Google and search engines.
May saw the latest incarnation of Google’s Panda release. Designed to rid the search engines of poor quality content it’s hit the PR-web type services very hard indeed.
Google have, for some time, been moving away for what it calls “thin-quality” sites. This specifically catches aggregators and publishers out due to the very nature of these services.
It’s always felt a bit unfair that some sites such as PR-Web were able to charge £150 for a single article just because of their special status with Google. What makes my content on their site more valuable than on our company site?
Well, it seems the answer is changing. PR newswires will still have a place, maybe just not so dominating. In the meantime it’s probably worth holding fire on spending any newswires credits – it took just 3 months after the last big Panda update for the newswires to bounce back.
Summary: Focus on quality content on your site.
If your current web platform is a bit antiquated, or doesn’t support easy content management then maybe it’s time to move to a platform that does. We’d suggest WordPress, but I guess you’d expect that as we’re (disclaimer bit) a WordPress Agency and that’s all we do so we’re not impartial, not at all.
Here’s the original article with graphs and the like, more in depth but a bit techy and tl;dr if you start going through the comments.
