Google Panda Update Has Drastically Affected Website SEO Tactics and Search Rank
Thursday, 12 May 2011 05:53
Lets get straight to it, if you haven't heard about Google's Panda update, chances are you've had your head stuck under a rock far from web marketing and SEO. Panda, one of Google's biggest algorithm changes was launched in February 2011 with the specific goal of finding and weeding out "low quality" websites from the search results. According to Google's people, they want to provide users with a better search experience by providing search results that yield relevant, unique, and original content. Sites that farm, scrape, duplicate, are heavily adverting laced, or use heavy amounts of syndicated content from other sources are penalized with extremely low ranking in the serps.
Basically Google is saying it's tired of spammy copycat websites and webpages, so you better get your website in order or risk getting booted out the searches. Panda changed the playing field by forcing web sites like those that use autoblogging software to reconsider their bad SEO tactics. Sites that once littered users search results in the top 10 or 20 with irrelevant or unoriginal content suddenly disappeared from the serps (search engine results pages). Users now find better more relevant content produced by the original authors.
The wesites that should be concerned about the adverse affects of Panda continue to operate but aren't assisted with getting organic traffic from Google. Even legitimate sites have to reconsider creating their own content, since many source or use RSS feeds through content aggregators. Sites like article directories that rely on syndicating or duplicating single articles across countless websites also feel the negative effects of Panda. As they are seen as encouraging duplicate content and as such get penalized in search. Users now have to reconsider whether they want to keep using article directories.
But What About Your Business Website?
Most business websites generally have slightly better content than websites of hobby, so if you produced quality and original content relevant to your niche, you should have seen an improvement in rankings. On the other hand Panda might affect your online business presence if you sourced even a small amount of content from external web sources. Google search does not differentiate between legitimate sourced content or scraped/stolen content, it's all duplicate content the same. Many small business websites depend on high search rankings to help boost their profits from advertising revenue generated from web traffic. If your business website suddenly dropped in the search results, chances are your adsense or other traffic related pay-per-click programs will take a big hit in revenue.
What Can you Do to Prevent a Negative Panda Effect?
- Make sure your web content is original and not aggregated from other websites.
- Any information or videos you present must be informative and authoritative.
- Present a clear and simple navigation structure easy for Search engines and especially people to navigate.
- Make sure your content present value and relevance to your target audience
- Reduce the amount of ads on your website and make sure any remaining ads do not obstruct your main content in any way. Preferably place ads after or to the side of textual or visual content.
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