The Lowdown on the Google Panda Update
In one of our previously blogs, we told you all there is to know on the Google Penguin update and this time around, it’s all about the Panda update.
The update, which launched in February 2011, was one of Google most important spam-fighting algorithms and is now an official part of the core ranking algorithm. This means that it plays a part in the decision of which rank your website is awarded on the google search engines.
Jennifer Slegg said in a statement that the “Panda is an algorithm that’s applied to sites overall and has become of the our core ranking signals. It measure the quality of a site. Panda allows Google to take quality into account and adjust ranking accordingly.”
The aim of Google Panda was to target what is known as ‘content farms’ and low quality sites to put the high quality sites at the top of the search results. A content farm is a website that has content written specifically for search engine bots instead of human readers and is a black hat technique within the SEO and internet marketing industry.
The Google Panda update was said to have affected the ranking of around 12% of all search results. After the release, a blog was published by Google to help make people aware of what qualifies as a high quality site. It said that content producers should try to step into Google’s mindset, ensuring that their work answers questions like ‘was the article well edited or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced’ and ‘would you trust the information in this article’.
Here at Internet Marketing Questions, we do not like the bad reputation that black hat techniques give the SEO and internet marketing industry, which is why the updates are a positive thing for legitimate companies. Despite this, sometimes even well done SEO can suffer slightly. Because of this, we must remember to focus on high quality and relevant content so that we can stay in Google’s good books.