Google’s Panda Update

Today’s guest post is by Wendy Williams of Search Engine Optimist

Google’s recent Panda (a.k.a. “Farmer”) update is not only getting plenty of notice and discussion on SEO and web marketing sites, but also in general public media, such as The Atlantic, Slate, International Business Times, and Reuters. The change was announced on Google’s blog in a post by Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts.

When I talked with a new client last week about SEO for their site (for a business that is unrelated to anything web or SEO) I was asked what I thought of the Panda update and if it was impacting my SEO practices. It’s the first time I’ve had a client ask me about a specific Google algorithm update, but no surprise with all the media attention.

As of late March, Google is still rolling out this update. Site owners are still tracking changes in their page rankings to try to understand the Panda impact, with often inconsistent results.

It is clear that one of the biggest goals for Google’s algorithm update is to provide higher page rankings for quality, rather than quantity, content. The biggest sites hurt in the change seem to be the “content farms” such as Demand Media, Associated Content, Suite101, and Answers.com.  Wikipedia defines a “content farm” as “a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views.” In other words, spammy content designed to fool Google into better results.

Google Panda Update Tips for Your Site

While your site may not be a content farm, you could be adversely affected by this update if your site contains:

• Relatively high amounts of advertising on the site
• Duplicate content (either on your own site or other domains)
• Page headlines that don’t match their content

You can improve your site’s ranking with:

• Authoritative and useful content
• If your site is currently light on verbiage, more words per page may be an asset
• Content that provides value to your visitors, i.e. content that Chrome users don’t block from future search results (more on this below)
• Social network visibility via comments and sharing

For specifics, see:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Search Engine Optimization Guide

How Google Developed Panda

To prevent spammers from gaming the system, Google does not divulge what specific changes they’ve made to their algorithm. However, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts of Google discussed the Google algorithm with Stephen Levy of Wired in early March.

Singhal and Cutts confirmed that the focus of the Panda update is to lower search rankings for “shallow” content, content that as Cutts describes, was designed by creators whose content strategy is “What’s the bare minimum that I can do that’s not spam?”

Google formed their definition of low quality by asking outside testers to rate sites by answering questions such as:

• Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card?
• Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?
• Do you consider this site to be authoritative?
• Would it be okay if this was in a magazine?
• Does this site have excessive ads?

Google earlier launched the Chrome Site Blocker, which allows users to specify what sites they want blocked from their Google search result when using Chrome browsers. Google is not yet using blocked domains as a ranking factor, but “we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future.”

Related articles

Search Engine Land: Why Quality Is The Only Sustainable SEO Strategy

TechChunks: SEO Guide For Surviving Google Panda Update

SEO Desk: SEO Tips about Google’s Panda Algorithm Update

Wendy Williams handles web analytics, project management and client relations for Search Engine Optimist, a Seattle-based SEO and PPC marketing firm specializing in local lead generation for small and medium-sized businesses. She is Google Analytics-certified and enjoys combining web analytics and SEO to help small business owners be successful online. View their blog specializing in Seattle SEO, reputation management, and Pay-Per-Click for the small business owner.