It would, admittedly, be difficult to regulate, the game changes all the time and Google throws things up which keep people guessing for months. Is it really too much to ask to have a body which at least screens potential members with a 50 question offline sit-down exam which covers the basic principles? Forty correct answers and you get your membership, less than forty then you don’t, is this really too much to ask?

Over the course of around twenty months, using a list of my greatest SERPs rankings as a half page resume, I took on numerous clients and did wonders for their businesses. As a result, they still contact me time and time again asking for help finding an active SEO. That’s easy, I know plenty of great optimizers, I pass on their contact details, and I kindly ask that the client let’s them know that I referred them. That brings me some good karma points and occasionally a random cash deposit into my Paypal account.

The problem comes when I refer them to my best contacts and they are simply far too overwhelmed with existing clients to take new ones on, that has happened a few times, I then get asked to try and urgently find them an SEO (or a PPC specialist) for their Q4 campaign or to rank something before Valentines Day. Not wanting to leave them in the lurch (and feeling a bit guilty that I don’t want to do it myself), I tell them to post an ad on a few websites and offer to peruse applications from freelancers. This is what happens:

• The ads get dozens of replies (the last one got 67)
• Almost all of them blatantly know very little about SEO
• One of them listed the PageRank of their websites and gave no examples of SERPs positions. For those who don’t know, PageRank is a completely pointless and useless SEO metric.
• People actually write real words boasting about ranking for terms which nobody (and I mean nobody) search for, and as a result nobody writes about. I would love to provide examples of these search terms but it would create enemies, I don’t want to create any more of those if I can help it.

This is what you should want to see in the application from an SEO:

• A short bulleted list of their best current greatest SERPs achievements (what they rank for right now, not what they ranked for in 2009)
• Several recent referees (with contact details)
• An indication of whether they intend to work remotely or on-site (either is fine, it’s the 21st century, but it’s nice to know).
• Their rates (unless you have specified how much you want to pay in your ad)

If you like their resume then you get in touch, at this stage you discuss what your requirements are. For an established online business this could be as simply as wanting to rank x page at #1 before x time, and y page on the front page before y time. In this case you now want to know:

• That they are confident of reaching the target within the specified timeframe.
• Whether they agree to your budget (I won’t employ an SEO who provides an ‘estimate’, I employ one who provides a fixed quote, especially when most of the work is off-site and sitewide SEO audits and on-page stuff is not required).
• Whether they will accept at least part of the payment as performance based (50% as weekly payments over the life of the contract, 50% on completion, that’s ideal).

SEO is essential for a business, whether you take that on in-house or outsource it, and it is definitely a skilled job, SEO isn’t easy in 2012. It is also tedious and boring. A great SEO will pay for himself/herself several times over, and several times over again. A bad SEO could potentially destroy your business. In fact, a bad SEO almost certainly will.

Does This Scare You?

It should. If you own a web property making you a fair bit of money then there is every chance that an idiotic black hat SEO will come and get you -50′d, either an algorithmic or manual penalty, and if that were to happen in November it would put many small online retailers out of business (or at least destroy their year).  The most important thing is that you obtain evidence of their SERPs achievements and happy clients, that should weed out most of the incompetents.

Harvesting Resumes

Unemployed people hate this strategy, but posting phantom job ads purely to harvest resumes is a fantastic idea. If I get fifty resumes to sift through and I take a shine to five, I will keep them on file. These resumes will always have a list of SERPs achievements on them, I don’t ever give those which don’t a second glance. What happens to those impressive results six months, nine months, or twelve months down the line? Still there at #1? Jumped from #2 to #1? Can you verify that the web property is still owned by Mr SEO? Or, can a referee confirm that he/she is still their SEO for that property? If so, that there is a good SEO.

A Few Great Freelance SEO’s

If you are a NASDAQ listed company then you are going to be employing major SEO firms. If you are a small business, or even a one man band, you are going to be shopping for a freelancer. Here are a few that I can recommend, they are often busy, if you need me to drop any other names for you then please just get in touch and I’ll ping you some URL’s. I did mention above that I help people with recruitment, if you can’t find an SEO from the below links then please note that I won’t do this for free unless you happen to be a former client of mine; I would happily peruse resumes for a fee though.

Oliver Whitham

Mark Knowles

Joshua Gallagher

Many people without a website, or indeed anybody who was lucky enough to be  a ‘net’ gainer from Panda, were quick to praise Google for their ‘war against content farms’, or for winning a ‘battle against spammy content’, anybody with their ear constantly on the ground knew that a lot of good content was punished (and still is being punished) and in many cases outranked by scraped or even spun content. One webmaster that I know set to work deleting 5000 pages of content that he considered to be lower quality or no longer relevant, equivalent to half of his site, only to be punished in the process – probably as a result of a loss of some of his oldest and most mature backlinks. 

It soon become apparent that heavily competitive commerce related terms were becoming more and more difficult to rank for, with great content outranked by the likes of Amazon in #1, #2, and #3 in the Google results. One term that I track had Amazon in the first five positions at one stage, that’s bad news for any small independent retailer and any affiliate marketer, they had a hard enough time as it was trying to find the time and capital resources necessary to compete with the big boys.

There have been a few positives however, and one is that exact match domains appear pretty much untouched, if anybody should know it is me – I am primarily an affiliate marketer and the large number of micro-sites on my own EMD’s is precisely the reason that I no longer have the time to offer my SEO services to other webmasters. Exact match domains are in no way immune to Panda of course, the content is just as susceptible to the algorithm as it would be placed on any other domain, the point is that Google has not appeared to have reduced the weight of Exact match domains in 2011 – despite this change long being the most feared in the world of affiliate marketers.

My own exact match domains are ranking as well as ever, if not better, and in most cases it takes me little more than a month to outrank Amazon for moderately competitive search terms, I have been particularly successful with domains which use three keywords e.g. bestredwidgets.com. That is not to say that the change won’t come however, one day it will:

It will be interesting to see how Google approach this of course, such a change could potentially leave  a trail of destruction much greater than that seen from Panda. If exact match domains lose too much power it won’t only effect affiliate marketers, and in reality nobody cares about the affiliate marketers, it will also effect small offline businesses who use common sense domains such as sanjosegardeningservices.com in order to attract highly relevant converting customers. We also have the ask precisely what an EMD is, when a domain becomes an EMD, and what real benefit it will have to the users, the likelihood is that it will benefit nobody but the likes of Amazon.com and eBay.com again, who use ‘branded’ domains.

We do know that Google currently has unused technology to somehow seperate commercial and non-commercial domains, they have had it patented since 2003. The real losers however will be the major domain resellers, if exact match domains lose their power then all but the most brandable of domains lose their value, there will be no need for the likes of Sedo whilst major domain registrars such as GoDaddy.com would need to scale back their operations significantly, no more domain auctions, no more commissions from premium domain sales. If anybody can rank easily in any niche with the meaningless domain www.4kfmdnfdnngd. com, then the resale market for two or three word keyword domains will vanish.

It does scare many people, it probably should, but right now exact match domains can offer the means to easy money. Just don’t pay too much for them, they may become worthless one day.

One of those unanswerable questions is…. What is the best permalink structure for WordPress? It is one that cannot be given a conclusive answer, any answer will only convey somebodies ideals, and often those ideals will be based upon aesthetics rather than any real SEO value. The existence of your primary keywords in your URL possibly helps you to rank for your chosen phrase, but the impact will no doubt be minimal. Some optimizers will suggest that you have numbers in your post URLs and not in your page URLs so that the major search engines can distinguish between your posts and your pages, personally I consider this to be complete rubbish. If you have a problem with Google ranking your pages above your posts, and you don’t consider your pages to be of any importance, then the solution is to simply noindex the unimportant content using any one of the numerous WordPress noindex plugins – the can be found in the WordPress plugin directory with relative ease.

Perhaps the only thing that people have reached a general consensus on is that you do need to change your URL structure from the default WordPress setting which uses nothing other than a post number. There is a pretty much endless list of formats that you can choose as an alternative, but the most popular ones are perhaps those that show a post date like this:

Or the use of the post category (or categories in the case of a hierarchy) followed by the post title, which is the structure that I tend to use, like this:

Alternatively, as touched upon above, you can simply end it with the post title like this:

Some optimizers believe that using a category before the post title helps a little with Google trust, particularly if your category pages themselves gain authority, but again this is all speculation. I have had thinks rank well using any one of numerous permalink structures, and I’m certainly not the only person around who doesn’t consider permalink structure to be of great importance, your choice of keywords in your post titles and the appropriate use of H1, H2, and H3 tags is infinitely more important. Feel free to disagree in the comments box though!

Many of these sites were brand new and set up as a reaction to market change, primarily by people hoping to benefit from the shoals of disillusioned contributors looking for somewhere new to write their sales pages or let of steam. The concept of small one-man WordPress based revenue sharing sites wasn’t in any way new however, in fact one of my very close contacts was busy building and launching one almost a year before Panda struck. That contact is Oliver Whitham, an Internet Marketing consultant, who added the invitation only article directory ThisIsFreelance.com to his stable of web properties at some stage in 2010.

I’m slightly jealous of Oli, mainly because he is a fellow Englishman who fluked an American passport by virtue of his marriage, but also because he seems to find interesting clients who pay him money to sit around chatting to people all day. This is what he had to say….

To start us off can you tell everybody what ThisIsFreelance.com is and perhaps what the vision was?

This is Freelance is a site that has evolved rapidly over the last year.  Initially it was intended to be a spam free backlinks site for other writers, focusing on quality content.  It quickly turned in to a great place to earn a few extra dollars, and in the interests of beating Panda it will soon be the starting point for writers looking to write on niche sites. In the future I want to keep This is Freelance as a great place to build backlinks and test out new writers for my other revenue sharing sites which occupy specific niches.

You seemed to almost envisage Google Panda by implementing some pretty stringent quality controls upon launch, this has ensured that the quality of content remains pretty high in relation to other article directories, did you sense that something big was going to happen or did this just fit in with your general ethos?

It was more to do with my general ethos. I have always held that original quality content is a part of SEO. Though I did not forsee just how quickly Google would crack down on poor quality content, I had expected a more gradual focus on quality as Google’s algorithms picked up on an increasing number of quality ‘tells’.

Have you made much money? I know that I haven’t with Excerptz.com (a similar site), but the doors are a lot more open to just about anybody on there, how much content do you think you need to make it work?

The earnings on This is Freelance have not been huge. For the most part I think it is because a lot of writers use it for its original intended purpose, a source for backlinks.  I am hoping to see earnings increase as the site ages, simply because when writers see a small income from their work, they are more likely to come back and write some articles designed to generate those clicks and sales.

Where do you go from here? I know that you are currently completely custom building a new WordPress based site right now, which should be with us in a few months, but do you try and build the brand or do you keep it super small?

I am hoping to make things big, but manageable.  By focusing on quality content and stringent applications I will be able to create an umbrella of sites which will become, if all goes to plan, high quality safe havens for writers looking for backlinks in a specific niche.

The custom built theme is taking longer than anticipated, mainly because I am not just putting in what I need the site to do, but I am also taking out the things that the site does not need to do.  My hope is for it to create a quick, streamlined environment for my writers.

Do you have any tips for others who want to pursue this business model? I know that mine would probably be “don’t bother”, but multi-author sites do appear to be a viable method of building up site authority in a short space of time, as opposed to say a single author blog which is going to struggle to build up organic backlinks.

I think if you are new to the game it may be too late, there is simply too much competition out there for multi-author sites now.  If however you have something unique, an idea that has not already been done, or you simply want to get a few more regular writers for an already established site, multi-author may be something worth investigating.

Do you think that there is a future for major open platforms such as Hubpages and Squidoo, or does Google really have it in for them? The return of traffic to one or two of those platforms may suggest a relaxing of the algorithm, but I myself can envisage a bit of calm before another major storm, or do you think we will see more sites move towards the Hubpages sub domain model?

I think there is a future with these platforms, but I don’t think it is the same prosperous future I would have predicted before Panda hit. I think the sites that are slowly going to fold are going to be the sites which had absolutely no quality controls or moderation.

The sub-domain model was something I, and several other prominent ex-hubbers mentioned before Hubpages went on an ill-advised unpublishing spree. (Something that I escaped, but felt the repercussions of, as thousands of hubs were removed for the rankings for very minor reasons). Although the sub-domain switch seems to have worked temporarily, I don’t think it addresses what Google really look for, which is specialization.  I believe that sub-domains based on categories would have been much more effective, especially when paired with the valid removal of duplicate and badly spun content.

Talking about sub-domains, any reason why smaller sites should use these? It’s a big undertaking, really not an easy job, but it can perhaps be assumed that smaller sites should manage a firmer grasp on moderation?

There are several reasons a smaller site may like to use sub-domains. Starting with the fact that if your site covers several topics, you may want to split them up.  The big problem with sub-domains is that each sub-domain is in essence a separate website, which means backlinking needs to be done to a multiple of the sub-domains you create.

That’s actually all I have for you, I know that your eternally busy. Actually, I do have one more question, does this exposure and the nice backlink give me right to crash on your sofa in Austin if I ever get round to visiting Elvis in Memphis?

Yes, you should probably visit Austin before Memphis though, as my wife went on a ladies vacation down there, and could point you in the direction of a man who gives tours in a Cadillac, an ex pimp with a great bar, and other tit bits of information!

Awesome I’m going to call that favor in one day!

If you want to stalk Oli or generally leech off of his SEO knowledge you can find him on the website SEOchemist.com, one day I will convince him that I know enough about SEO myself to guest blog. If you have any questions for Oli then please post them on SEOchemist, there is no guarantee that he will read them on here!

Three months after Panda 2.0, which was released on February 23rd, I searched high and low for examples of websites which had made a full recovery from the set back. Things looked gloomy at the time, my search was fruitless. There were a few medium to large sized businesses reporting a partial recovery, but these provided little by way of conclusive evidence and those partial gains could well have been attributed to on-page factors which were holding those websites back even pre-panda.

The sites which took the most pain were multi-user sites, otherwise referred to as ’content farms’, their ilk include well known brands such as Hubpages, Squidoo, and About.com. The reasons were soon made pretty clear, Matt Cutt’s had acknowledged publicly not long after Panda that even a small proportion of low quality content could bring down an entire domain name, examples of poor quality content may include duplicate content, spun content, really short content, and articles written by somebody who uses English as very much a secondary language. The initial reaction by almost all of the worst affected ‘content farms’ – I prefer to call them open publishing platforms, seeing as I hold portfolios on these sites myself for their once superior ranking abilities and would prefer not to tarnish myself with the slightly self-depreciating label of ‘content farmer’ – was to begin the process of deleting large quantities of lower quality content.

That step seemed pretty logical at the time, algorithms often use ratios, it is well known that Google themselves use ratios to judge various indicators, and I think most SEO guys would have expected a reduction in the proportion of obvious low quality content to reduce the severity of penalties in some sort of correlation. In hindsight, and in light of various new pieces of information and the inevitable speculation, in turns out that Google had done things very differently this time around. They had taken a hardline approach, a zero-tolerance approach if you like, to quality standards.

So where do you go from there? It was inevitable that somebody, somewhere, would come to be known as the man who cracked the Panda algorithm. It was a pleasant surprise, a welcome one in fact, when it became clear recently that the person who can lay claim to that honour is somebody that I have had the pleasure to meet briefly in San Francisco. Step forward the CEO of Hubpages Paul Edmondson who initially went public with his initial findings to the Wall Street Journal in mid-July.

Edmondson claimed to have stumbled across the possible Panda cure after noticing that Google had indexed some of his websites content under ww.hubpages.com rather than hubpages.com, and that the content indexed under the former was outperforming the correctly indexed content. After doing so he emailed Google (Isn’t that nice? When you reach the top 100 global sites you get a direct line to Google apparently! That’s what it takes to enter the online illuminati.) and asked whether his site should be split into sub domains. To cut a very long story short, they said yes, so he instructed his engineers to test run a test using a small selection of user accounts. Within days of that July announcement a large proportion of the site had been shifted to sub domains, with each user getting their own sub domain just like a blogger or tumblr blog.

I was initially highly sceptical, Quantcast figures showed a marginal increase, and some users reported an increase in traffic. Most of them reported a partial recovery rather than a full recovery. My first thoughts were that those sub domains would run through the next Panda update (which at the time was 2.3) and then be considered mini-content farms themselves. Traffic growth site-wide was relatively slow, and the change did not appear to have had the impact that Edmondson and his colleagues (I’ve met most of them too, got some t-shirts, nice lot) had hoped that it would have. To be frank, the whole thing was a bit of an anti-climax. This may be a good time to tell you that I am one of the major traffic guys at Hubpages, and therefore have a possible bias opinion yet also have a decent amount of insight. Alexa.com is telling everybody already, so what do I really have to lose:

My own traffic saw a decent increase, perhaps 30%, this still left me far short of my pre-panda traffic levels; in fact I was still 50% down. I didn’t expect this traffic to rise any further, I saw it as a dead cause. I was naturally delighted two days ago to see upward pointing arrows all over my statistics pages and in Google analytics, I’m not the only one either. The vast majority of users on the forum are reporting huge traffic gains, and Quantcast is showing these gains too. Here are the latest Quantcast stats, as of 1:31 GMT on 27th August 2011.….

That’s a fine upward sloping graph if I have ever seen one. At the bottom you will see that Quantcast is reporting 577k US unique for the 24 hour period preceeding. That is still a fair way off the record 874k, recorded just two days before Panda struck, but it is a lot higher than the miserable 264k that I spotted whilst monitoring progress before content was separated into sub domains. Who knows how high that graph will keep on travelling, but there is no denying that the recovery is in full swing. I’m not going to show you my own traffic graph, but it looks even better than that, in fact my own traffic has recovered entirely.

As a result of the decision to move each user account to their own sub domain it seems that content judged to be of a very poor standard is now unable to hold back better quality content. This in turn enables some user accounts to be penalized for Google, and others to be allowed to flourish. Many users are reporting poor traffic levels, whilst many others are reporting traffic which matches or even exceeds pre-Panda levels.

This switch also allows for further analysis of data, potentially enabling the Hubpages team to identify ranking factors which may be holding back user accounts; there are bound to be reasons why some accounts struggle and others don’t. The failure to employ basic SEO techniques will always be one of course, but putting those firmly aside it is also possible to gain a greater understanding of just how Panda changed the ball game. Edmondson himself recently published an article, Characteristics of Content That Drives Content, which summarises his early findings. After seeing the recovery for yourself, he looks to be somebody who is well worth listening to right now, I will be watching keenly as the story continues to unfold.