An SEO Tool To Help You With Panda
So in case you haven’t heard there was another Google Panda update last week. The Panda updates are all about “quality”. I’m using quotation marks here as quality is a subjective thing unless you’re an algorithm. As Sugarrae points out in her post this week , a lot of businesses were caught up this week in the update. Not that they were doing anything wrong just that Google saw their pages as low quality. One of the fastest ways I know of assessing potential quality issues with your site is to use the Google cache text only version tool. It will show you a web page as Google perceives it which isn’t necessarily the same as you see it.
Text Only Version For SEO
I’m on the Gold coast this week for the PeSA 2014 Internet Conference. I’m running a half day workshop on SEO, running a session on webmaster tools, a session on SEO 101 and speaking on an SEO panel. I’m talking to a lot of online retailers this week and for the most part they will all have similar issues because they are on large ecommerce platforms that have not been configured properly so Google understands them. As I show in the video this week, a lot can be quickly revealed with a look at the text version of the cache. Here’s how to do it.
1. Do a search for the page you want to check. If it’s your home page simply type in your brand and scroll to the result that is yours. I want to check the post we wrote on Opencart SEO so that is the search I have done.
Next click on the little triangle drop down and click “Cached”. It will take you to a version of the page that Google has in it’s cache. Note: This is not your live site, it’s what is in Google’s database.
Over the far right hand side you will see a link that says Text Only Version, click on that. You will then see your page as Google sees it.
It will be stripped of all its formatting and styles and images. What you are looking for is stuff that should not be there, like weird menus, content way down the bottom of the page, lots of large text that has no relevance to your keyword etc. Once you have that info you can then go about fixing it so you can get Google seeing your page as you want it to. Questions?
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
