March 4, 2011
Why Google's Panda Algorithm Update Dropped Sites
Google's Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal have revealed some more about what is officially known as the Google Panda update, Google's latest algorithm update. There has been much speculation about why sites were dropped and others were promoted.
Make Google Trust Your Site
One key element is whether Google trusts your site. How does Google determine this?
It seems Google is using outside human raters, at least in part, as a form of quality assurance. Singhal said they asked raters questions like "Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?"
Cutts said other questions Google asked to establish trust include "Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?"
Some SEOs are interpreting this to mean sites overloaded with AdSense and others advertisements are now in Google's crosshairs.
Google has also previously mentioned that Google's Chrome site blocker extension could become a ranking signal. In rolling out the Panda update, Google said the spammy sites reported by Chrome users wasn't used, but it was used for comparative purposes. Google reported an 84 percent overlap with blocked and downgraded sites.
Some SEOs are speculating that Google may be looking at the ratio of above-the-fold content (word count) to advertising. Many of the sites punished by Google had more ads than useful content.
"Low Quality"
Singhal said the shallow content overload that had users complaining mostly came about due to their Caffeine update. But Google still is having trouble defining "low quality" - with Singhal saying Google still hasn't solved it.
Cutts said Google "came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. And you can really see mathematical reasons."
"Our classifier that we built this time does a very good job of finding low-quality sites," Singhal added. "It was more cautious with mixed-quality sites, because caution is important."
So big brands seem safe in Google's eyes -- potentially more bad news for the little guy on Google. Cutts also mentioned government sites ranking higher for medical searches.
Another hint if you want to figure out what not to do, according to Cutts: Look at Suite 101. Go there, look around, figure out what they're doing, and make sure you're doing the opposite.
Even though this hasn't solved the problem of low-quality content, Cutts and Signhal both think this update did what it was supposed to. Despite this, Google is accepting feedback.
Tips on adjusting to Google’s Panda algorithm change.....
It is aimed at what are referred to as ‘content farms‘, sites that post massive amounts of content that Google feels is poor in terms of its quality. For those who want to be able to make sure their site survives in this new era of changes that are affecting all of us, there is good news: it is not that hard to be able to keep your site ranked well. In fact, if you think about, your site stands a very good chance of actually rising in the rankings if you are not practicing any shady tactics. In the past, those shady tactics would have been almost required if we wanted to see good results. Now, however, we can get good results without having to resort to less than quality links that we used to have to buy in massive quantity just to compete.
Things that you need to keep in mind for this Panda algorithm change are really not so complex as you might think. If you know about the Terms of Service used by Google’s Adsense program then you do have a very good idea of what needs to happen. First off, avoid all of the spammy links that can pump traffic your way which is just not relevant to the site you have.
That is going to cost you and it should be avoided altogether. Keep those links of high quality and you will get further ahead. The next factor is going to be the quality of the content itself. It is better to focus on the ‘less is more’ concept and focus on high quality, rich content about a topic that you have or can hire expertise on. In addition, avoid giving off the appearance that you are merely posting content to get traffic for ads. Make ads sparse and they have more impact to the visitor. These 3 points are paramount, but you also want the title tags of your page to match the content so don’t ‘trick’ Google. Finally, keyword stuffing, is out of the game and will definitely raise a red flag.
If you have been doing SEO for any length of time, you can see that these are all common sense issues. If you keep your sites clean and effective for visitors you should be just fine. In fact, you might just rise above those with unscrupulous methods.
7 Areas to Address Google Panda Algorithm Update
1. Low Quality Page Clean Up
* Block low quality pages with traffic
* Remove low quality pages that hurt overall credibility for the site.
* Enhance existing content with additional content
2. Removal of Ad heavy pages
3. Clean Up of duplicate content
* Analyzing stolen content and requesting removal
* Reporting blatant offenders to Google
* Leverage Google Chrome Extension – blocklist?
4. Improve Inbound Linking – an indication of significant user engagement in the eyes of Google
* guest blog posts
* social media channels
* discussion forums where your topic area is being discussed
5. Social Engagement - is your audience actively discussing the topics on your site? Are they sharing the content on social media sites?
6. Lower Click through rates – re-optimize titles and meta descriptions
7. Too many internal links? – reports suggest that this may have been a small part of the algo update.
