Google's Panda and Penguin updates are great for bloggers, marketers and business

Google's Panda and Penguin updates mean more traffic for bloggers and quality content producers! In the meantime, SEOs are trying desperately to sidestep the Panda and Penguin updates, and recover their search engine rankings and organic search traffic.

Why? Because they aren't creating great, useful, funny, engaging, interesting and valuable content with only the recommended amount of "good practice" SEO.

Why? Because creating high quality content requires not only time, effort, creativity and skill, it also takes time, effort, creativity and skill to bring that content to a wider audience via social media, relationships with other bloggers and webmasters, and so on.

SEO over optimization (Webspam) is subversive

Search Engine Optimization is a bug that allows people to create poor quality content and have it appear high up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) by utilizing a host of "tricks".

Fundamentally this defeats the objectives of Google, who needs to be able to return the most relevant and highest quality web pages to browsers - if they want to remain the number one choice for finding information on the Internet.

Google tells you everything you need for SEO

Google webmasters publishes SEO guidelines for everyone to use, plain and simple. If your company is paying someone to do more than what it recommended by Google, the chances are you are paying them to have your blog or website penalized (maybe not today, but Google will eventually sniff you out).

Exchange SEO for quality content

It would serve your business interests to find someone who:

• Has proven writing skills
• has technical skills and knowledge (CMS, HTML, possibly CSS, PHP, etc)
• Knows how to implement "best practice" SEO
• Has knowledge or experience in your industry or niche
• Understands social media, and can leverage their knowledge of the Internet

and pay them to create and promote great content for you. It works.

"My organic search traffic has doubled approximately every quarter for the last 18 months!"

As Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates roll on, my "best practice SEO" approach, combined with useful and informative content around business online pays more and more dividends. "Viva Panda. Viva Penguin".

But I digress...

The SEO industry

For many years, SEOs have ducked, dodged, dipped, dived, and dodged the Google's SEO algorithm updates to make money by having their poor quality content outrank genuine, high quality content producers.

What amazes me is how much effort, insight, skill and hard work goes into avoiding writing great content. SEOs spend years honing their SEO skills in an attempt to avoid writing great content for them and their clients.

I hate to be the one who asks, but "wouldn't it be easier to simply apply all these resources to creating content that people want to watch, read, share, and enjoy?"

The flip side to SEO over-optimization

Still, SEOs who push the boundaries play an important role in keeping Google on its toes. Google's Panda and Penguin updates are evidence of the fact that they have to keep their search algorithm lean and mean, and this is driven by the need to close down SEO loopholes.

SEOs have made a lot of money in past years foisting poor quality, ad-ridden content on the public, via Google and the other search engines. Ultimately, they have been hard at work ensuring their own demise.

Don't get me wrong. Maximizing ROI (Return on Investment) for your content is hugely important. Without generating revenue from content, it's simply is not a sustainable business practice.

Revenue from ads, affiliates, conversions, eCommerce are all great. But this revenue has to stem from credibility, hard work, and value.

Ultimately quality content will outperform SEO

As Google get closer and closer to providing "the best search results", regardless of over or highly optimized SEO content and sites, bloggers, marketers, writers, and businesses that do work hard at creating useful content will start reaping the benefits.

The SEOs that have spent years and years forcing Google to continually improve its algorithms will ultimately drop in the SERPs, unless they change tack and start creating quality content.

In the meantime, your job is to make sure:

• Your business and blog content isn't guilty of SEO keyword stuffing
• You aren't inadvertently falling foul of SEO guidelines. For example, duplicating content - or using canonical URLs if duplication is unavoidable (important for Drupal sites in particular)
• You aren't paying for unnecessary, and potentially harmful, SEO over-optimization
• You are regularly creating high quality content
• Your content is targeted and relevant for your niche
• You are promoting content via social media
• You are making quality connections and following the right influencers in your niche

Talking of the right influencers...

People to follow when it comes to SEO

Do a search for "SEO" on Google. There's around a trillion results. The vast majority of which is complete garbage.

While you should always follow influencers that provide quality information on any topic of interest to you, the following people, blogs and resources definitely help to cut through the clutter and get to the heart of the matter with regards to SEO:

• Matt Cutts - head of the webspam team at Google
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Danny Sullivan - editor of SearchEngineLand.com
• SEOMoz
• Chris Crum
• SEMRush

Tell me about your experiences with SEO and the Google Panda and Penguin updates in the comments below, or join the discussion on Twitter, LinkedIn, or by interacting via my weekly newsletter.