@sweeppicker weird, to me your last sentence makes no sense, how can spun content = spammy links? It's like saying apples = showergel, they have no bearing on each other.
There are only so many hours in the day. I'd rather spend my time and money buying and building quality (lol) links with spun content. I cannot possibly do both, it is impossible. My spun content can get me to number 1, so why try harder? Granted your situation and niche may be different however I suspect there are other factors at play that are affecting your spun vs. unspun hypothesis, eg. sentence length, article length, relevancy of keywords, etc
Texts can be spun so that even a human can't tell the difference, it's all about quality, not if it is spun or not, imo. But true that most spuns are spammy. If you use one click spinning - yea prob a robot can detect it, if you do it quality (and don't overuse it of course) - it is not logical to be detected as spam, otherwise all news, product reviews and half the internet would be penalized.
If their robot is so smart on grammar, why don't they adopt it on G Translate? You put a nice text there.. and the translation seems like worst spun sh*t ever - same words have different meanings depending on the context and a robot can't understand it.
I think as Panda is content related, thin content, on-page over optimization, clear spam text are reasons to get into trouble. Make natural and readable content, produce useful information on site, and there should be no reasons to get into trouble. I don't want to say BH is dead, but you just need to be ready to start things over again after an update.
Good discussion guys. No problem with differences in opinion as there are a lot of veterans here. I've known @sweeppicker for a long time on other boards so I know he knows his stuff. I might have to disagree on the spun content part, but I would balance it by saying I haven't done straight up tests on spun content vs. non-spun content.
I know that I always use spun content and haven't had issues. But my spin on properties I care about are always human spun which is 1000% readable. So I find all of this debate interesting. I also know @hunar has a zillion sites, so he would know as well if spun content works.
If I had to take a stab at it, I would say there are other factors that may have crossed into the results that made it appear that spun content was the issue, but it really was other variables. Or just the random Google thing where some sites never get love for no apparent reason.
IMHO, Google's algo is getting better at detecting crappy spun content with Hummingbird and Panda. The way to avoid problems is to use quality spun content on tier 1. I also believe, with no proof whatsoever, that using high quality spun content on your other tiers is a very good idea, even if not for now, then future-proofing your links.
Google keeps getting smarter and evolving. We need to also. Don't build links based solely on what works today. Stay 2 steps ahead, and that starts with using better quality spun content.
ron. Thanks Ron. Everyone has different strategies and working theories and this is what's working best for me. Hopefully it can help out some people who have been penalized and give others some ideas on how they approach SEO.
I didn't expect everyone to agree with me but it's good to have a lively discussion.
I still think it's the relevancy of the words in the spun text. If you spin text that's supposed to be about Bing and it generates text on search engines, then that's not bad, but if it generates text on Chandler Bing off Friends obviously it's going to not rank as well. Or that's my theory.
Either way, I note that you said you have many sites sweeppicker; how can you possibly write unique stuff for 100+ sites? Or do you get others to do it? I don't like writing off things without trying them but unless I'm missing something it's just impossible to do on any sort of scale?
It's hard to draw conclusions before the dust settles i guess.
My sites are still bouncing like crazy, hard to see much of a pattern as to why some have improved and some have been decimated, with vast majority somewhere in between
spunko2010 . Tons of outsourcing over ten years. I've been building sites since 2004 so it's taken a while. Not all of them are doing well. Some have been spammed, some of have been recovered, and some are doing great.
@satans_apprentice brought up something very smart that none of us talk about, and that is Hummingbird. There is a logic to that algo where they look at the various words, LSI, etc. you have on a page, and if I am not mistaken, they also look at the other pages on your site to see if it "fits" with what Google would expect a legit site to have (if it were a legit authority site).
Maybe he can expand on this because he knows his stuff.
I'll wait for a few days for the dust to settle, delete my identified and verified and start scraping from scratch. From now on I'll take a week off every time any animal comes to stage
Google has been investing heavily in "Semantic Search", and Hummingbird is the first step in building truly intelligent search algorithms. Semantic Search, in short, is about deducing a user's intent when searching, and at the same time, understand what the content on a page is really about. Keyword density doesn't matter much any more, and it has gotten much easier to rank for multiple stems of a keyword on a single page. Ex: HR Outsourcing, Human Resources Outsourcing, Outsource HR, etc.
It also allows Google to determine bad content via bad grammar and unrelated terms on a page. This is what is coming, and some of it may be already here. The point is, that at some point in time, Google will be able to hammer badly spun content, and that it makes really good sense to use well spun, readable content as much as possible, even in lower tiers. For some niches, unfortunately, this isn't very practical. Even if Semantic Search doesn't penalize your money site, your lower tiers could be hurt.
+1 @Satans_apprentice. Absolute gold as always. Everything I've been reading of late pretty much agrees with what you've said. In fact they probably got it form you
I also have a suspicion that Pay Day Loan 2 is having more of impact not only on Pay Day Loan sites, but across a lot of Affiliate verticals, especially some of the more "competitive" ones that having been getting some press lately.
We all know the ones - some WH writes a Moz article about how he can't rank in a vert and it's cos everyone else is using SER *sob* *sob*
Another interesting thing I've noticed is pretty much all of my EMD are stronger - Is anyone else seeing that?
Hello everyone one ! The update is still going and some of my new sites took a dive I think this time its a little bit bigger update than it was before . Noticed lot of EMD coming out of dust and ranking well now . I suggest you not ot start new projects at the moment LOL
There is talk of Panda 4 now being part of the algo, so if you are doing the same things that caused your older sites to get whacked, then your new ones will also get whacked too.
If it is part of the algo then this can only be a positive...
Is Anyone else noticing that as these updates are occurring that nothing is moving much responding to Backlink seo? Usually after I do major back linking there is a lot of movement but right now, its like no movement at all.
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There are only so many hours in the day. I'd rather spend my time and money buying and building quality (lol) links with spun content. I cannot possibly do both, it is impossible. My spun content can get me to number 1, so why try harder? Granted your situation and niche may be different however I suspect there are other factors at play that are affecting your spun vs. unspun hypothesis, eg. sentence length, article length, relevancy of keywords, etc
http://searchengineland.com/official-google-payday-loan-algorithm-2-0-launched-targets-spammy-queries-192027
Either way, I note that you said you have many sites sweeppicker; how can you possibly write unique stuff for 100+ sites? Or do you get others to do it? I don't like writing off things without trying them but unless I'm missing something it's just impossible to do on any sort of scale?
My sites are still bouncing like crazy, hard to see much of a pattern as to why some have improved and some have been decimated, with vast majority somewhere in between
I also have a suspicion that Pay Day Loan 2 is having more of impact not only on Pay Day Loan sites, but across a lot of Affiliate verticals, especially some of the more "competitive" ones that having been getting some press lately.
We all know the ones - some WH writes a Moz article about how he can't rank in a vert and it's cos everyone else is using SER *sob* *sob*
Another interesting thing I've noticed is pretty much all of my EMD are stronger - Is anyone else seeing that?
If it is part of the algo then this can only be a positive...
Pay attention to punctuation, for the rest of the french will always be too complex for an algorithm
Not index and not link on T1 directly ... take time, as many will plunge the result will be the same as before with less work.