Panda 4.1 has rolled out, and websites that once ranked well are now ranking poorly, and websites that once ranked poorly are now ranking well. This is great for smaller businesses that haven’t had the ability to drop large amounts of money on marketing, online ads, etc. but have focused on content like quality blogging. Why is blogging so important?

You’ve heard the phrase, “Content is King.” Well now, more than ever, Google is focusing on relevant and engaging content. Prior algorithms had ranked blogs well if they had a certain percentage of keyword phrase density, if the blog contained a certain number of words, if keyword phrases were placed above the fold and in other strategic areas of the blog…but with Panda 4.1 we’re seeing less of a focus on that and more of a focus on (here comes that word again) quality. In other words, write blogs that people will want to read, and be clear about the focus of your blog (without stuffing keywords).

Now that we’re on the topic of content, let’s talk about duplicate content. So you’ve found a great article online that you want to share with your website visitors, social media followers, etc. but you want the traffic to come to your website, so you copy/paste the article to your blog. This won’t penalize your website ranking, but those pages probably won’t rank. The GoogleBot will crawl your duplicate content pages, but will probably drop them once it gets to the indexing phase. If you write the same blog (or similar blogs) but post on multiple sites of yours, Google will index all but will probably only show one in the search results (which makes sense if you think about it).

And last, but certainly not least, these new changes will allow websites to be crawled faster than ever. For this reason, new and fresh content is critical. If you can add new quality content to your website daily, that is ideal. However, if that’s not possible for one reason or another, at least make the commitment to post new content twice a week, whether this is done through blogging or something else. Stale websites aren’t generally great for ranking.

So right about now, you’re either nodding with engagement or nodding off from boredom. If that latter sounds like you (and probably will be for most people who aren’t SEO enthusiasts) then you might want to leave your SEO and blogging to the professionals. Fortunately, REVStaffing has bloggers with SEO knowledge who can write quality content for your website. To learn more about blogging and other services we offer, complete a Needs Analysis Survey.

Thanks for tuning in and happy blogging!