Understanding and surviving the Google Panda update

As part of their never-ending mission to perfect online search, Google recently released the Panda update. This is something that SEO experts and website owners definitely need to take note of, as when it was rolled out in the US in March 2011, it had an impact on around 12% of searches.

So, what exactly is the Panda update? It is essentially an algorithm update designed to improve web users’ search experiences. We’ve all been in a position where we’ve searched for a piece of information, only for the results that come up to be disappointing. Often, we end up directed to sites that seem to exist purely to promote keywords, that have low quality content or that seem to have simply copied content from elsewhere.

It is these sorts of sites that Google is looking to target with the Panda update, so that good quality websites find it easier to do well in relevant search results, no matter how hard content farms or other low quality sites try to stay at the top of the list. On the whole, this update is a good thing for the vast majority of web users and websites alike. It means that good quality sites that take care with both their SEO and their content should find it easier to place highly in search results. It also means that web users will benefit from better quality results when they enter search terms, and that sites with shallow content will be weeded out.

There are, though, a couple of little issues that arise from the Panda update. One is that websites are constantly evolving and so pages can sometimes seem as though they have shallow or low quality content, when in actual fact they simply aren’t finished yet. For instance, if you set up a discussion post on a website, that page is going to appear to be relatively empty until people actually start posting comments on it. This makes the page read as being low quality to the Google bots and it could end up affecting the standing of the entire website. One option here is to block pages until they have sufficient content that they’ll be able to pass Google’s tests.

Another part of the solution is to simply pay more attention to the overall quality of content on websites. Of course, SEO is massively important and targeting keywords can make a big difference to your Google results, but now this alone isn’t enough. Google and the other search engines closely guard the algorithms they use to work out how highly websites rank, but it is common sense that those sites with well thought-out content that adds value to a user’s experience do better than sites that simply focus on keyword placement. One indicator here is how well a page’s content reads. Ideally, it should flow naturally and the sentence structures should be good, as it can be all too obvious when a post is designed around shoehorning in a single keyword. A good thing to ask yourself here is: will web users find this useful and easy to understand? If you can honestly answer ‘yes’, then you should be fine.

Something else that will help websites bolster their rankings in the wake of the Google Panda update is to keep their content fresh. Update regularly to keep the site active and more relevant as this is often an important factor in search rankings. If you have advertising on your site, then make sure this adds value to the other content that is there – and is relevant to the other content, if at all possible – rather than taking over from the focus of the page and reducing its worth.

There is strong evidence that Google is using site usability indicators such as clickthrough rate and bounce rate to judge thin content. This makes sense. if people dont like your landing page it might be because its not a good fit to what they actually searched for on Google. In theory if you website is written well, has informative useful content and is well explored once people get their Panda should be an issue for you. The volume of outcries from many people though suggest that it may not be quite that straightforward. Its worth noting that Panda has already gone through several updates and some sites are recovering.

Its worth looking at your page analytics, identifying possibly weak pages and trying to improve them so that they are more useful to your site visitors.