I recently read an article about a boy in Alabama turning 12 at 12:12pm on 12-12-12 and while Alabama wasn’t the 12^th state in the Union (North Carolina was) it is still a pretty cool moment in time.  Sure there was 11-11-11 11:11, which behind 10-10-10 10:10 is the nerdiest moment in time since January 1, 2001 at 1:01 but today is December 12, 2012 and we should all appreciate this date since there won’t be another numerical date for almost a millenium – January 1, 3001 or 1-1-1.

 As you can see we could do this all day but instead lets look at all of the interesting facts about the number 12 strictly for nerds.

 A few movies with 12 in them:

1. 12 Monkeys
2. A Dirty Dozen
3. 12
4. 12 Angry Men

 A group of twelve things is called a duodecad. “Bill had a duodecad of finger puppets so he couldn’t use them all at the same time.”

 12 of something is referred to as a dozen and 12 dozen is known as a gross. “Bill had a gross of framed cheetah pictures in his living room that covered every wall.”

 12 is a sublime number, which means it has a perfect number of divisors and the sum of its divisors is a perfect number. Awww, how cute.

 12 is the atomic number of magnesium in the periodic table and magnesium is in your daily multi-vitamins.

 The maxium on the Beaufort wind force scale, which is the maximum wind speed of a hurricane, is force 12

 The majority of self-help programs have 12 steps. “Bill was in a 12 step program for people addicted to cheetah photography…he was the only member of the group.”

 In English 12 is the largest number with just one syllable.

 There are 12 function keys on most PC keyboards.

The iPhone 5 was announced September 12, 2012.

 To bowl a perfect game you have to bowl 12 strikes.

 In history there have only been 12 people to walk on the moon.

 The Beatles released a total of 12 studio albums.

If you happen to be going to trivia tonight, like the majority of us here at the office are, feel free to use this as a study guide or if you are like our rival team the Get Smartypants and like to cheat you can bring this as a cheat sheet.

 Enjoy your 12-12-12!

Posted at 12:12pm

Recently we saw big positive SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) ranking changes for many of our clients. We are always working to improve our clients SEO and while those improvements help our clients rank higher in the search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. – this was such a substantial jump that it had to be something in addition to our on-going efforts. 

 We did a little digging and found a lot of other people having similar impacts, both negative and positive, to their rankings. It could only be one thing…another Google Panda refresh, update, upgrade or whatever you would like to call it. Well on Friday Google confirmed that it had refreshed its Panda Algorithm on November 21, 2012 and impacted about 0.8% of English queries to the point where a regular user might notice and to the point where a web design and marketing agency like us would really notice.

 Google Panda is a change to the search giant’s results ranking algorithm and was introduced in February of 2011. The goal of the change was to weed out the “low-quality sites” and reward sites with quality content that people found valuable with higher search rankings. For a full explanation of Google’s Panda Algorithm you can see our post here.

 The impact of Google Panda updates are not usually seen immediately on SERPs and it usually takes a few days for everything to be indexed and updated.  The jumps in rankings for our client’s sites fit into this time frame perfectly.

 We were happy to see that our efforts to make sure we were creating quality content and using the right SEO techniques, ahead of the Panda update, made sure the sites we had been working on went up in rankings and not down like many other sites.

 An important part of SEO is being proactive and not reactive. It is a lot easier to do it right in the beginning than trying to play catch-up with Google or the other search engines. This recent update let us know we were doing it right.

Google’s latest and greatest algorithm change might sound like a cute little fluffy animal, but it is actually a beast that has affected millions of websites around the world. Many sites that have been affected by the change didn’t even know it until they saw their website traffic drop significantly.  Many ran to check Google and Bing and saw that they had dropped off the face of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), from page 1 to page 3 or lower.

So what is this sweet sounding algorithm looking for and how can you make sure your site isn’t affected by it?

Panda was introduced in February 2011 and was Google’s attempt to drop “low-quality sites” out of the top search results and replace them with higher-quality sites with valuable content.  Like every Google update the intention was to make sure people who were using the search engine were finding what they were looking for. Google did not want content farms or sites full of bogus links showing up higher than the majority of sites.

Google has made more than 20 Panda updates since the launch and with each one the algorithm improves. Google published a bulleted list of questions to ask when trying to determine if a site is high quality or not. Here are a few basic questions, out of the more than 20 that Google lists on its blog, that you should ask yourself when trying to determine if your site is high or low quality in Google’s eyes:

• Trustworthy: “Would you trust the information on this site?”
• Unique: “Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?”
• Quality: “How much quality control is done on content?”
• Editing: “Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?”

Google Panda affects the entire site and not just individual pages and that forces webmasters to do complete site audits to make sure that a few pages won’t drop the entire site.

Google continues to update and improve Panda and as long as your site produces high quality and unique content that your customers or visitors find valuable then you should be safe from the Panda.

While “content is king” and very important there are many factors that go into making sure your site ranks high in search results. IHS Website Solutions can help you optimize your site, which will increase traffic and make sure your customers are finding you. Better search results means more traffic, better leads, higher sales and overall better results. 

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about Panda, SEO, or any other issues with your website you would like to discuss.