
التسميات:
google ads
One Year Later: How Google Panda Changed Our Business
Matt Moog
posted yesterday
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Editor’s note: Matt Moog is the founder and CEO of Viewpoints.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattMoog.
Google Panda strikes
February 24, 2011 was a day that will live in infamy for the team here at Viewpoints. That was the day of the Google Panda update. Up until that point we had enjoyed four years of consistent traffic growth to Viewpoints.com.
We managed to double traffic each year and had just reached 2.7 million
unique users. We had heard that Google was planning to update its
algorithm to penalize content and link farms and were excited about the
bump we might get as a result. Turns out we were in for a bit of a
surprise.
Viewpoints takes it on the chin
You see, Viewpoints is a consumer reviews and product ranking web
site. We have 600,000 reviews of 100,000 products contributed by more
than 250,000 members. We have had more than 70 million visits to the
site since we launched in late 2007. All of our content is original and
we always viewed all of our practices as the “right way” to do things.
Apparently Google felt differently because we lost 50% of organic search
traffic overnight as a result of the Panda update.
And tries some quick fixes
As the days passed and we sorted out all of the comments from Matt
Cutts and industry pundits and watched the Google blog as anxiously as
the faithful await the plumes of smoke from the Vatican to figure out
what we could do to get back in the good graces of the Google crawler.
Was it our ad density? Was it speed of our site? Did we not have the
right authoritative back links? Was it that some of our reviews were
short and Google was penalizing sites with ”thin content”?
The truth of the matter was that it could have been any and all of
these. Although we had hundreds of thousands of great reviews, we had
probably let some slip through that did not deserve to be published. And
we had not paid enough attention to speed, ad density or other hall
marks of a good user experience. So we set out to fix our Google problem
but at the same time, we resolved to think bigger and longer term and
use this opportunity to create a better user experience, regardless of
what Google was looking for.
So now you can judge the results for yourself. We have spent the last
12 months as a team of 25+ professionals reinventing Viewpoints. From
March to June we removed 40% of the ads across the site. We improved the
speed of the site by 3x. We moderated out 80,000+ reviews that did not
meet minimum quality standards. Unfortunately these changes had only a
nominal impact on traffic. So we decided it was time for a more radical
approach.
Time to make serious long-term changes
After making the changes listed above and 90 days after Google’s
Panda update, our team decided to devote six months to a total overhaul
of the Viewpoints.com user experience. This was not just a visual
redesign but a soup-to-nuts, top-to-bottom overhaul. We ended up making
30 major changes to the user experience. This entire effort was
basically a bet the company decision. It had been four years since we
first launched and the reality is that the world had changed. It was
time to question even some of the most fundamental assumptions.
Content Quality – addressing the perception of “thin” content
In addition to eliminating 80,000 reviews that did not meet our new
quality standards we also decided to eliminate stand alone review pages
for all but the longest reviews. This one decision removed 600,000 pages
from the site. We also decided to treat very short reviews differently.
A new minimum threshold was established for when a review would become
publicly accessible. If you want to review a product and say “It’s
awesome!” that’s fine, we just don’t think your two word review helps
other consumers enough to warrant publication. We also made the tough
decision to exit more than 300 review categories that had more than
90,000 reviews. We decided strategically to focus on product reviews and
retire hundreds of non product review categories such as hotels,
restaurants and movies. All of these decisions to improve content
quality together eliminated 20% of all reviews and completely eliminated
short review pages in favor of very comprehensive product pages.
We don’t know if Google will notice, but we do feel that we have addressed the issue of “thin” content the best that we can.
Site Credibility
In addition to eliminating “thin content” we also focused on the
overall credibility of a site. Google suggested that site owners need to
put themselves in the shoes of users and ask the question “Would I
trust this site with a health issue or my credit card?”
For Viewpoints, this meant cleaning up the content as outlined above
as a first step, but it was also time for a redesign that was cleaner,
simpler and better conveyed the credibility, quality and overall
helpfulness of the site. In addition to eliminating 40% of the ads on
the site, we also stripped out 15+ features that were clouding the core
value proposition of consumer reviews and product rankings. For example,
we made the decision to stop giving scores to products that did not
have enough reviews. And we made it clear when members had connected
their account to Facebook to demonstrate an extra layer of authenticity
of the reviewer. You can see the following screen shots for some
examples of the old design and the new.
OLD SEARCH RESULTS
NEW SEARCH RESULTS
OLD PRODUCT PAGE
NEW PRODUCT PAGE
Product Intelligence
So we have addressed content quality, site architecture and site
credibility. But were we adding enough value to distinguish ourselves in
a crowded market? Good question! While we firmly believe that getting
the basics right (quality, credibility, ease of use etc) is the key to a
great consumer reviews user experience, it became clear to us that
there was another important way we could distinguish the Viewpoints user
experience. We saw an opportunity to occupy the white space between
expert reviews that make clear buy recommendations and the mass of
consumer reviews which gave great consumer feedback but did not always
help give a clear and concise buy recommendation.
We call this “Product Intelligence – for the consumer by the
consumer“. We have spent a significant amount of time and resources
developing scoring and ranking algorithms to smartly rank products
against each other so that shoppers know what product to buy.
Diversification
As much as these changes were done to improve the user experience and
in turn improve our rankings with Google, we also explicitly wanted to
optimize mobile and social as two new channels that can be a new source
of growing traffic to help us build our audience. The changes we made in
these areas were very significant. The specific changes will be
detailed in a later post.
Conclusion
So, that is how Google’s Panda update changed our business. It drove
us to improve the quality of content, improve the credibility and trust
of our experience and invest in Product Intelligence as a distinct point
of difference in the market.
We don’t know how Google is going to respond to these changes but the
important thing to note is that every change we made improved the
experience for the user. So as disappointed as we were with the outcome
of Panda, we will admit that it forced us to think harder about our
business, about adding more value to the end user, and perhaps most
importantly, take our game to another level. Game on.
Viewpoints (www.viewpoints.com) is a consumer
reviews and product ranking website. We provide product intelligence
based on 800,000 reviews from more than a quarter of a million members.
Viewpoints taps into the power of product intelligence expressed by
consumers. Our nearly one million reviews written by over 250K
contributors are available to everyone, free of charge and without
registration. The Viewpoints team translates these unfiltered, authentic
end-user insights into meaningful product intelligence—scores,
rankings, and recommendations—that help consumers connect the...
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