Google Panda Overview

What is Google Panda

As you might have noticed there has been a lot of talking about Google Panda and what it actually means for your online business. There are many internet marketers who were hit by it and thousands of websites were either de-indexed or significantly dropped in ranking. We know a lot of people who are struggling today as their websites dropped from the top of SERP to the very bottom of it. Their income was swiped overnight.

So, what is that magic ‘Panda’ word means for us. As we all know, Google is really trying to make search results cleaner and more useful for people who use their search engine. We do not really like this monopoly of Google and hoping that other search engines will come into play soon. But this is a different story. Let’s get back to Google Panda algorithm. The purpose of it is to get rid of low quality websites, which do not bring any benefits to their readers. From here, we have one of the main rules of it, which is content.

Website Content Rules

Everybody heard that content is the King in the Internet marketing world. But it actually was not really true until new algorithm updates. People still were able to earn money with low quality contend and syndicated websites with tons of duplicate content. And now that time has gone. Most of the websites, which were penalized, are those with duplicated or low quality content. Today, to rank high, you need to have a lot of great content, which is really beneficial for readers of the site. Also, content should not be too short and designed only for SEO purpose. Users should stay on your website and you cannot achieve this without quality content, but we will discuss it later in this article. For now, let’s summarize some main requirements for the content of your website:

1. Content should be unique. Avoid content duplication.
2. There should be enough content in each article as days of 300-500 words articles are over
3. Content should be informative and useful for readers.
4. There should be a lot of content on your website. This is not the main rule, but it definitely helps.
5. Unnatural usage of keywords. This is not really new requirement, but we wanted to mention it here again as it became more important for us too.

User Interaction

We mentioned before that user experience is very important for new Google Panda. This means that users should be willing to visit your websites, to stay on it and to come back. Also, it is very important, how many users are clicking on your website in search engine results. Today, all these things are more important than ever before. Let’s briefly discuss these requirements separately.

1. There should be low bounce rate. This means, that once on your site, users should stay there. If they do, than, this will show to the search engine that this site is important for the user. This brings us back to the high quality content.
2.   Returning visitors are monitored. All visitors to your website are carefully monitored and if a lot of visitors come back to your site, this shows Google that it is really useful for them, hence it should bring you higher in the results. To get your visitors come back, brings us back to the content. You should update your website regularly and with top notch content, which visitors will want to read.
3. Click through rate. This parameter is very important for Google and it actually has been for a while. This means a percentage of people clicking on your website in the search results. It does not make sense for any search engine to show your website if no one is clicking on it. So, you should be very specific with the title and description of your web pages.

Domain Requirements

We all know that some time ago it was quite important to have a keyword in your domain name. It has not really been the case for quite some time now. The only benefit of having a keyword in your domain name would be when somebody is linking to your website, using your domain name. We would not recommend to bet on that and not to spend a lot of time, searching for domains with a particular keyword in it.

Another change, which has been recently introduced, is that now whole domains are being evaluated, but not single web pages. With the Panda changes, an entire domain is evaluated rather than each page of it. To get higher ranking in Google your domain should have a very high authority, which is calculated on a summarized authority of each page of the website. This means that each page is important and deserves to be promoted the same way as you promote your home page. Also, this means that all your pages should have good value for your visitors. Again, think about content of each and every page. If you have just a couple of webpages, which bring great value to your website and other pages, which do not have any value at all, those low quality pages will drug your site down.

Testing SEO Strategies

Everybody knows that testing and especially split testing is very important in the search engine optimization process. Unfortunately, we have quite bad news here as with Panda update, it is more difficult to do this. We are not saying it is impossible. It just became a little bit harder as it cannot be done as quickly as before. The reason behind it is that, because of the complexity of new algorithms, it takes much longer for Google to analyze and rate our websites. As of now new updates do not happen more often than once every 30 days. So, if you have made a change, you should wait at least one month to see some results. And as the logic of the search engine becoming more complex, we believe that this process will be taking longer in the future.

Summary

To summarize our short overview of the Google Panda update we would recommend you to spend more of your time on writing quality content and updating your website regularly.

One area, which we have not covered in our overview, is link building.

This is another very important part of search engine optimization. Google wants to see backlinks to grow naturally, but you can still use legit methods like article marketing. You can even purchase backlinks if you do it in a right way. If you decide to do this, we would recommend you to get either site-wide backlinks or content text links. It does not meant that usual text links are not important, as they are, but site-wide and especially content backlinks bring more value. If you take a look in our inventory, you can even find site-wide content backlinks, which means you will have a text link to your website surrounded by relevant text on each and every page of a website you select. Please remember that you should try to get backlinks from high authority pages as low quality links can harm your website.

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