Penguin/Panda SEO Interview with Eric Lanchares

Eric: The question I get the most, especially for Panda these days, and one of the biggest changes for Panda is in 2012, Google kind of turned up the notch. We know Panda’s all about site quality, and they turned up the notch on the actual code quality. One of the big improvements that I see websites do is they fixed all the code and they see an improvement in the rankings. Before, that didn’t really have that big of an impact, but now what I’ve been seeing is a lot is deprecated code. Things like if you were using FrontPage 2003 or FrontPage 2007 to code your website, now you’re most likely going to suffer a penalty these days, because FrontPage by itself uses the old type of code, things like /font, /center. These pieces of code are really commonly found throughout the web, but those are old and they’re outdated.

Ezra: Funky, out-dated code.

Eric:Yeah. Now Google’s trying to phase that out, and all the sites that typically have that also typically haven’t really been updated in the past 5, 10 years or so. It’s a big quality indicator. If you have any of those on your site, I urge you to go through them and remove them, fix them, update them, or do whatever you have to do but make sure you get rid of the deprecated code because that’s really one of the quality indicators that is brand new of 2012/2013.

Ezra: That tells Google that you’re keeping your site up-to-date and in line with the improvements that are coming, as far as how websites are coded, HTML 5, and all that kind of stuff.

Eric: Exactly. The more modern your website, obviously, usually the better. You could still have an HTML website; they’re not going after HTML, but they’re going after bad code inside HTML. That’s a big distinction as people would say. It’s not necessarily you don’t need a WordPress site, you don’t need a Drupal site, or anything specific, but your code, whatever you do use, needs to be of high quality and that’s going to make a big difference. If you’ve started losing rankings because you have old code, fix it and you’re going to see some improvements.

Ezra: Nice. Tthank you. Cool.

Eric: The other thing.

Ezra: There’s one more?

Eric: There’s one more.

Ezra: That was for Panda.

Eric: Yeah, exactly. Now we have a Penguin. Penguin is like an over-
optimization penalty.

Ezra: Page-specific, not site-wide.

Eric: A lot of people, their homepage was bombarded with links to the homepage to rank for one specific term. Then they see themselves losing rankings for that one specific term, and they don’t just lose a bit, they lose completely. One of the major things as Google’s counting now bad backlinks, they’re finding the bad backlinks and they’re penalizing you for it. One of them, it doesn’t necessarily go via page rank, but instead, sometimes it goes by the text on the page. Let’s say you have a profile: People that that used to do Angela’s Packets, Paul’s Packets, or whatever, they used to create hundreds of . . .

Ezra: Spammy profiles; buying bulk backlinks from crap places, basically.

Eric: Exactly. Those are among the ones you want to avoid. We’re going to talk more about that.

Ezra: We’ll talk more about it on the podcast. Basically what he’s saying is that where your links are coming from … If you’ve got links pointing to a website about barstools and it’s on a gambling website, Google knows that the site that the links are on is irrelevant, so it discounts those. We’ll go into all this kind of detail in the podcast. Just wanted to give you a quick teaser about it. Thanks for watching. Eric, thanks so much.

Eric: Thank you.

Ezra: We’ll do a little handshake. We’ll see you guys on the next one.

Eric: See you.