Bing: How to survive Google's Panda and Penguin updates

[djbaxter]

Penguins & Pandas Poetry
Duane Forrester, Bing Webmaster Blog May 18, 2012

Algorithms change. Rankings change. Competition happens. The fact is, you need to be prepared. So, when your single biggest source of traffic sudden loses steam, what do you do? If your plan was to make sure your content ranked well across all the major engines, then your plan of action would already be in effect, protecting you from the loss in one area. True, its not an offset that matches what could potentially be lost at the same level, but the option is losing everything and having nothing suddenly.


And while you're thinking of diversification as a way to protect your website from future changes, ask yourself this: is search, all up, my primary traffic source? What other sources of traffic should you be cultivating? Social traffic, direct traffic, affiliate driven traffic? Search will, for the foreseeable future, continue to be the major driver of traffic to most websites, but this doesn't mean you shouldn't be looking to other avenues as a way to augment your traffic from search...and potentially protect yourself should a future change upset the balance of rankings in some way.

If your business suffers when an algo gets tweaked, insulate yourself from that. Any first year marketing student will tell you this: having all your business in one basket is bad news. You need to diversify. When things are ticking along well in one area, start ramping up efforts in another channel. Over time you?ll see metrics increase from all inbound channels, insulating your from dips and spikes in other channels and allowing you time to react, adjust and test ways to rebound.

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[dinariccs]

I've heard quite a few instances where these updates have absolutely demolished businesses, but not any personal accounts. How is everyone coping?

 

[CarolWales]

The latest update focuses on over optimization of keywords. It is not necessary that over optimization will improve the search engine rank of the keywords. The most crucial thing is to focus on the keyword variations for getting good rankings. Moreover it is also essential to avoid keyword stuffing when it comes to web pages.

 

[sparish75]

Being relatively new to IM, I was quiet pleased as I built my hits to 1,800 per day. Then over night it stopped. Just a 5 or 6 hits per day. For me the discouraging thing is not really knowing which aspect of my marketing plan was the cause.
My content was original but was it considered poor quality?
My backlinks were varied, but maybe not varied enough.
I used paid services to provide some backlinks, maybe this was the cause.
And on it goes.
I want to keep IM but I don't want to repeat past mistakes!

 

[JamesQ]

It's a good point that it is beneficial to vary your keywords. It is paramount that your inbound links do no come across as artificial or spammy but genuine and valuable.