Google Panda Algorthm
Most people think they are dead in the water after a hit to their overall traffic from the big bad Panda. However, what most companies don’t realize is, they can recover if they add a few steps to their daily activities.
These additional steps will improve the experience of their site’s visitors as well as their traffic and rank.What is the Google Panda Algorithm?
According to Wikipedia:
Google Panda is a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of ‘low-quality sites’ or ‘thin sites’ and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.
Panda is a collection of signals used for scoring/ranking a content page within your website looking for low-quality signals or thin content.
Example:
When a visitor is looking for information, especially if it has many layers within the topic, the visitor may want to dig deeper. Without this, the visitor will leave the page and repeat the search query to go somewhere else.
There are many ways you can track your website using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Both of these tools will give you nuggets of data you can use in fine-tuning important areas within your site.
Note: We’ll go into more details about this in a Past SEMrush webinar.
At Search Engine Land, they have archived a library of articles focused around this particular update. This algorithm really gained steam in February 2011 with an extremely strange name: the Farmer Update. It focused on content farms. The update is known best as the Google Panda Algorithm Update.
What Have We Learned From This Algorithm Update?
Looking back to the beginning of Google in 1998 (when they first registered www.google.com), they have focused on delivering the best search results to the end user.
Google had their fair share of challenges with webmaster's trying to take advantages of flaws in its algorithm; however, this all changed big time in 2011 into what we see today in news reports from all over the world.
Before 2011, it was fairly easy to rank for a keyword in any industry. However, in the new era of machine learning along with the Google Knowledge Graph and other developments in mobile and social media, times have changed. The playground is changing yet again and will continue to change and evolve along with technology.
Panda Updates: What are They, and Why are They Important for Your Company?
Updates are just as they sound; Google is constantly fine-tuning how they deliver results to the searcher.
Test These Tasks on Your Site
I like to put myself in the shoes of the visitor looking for a product or service that I am marketing. As such, I follow these steps:
- First impression is key. When reviewing a website, can I understand their product or service as described on the website? Is it easy for the visitor to get what they need to move to the next stage in the sales cycle?
- Next, I will call the main phone number and talk with the front desk person trying to better understand the product or service
- Then, I ask to speak to a sales person and continue the learning cycle