What Google Panda Means to New Webmasters
If the phrase Google Panda doesn’t ring a bell with you, it’s time to do a little digging in the Internet to find out how it can impact on your work. After all, the success or failure of your website substantially rests on what Google does to call up the right websites given a particular keyword.
The Panda revolution
You’ve been a very conscientious webmaster so far, uploading quality content regularly, tending to your backlinks, maintaining all your social networking accounts and replying to the legitimate feedbacks on your site. In the pre-Panda world, all these activities are enough to convince Google to bump your website up a few notches in its page rankings.
However, a lot of significant changes happened when Google came up with a new algorithm that is supposed to weed out the bad sites from the good ones and direct readers only to the most relevant, useful and quality websites out there. With millions of web sites vying for Google’s attention, it’s no small wonder why Google eventually had to revamp their algorithm and change the way they refer users to certain websites.
Google launched its new algorithm only February this year, but a good number of websites have already been adversely affected in such a short span of time. The update was nicknamed “Farmer” by the online community because of the way it dropped the page rankings of certain websites that did not live up to Google’s quality standards.
These so-called content farms were the first to be hit by this new algorithm, but Google carried the revolution one step further by ensuring that can refer users to only the best quality website. In turn, this means that Google has to really look into the content of a website to see if it can satisfy the user.
Some of the parameters that Google uses to determine whether or not a website is good enough to be referred include:
* Does the website contain enough content to be useful?
* Is the content copied from other websites?
* Is the content useful and relevant?
* Is the content well-written?
For Google, the bottom line is the usefulness of the website to its readers. Now it doesn’t matter if you use a lot of relevant keywords over and over in your posts or if you have only unique content. So long as your website doesn’t hit all the marks in Google’s check list, you’ll stay at the bottom of the page ranks.
Whip your website into shape
Even if you consider your website a top-notch source of information that delivers only original, timely and relevant content, Google can still downgrade your site if it thinks that you lack one of the four items mentioned above.
At the end of the day, what you should do is to re-evaluate your website to find out if you’re really doing a good job and giving your visitors what they need. There are two ways you can do this—first, you can check out your content and see if you are hitting the mark with every post. Do you provide solutions to your visitor’s questions and problems? Do you give tips and techniques on how they can do certain things better? Do you provide accurate, reliable information that they can use anytime?
If there are certain pages on your website that do not really contribute anything to the overall quality of the site, perhaps it’s time for you to either revamp these pages or delete them altogether. Remember that Google tracks down and evaluates every single page in your website, and bad pages can bring down your general score.
Another component that you can look into to make sure that your website doesn’t get kicked to the bottom of the list is to maintain a nice balance between your posts and your ads. If there are too many ads cluttering up your pages, Google might think that it’s a low-quality site even if it is isn’t.
SEO tricks can only do so much, after all. What you should focus on instead is to make your website beneficial and truly useful to your visitors. This is the other evaluation point that you can use—assess the experience of users as they navigate your website. Does your website have a professional, user-friendly design? Is it easy to navigate back and forth across different pages? Are your site visitors happy with both your content and the way it is presented? These are all crucial things that you can look into to keep your website safe from the clutches of Panda.
Ally is part of the team that manages Australian Credit Cards, a free small business credit cards comparison service in Australia. Before joining ACC, she was a Media Planner with McCann Worldgroup Philippines, Inc., with award-winning executions, including the Levi’s 501 “Live Unbuttoned” global campaign.
Category: SEO
About the Author (Author Profile)
Shiva Chettri is the editor and owner of Netchunks, a premier blog about Webmaster and Blogging Tips. He intends to make the web a friendlier place by sharing stuffs and articles which will help other webmasters and bloggers to becomes successful. His other interests includes Web Designing, Wordpress and Music of almost every genre. Send +Shiva an email at admin@netchunks.comSubscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Excellent post , its really useful for the webmasters. According to me Google has given much importance to the content. The parameters you mentioned here is not only after the algorithm updates, I think Google is following those parameters much before. The first and important thing every webmaster should do is to make their website content unique, informative and easily understandable.
I welcome Google this step as only those should get fruit that have real understanding of work and they have done a lot on good on their sites. Spamming activities are discouraged.
That means a lot of new sites need to make sure they only have relevant quality content, and avoid duplicated content. Those older sites that are not quite up to Google’s standard have to make necessary changes to be on top.
Google Panda is an excellent update to Google’s algorithm to help devalue spammy websites, and websites who copy content from others. With this update, genuine websites will benefit the most! Good job, Google! Love you, Panda!
Jasmine recently posted..FatCow Web Hosting Special Deal for the Weekend
I think if you really want to have online business, things need to be done always right. Generally there is no point to use duplicate or scraped content as probably you won’t be able to sell anything or get any top 10 rankings.
Well, since the Panda update… this basically means we have to really pay attention to our website’s content. Make sure they are original and good quality!
Jessica recently posted..Website Creation Made Easy with HostGator SiteBuilder
Very informatics and useful to newbies about the phrase Google Panda as it is a new term nowadays scattered and heard in the cyber world. Thanks for update us with daily blogging needs.
GRE Test recently posted..GRE Verbal Test 2 Anwers
Google Panda has greatly affected the rankings of my sites and this article explains why. Thanks a lot for this informative article.
Hi my friend! I wish to say that this post is awesome, great written and come with approximately all important infos. I would like to peer more posts like this .
improve backinks free recently posted..1