Google Panda - will it affect your ranking?

Google Panda - what is it?

And will it affect your website's Google ranking?

Google have rolled out a new variation of their search engine - it is called Google Panda (or Google Farmer in some reports). This follows the 2009 changes (Google Caffeine) and 2010 (Google Instant). The new changes to the Google Algorithm have been only rolled out in USA to date but will impact on New Zealand websites soon. Initial reports from USA suggest that 10-15% of websites have seen their Google ranking fall dramatically. So if your website is reliant on organic Google search engine traffic, then you should read all this article.

So what do Google say?

From a Google spokesman:
Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don't want to see shallow or poorly- written content, content that has been copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful.
In addition, it's important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site's ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you've been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.
We've been reading this thread within the Googleplex and appreciate both the concrete feedback as well as the more general suggestions. This is an algorithmic change and it doesn't have any manual exceptions applied to it, but this feedback will be useful as we work on future iterations of the algorithm.
Wysz

In addition, our favourite Google engineer, Matt Coutts, had this to say about Google Panda:

International Roll Out

Matt confirmed that the algorithm change only affects U.S.A. at this point. But Coutts advised that Google Panda is being tested internationally and would be rolled out to additional countries “within weeks”. He said that the type of low quality content targeted by the changes are more prevalent in the United States than in other countries, so the impact won’t be as strong outside the U.S.
Continued Algorithm Changes
Matt said that many more changes are queued up for this year. He said the immediate focus is on making low quality content (content farms) less visible in search results. The corollary impact wii be to help original creators of content be more visible i.e. have a higher ranking. Google is working to help original content rank better. We have been preaching for years that original, quality content is still the most important factor in gaining a high Google ranking. Seems that Google not only agree but are going to penalise poor quality websites.
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites - sites which have poor quality information for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis, etc. The last thing Google wants is searchers to be unhappy with what they find. They might try another search engine if that happens.
Does this mean that SEO will have to continue to change? Not if your philosophy is to build value for users rather than to be trying trick the search engines. As Matt said, “What I said five years ago is still true: don’t chase algorithm, try to make sites users love.” Matt also said in a different article that rather than worrying about Search Engine Optimisation, website owners should just concentrate on content and conversion.

So what is this change all about?

The aims of Panda are noble: to remove poor quality sites from the top of Google’s results pages.
Few people other than the low-quality sites’ owners and their investors will have a problem with that.
But all major Google updates leave ‘collateral damage’ behind them: sites that just don’t match the target or deserve to be penalised. Google are aware of this and so have asked those with “a high quality site that has been negatively affected by this change” to let them know about it.

 

So what happened in USA when Google Panda was released?

Many websites were penalised by these algorithm changes at Google. Some saw their rankings disappear because of Google’s Panda Update, which was implemented to improve the quality of search results. Many so-called content farms were producing low-quality content and ranking highly in search results to the dismay of users and  critics. Other sites saw their rankings crash because of issues with Google’s linking policy. There has been havoc for quite a few sites, and many E-Commerce sites have lost rankings for their most important keywords.

Google say that their latest update was “designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites.” Google “looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites” and also stated, “…it’s important for webmasters to know that low-quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.” Google’s advice to webmasters is “…if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”
While Google initially said the update affected 12 percent of websites, Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the results of a poll conducted 5 days after the update and found it affected 40 percent of SEOs and webmasters negatively. In case you were one of the sites affected negatively, below are some options to pursue.
If you believe you were unjustly penalized despite the fact that you think your site has unique and quality content, you can go to your Google Webmaster Tools account and do the following.
• Investigate which pages lost significant rankings.
• Read through those pages carefully.
• It may be they were created a long time ago, and the content is not as good or as current as it should be.
• Look for misspellings, broken links or code, check for unique titles relevant to the page content, etc., ensuring that SEO Best Practices are met.
• Ask yourself if the information is current and still important to your audience.
• If the information on the pages in question is not unique and of value to your audience, do as Google suggests and move this content to a different domain.
• Also look at the adverts on the page. If there are too many adverts relative to the content, you can either remove some ads or move the page to a different domain.
• Google does not like adverts to be in the content area, so ensure the ads are placed correctly on the page.
• If you have more adverts than content, that could be a big problem.

What you can do about it

Can your business handle a 50% drop in organic (non-paid) visits from Google? That’s what might be coming your way courtesy of Google’s Panda algorithm update.

We can think of a number of factors that Google might be able to measure to define low quality, including:
• A high percentage of duplicate content. This might apply to a page, a site or both.
• A low amount of original content on a page or site.
• A high number 0f pages with a low amount of original content.
• A high amount of inappropriate adverts (they don’t match the search queries a page does well for) especially high on the page.
• Page content (and page title tag) not matching the search queries a page does well for.
• Unnatural language on a page including heavy-handed on-page SEO e.g. unnatural overuse of a word on a page - should never be more than 5-8% keyword density.
• High bounce rate on page or site.
• Low visit times on page or site.
• Low percentage of users returning to a site.
• Low clickthrough percentage from Google’s results pages (for page or site).
• Low or no quality inbound links to a page or site
• Low or no mentions or links to a page or site in social media and from other sites.

If any of these factors is relevant to Panda, it is unlikely that they will be so on their own.
Combinations of factors will be required to get ‘Panda points’ (and points do not mean prizes in this game). Panda points will be added up. Cross a threshold (Panda’s redline) and you are ‘blocked’.
‘Blocked’ is Matt Cutts’ word, used in that Wired interview: “Whenever we look at the most blocked sites, it did match our intuition and experience”. This suggests that …
… if a site gets defined as low quality then a penalty is applied (it is ‘blocked’).
Google have since said that “low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole.”

So before Google Panda hits our shores, give your website a once-over and eliminate any pages that might upset the grizzly Panda!