SEO Tips

Google Panda Acts as Quality Filter on Search Results

February 18, 2012 by administrator in SEO Tips with 0 Comments

Google Panda in Plain English

Panda acts as a quality filter on search results, using survey data to determine desireable and undesirable site characteristics.

Good copy sells and earns its own links. Panda provides a huge incentive to produce good content

Panda Timeline

Panda 1.0 (February 24, 2011)

Targeted content farm sites that contain thousand of low quality, user generated pages.

Panda 2.0 (April 11, 2011)

Expanded the initial rollout’s target range from soley US search queries to all English language results around the world.

This update marked the first time Google officially acknowledged using data on blocked sites to influence rankings.

This update affected only about 2% of all search queries.

Panda 2.1 (May 10th, 2011) / Panda 2.2 (June 16th, 2011)

Google made minor adjustments to tha Panda algorithm, both affected an even smaller nuymber of search queries than the 2.0 release.

Panda 2.2 was originally intednded to help fight the problem of scraper sites outranking original content, but it was not completely successful.

Panda 2.3 (July 26th, 2011)

A Google spokesperson stated that this ipdate incorporates a new signals that help differentiate between higher andloew quality sites. After this most recent update, some sites are now ranking higher.

Panda 2.4 (August 2011)

This update to the search algorith came with an emphasis on improving search results accross differant languages.

Panda 2.5 (September 30th, 2011)

The latest rollout of the algorithm brought several large sites further up in search results, including FoxNews.com and Android.com. SEP experts continue to express the importance of quality content to drive links.

Panda 3.1 (November 18, 2011)

This minor update has effected less than 1% of all searches.

January 30-Pack(January 5, 2012)

This pack of 30 tweaks includes Megasitelinks whuich can show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region. Image searches were also updated to search not only by relevancy but also the highest quality source. The spam detection algiorithm is also being applied to image search.

Search + Your World (January 10, 2012)

Google announces a shift in personalization where they are pushing Google+ social data and user profiles into SERPs. Social personalization can also be toggled on and off.

What Makes Your Site Vulnerable?

A low amount of original content on a site
Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site
Low visit times on a page or site.
A high % of duplicate content. This might apply to individual pages, to the entire site, or both.
High bounce rate on a page or site.
A high % of pages with low original content.
High % of boilerplate content (the same on every page)
A high amount of irrelevant adverts
page content and title tag not matching search
Unatural overuse of a word on a page.

New Link Building Rules

Build brand-name anchior text links
Use content-based link building
Aim for quality, not quantity
Use on-site linkbait to draw extra links

DONT

Avoid using the same anchor text for links
Don’t use article spinning services to build links
Avoid article marketing when link-building
Avoid links in a guest posts that aren’t relevant

Link Building Tactics That Still Work

Link Bait
High Quality, Relevant Directories
Sponsor Charities, Contests, Conferences
Becoming A Resource Or Building A Tool
E-mail Libnk Building

What to do if your site’s been hit

Find the pages that are hit worst
Locate the differences between thiose that have been hit and those that have not.
Test changing those factors on hit pages, but be aware that pages hit most may not be causing the penalty
Make a list of different pages on your site. eg. forum, quality article, low quality article, light category, qualtiy category, product, blog post etc. Put the list in a cokumn in a spreadsheet and built a table.
Add columns to the table for relevant factors, such as: “lots of ads, little content etc. Also include number of pages and % drop in Google US organic visits Fill in all the values.”
Examine how many pages within your site are low quality pages, and improve them.
If you are scraping or copyig other site’s content, replace it with quality original content or test removing some of those pages.
If you have a lot of page with dupe (of your own cory), weak or no content, improve them or remove them.
Edit “over-optimized pages”
Improve user experience and streamline your websites’s apperance and flow.
Offer users more whem they first enter a page with images, videos, and links to your best editorial content.
If possible, make your content’s language more accessible
Promote your content on a social media including Twitter and Facebook. Build brand awareness.
If you’re still sure your site is “Google clean” and worthy, let Google know about it. But don’t expect this to have much effect.