Bing recently published a blog post about the wonderful Google Panda and Penguin updates. They obviously love making fun of these things as evident by the quick poem by Senior Product Manager Duane Forrester
Animal kingdon hurting ROI?
Pandas and penguins, oh my!
Take control and tell the fauna “Bye Bye”
With these helpful suggestions to diversify!
These aren’t new things in the spat between the two search giants, but are a little more marketing sensitive if you ask me. For instance it isn’t as pointed as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s statement that Google is just copying Bing, or their hardcoded “Easter Egg” that takes a direct shot at by declaring “more evil than satan himself“.
The difference this time is that Forrester actually offers some great recommendations (And things that we have touched on before related to the Google Penguin Update). He (like us) tried to summarize some ways to address the changes, and actually talks about what good SEO people should be doing as well. To summarize his “Penguins & Pandas Poetry” blog:
- Reality Check – “Algorithms change. Rankings change. Competition happens”
- Forecasting Change – “As an SEO, your job is to dig through the details to find incremental gains. To help fix fundamental problems that block success. And not we’re not taking anything away from the importance of that focus, but you cannot forget to stick your head up and look around every now and then.
- Preventative Work – “all of those projects you know should be done, yet linger unfinished. It even includes things that are less a project and more and ethos for your organization.”
- Exercises in the Obvious – “Do you have a webmaster account activated at the engines? How’s your robots.txt file doing? Blocking the right stuff? Got clean sitemaps? Still have duplicate content issues? Have you integrated social sharing features across your site? Got the best practices of SEO covered (remember, we like SEO…) …and the list goes on.”
- As your portfolio manager tells you, diversify, diversify, diversify – “If your business suffers when an algo gets tweaked, insulate yourself from that. “
So perhaps you are asking now “Did you already tell us all of this?” Well, to pat my self on the back… OF COURSE I DID! But to be honest, some if it is to show that we aren’t making this up!