Google rolled out its Panda update in the U.S. in March to improve the quality of their search engine results. Panda has now been allied for all English searches across the globe.
"Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does." (Google)
Google aims to improve the quality of search results by lowering the rankings of sites with:
This has had a serious impact on some UK websites with Pricedash.com and DiscountShoppingUK.co.uk reporting a drop in traffic in excess of 99% (Searchmetrics).
On the flip-side eBay.co.uk and TechCrunch.Com both report a 40% boost in traffic.
Firstly it's worth doing a link check (3WC Link Checker) to see if you've got any broken links. These may have come about if you've removed a page from your website and it's still linked to from some other content.
Not many of our customers have ads on their site or list their own voucher codes but it's worth making sure everything is up to date.
The "lack of original content" needs a bit more work especially on eCommerce websites. It's easy to drop in a manufacturer product description rather than write your own. However, it's becoming increasingly important that you add some value to that content. Perhaps you carry out your own product review or maybe you capture some customer comments that can be added to the description.
Mike and I attended the Kentico partner conference in London last week. It was great to see so many UK and Eire developers and Kentico fans in one room. Kentico CMS has really become mainstream now and that bodes well for the future.
Much of the talk throughout the day was on the next version of Kentico CMS, version 6, and what the future holds for the product.
We can look forward to improved document management and libraries, better social networking and project management as well as support for WebDAV (essentially the ability to update documents held on-line with the MS Office Tools used to create them).
In version 6 we can look forward to some eCommerce updates including better handling for tax and shipping. We'll also see more flexibility in the checkout process which we at Silkmoth will really welcome.
Our old friend Wayne gave a presentation that compared Kentico against the myriad of open source CMS offerings. He rightly pointed out that support for open source products was scarce and where it did exist it was very expensive.
Not only that but many open source CMS features are built and provided by the community as plugins which has a significant impact on reliability. Your website is only as reliable as its weakest component.
Kentico are soon rolling out 24/7 support across the globe. Support that's very easy to access and always timely in its response.
We're already running some Kentico sites on virtual cloud-based servers. However, Kentico is now compatible with Windows Azure meaning that it can be relied up for massive global websites that need to be ultra-reliable and supremely scalable.
We'll look forward to giving it a try for some of our larger sites.
Some of our customers run eCommerce websites built on huge product databases. The Beaumanor website has in excess of 12,000 products and the various websites we run for National Tyres and Autocare are all driven from a central product repository that manages around 6,000 tyres, alloy wheels and exhausts.
Clearly these databases represent a significant investment for their owners. We've been helping them maximise their return on this investment by opening up the data to other retailers, distributors and membership organisations.
Beaumanor are a leading manufacturer and distributor of fluid fittings, plumbing parts to you an me! We've been running their e-commerce website for a couple of years now. Towards the end of last year we discussed how we could open up more sales channels by providing e-commerce sites to some of Beaumanor's distributors.
Generally speaking this market hasn't made too much headway online so when some distributors were offered a brand-new website they jumped at the chance. For some it's their first web presence.
Each website has the full range of Beaumanor products wired up to a shopping cart system that takes credit and debit card payments as well as offering PayPal as an alternative.
All prices are determined by the white-label owner allowing them to be flexible for their customers.
Like the main website all of the white-label sites are fully integrated with Beaumanor's back office Sage system meaning that all orders are promptly processed and that all prices and stock levels are centrally managed.
By the time we'd built our third website for National Tyres and Autocare we realised we had a problem with content. A lot of product descriptions and imagery were duplicated across sites, it was becoming a time-consuming issue managing it all.
To address that problem we've built a central product repository that is used to maintain all product descriptions. These descriptions are then incorporated into all National owned websites including n-TECH which specialises in performance parts, the National eBay Outlet and the pure white-label AA Tyres website.
The AA Tyres site is a great white-labelling story giving National access to the AA's 15 million members. AA members can present their membership number in the checkout for a 2.5% discount meaning they get a great deal on fully-fitted tyres.
Find out more about Silkmoth's latest developments.