Penguin update affected your site? Time to consider the alternatives

Ever since writing the 2 posts about why my sites are not ranking after April 25 and how to recover sites that disappeared from the SERPs, it is time to rethink how you have been getting your traffic. The drop you have experienced should serve as a fine warning that no real money making ventures should ever rely on one traffic source, especially one that has no real challengers.

By the way, this latest algorithm change has been termed the penguin update by most folks so I will call it as such from now onwards.

You see, ever since the Panda 2.6 update that caused my adsense earnings to drop from 5k to USD600, I have leaned that there are more than 1 search engine. My sites that got affected by Panda never recovered from Google but most have gotten their traffic back. How? By optimising for other search engines.

I know Google is the biggest search engine. However, Bing and Yahoo (despite the smaller share) still command more than 300 million users. That is still a very very large number. While every IM and his dog is going after Google, I learn to optimise for other search engines that are happy to give my sites the traffic that they need for my earnings to increase again.

How to optimise for Bing and Yahoo

Almost everyone I talked draws a blank face when I mentioned that they should learn how to do SEO for Bing, Yahoo and other search engines you never heard of. Everyone seems to forget that we are doing search engine optimisation, not google search optimisation. A good SEO will learn to get traffic from all search based engines and not just from Google.

So, how do you actually optimise for Bing and others? Well, it is the same process:

• Keyword research
• Content
• Promotion
• Feedback

The main difference lies in which data set you pay attention to. When you are optimising for Google, I bet you only used Google tools such as Google keyword tool, Google trends etc. Now, you need to know what keywords are being searched by users of Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. There are a couple of ways to do it but definitely not using Google's tool to estimate other search engines' keyword volume. That is just plain stupid.

While Bing and others doesn't have an equivalent of a keyword tool, they do offer things such as auto complete, related searches and trending topics (See Yahoo trending tool as an example). Learn to dig out sources of how people search on these other engines and you are on your way.

Feedback is a problem as google analytics and other Java script based analytics programme don't offer a complete view of your traffic sources. These make it hard for you to know which search engines are really sending you traffic and how you can create more content to draw similar traffic. Server logs are the best but you need to know how to retrieve the keywords from there and used it.

I have still lots to say about optimising for Bing and other search engines but the key takeaway here is that you should never reply on one traffic source alone. Learn to optimise for other search engines and you are already miles ahead of other SEOs and Internet marketeers.