Panda Updates Got You Down
Do they have your site sown in the rankings? Google has rolled out several search algorithm changes over the last year that are designed to improve search results. These changes, named Panda, are designed to help people find high-quality sites. The problem for many sites, and their owners, has been that they had no clue why their search rankings dropped like a rock. It all boils down to quality.
Google makes money by people coming back and using their search product. If they use it there is a good chance they will click on ads. Google make billions of dollars from their search ads. It stands to reason that they want to give their searchers the best results possible so they keep coming back. Google search results mean good quality results. How many times have you searched for some term and ended up sifting through several less than stellar sites? I do it day in and day out. What is quality?
You can read a hundred posts on what to do about Panda. I can boil it down to this: eliminate duplicate content and thin content. If you have pages that are exactly the same as twenty other sites on the web then you have a problem. I guarantee if you have a e-commerce site that sells the same thin as other sites, you have duplicate content. That is, unless you took the time to change the descriptions and make them unique to your site. Thin content is all the crummy pages out there that have about 100 words on them and they tell you nothing. They are normally laden with ads and tons of links pointing away from the page.
Make sure you are delivering a quality site. Google says that Panda is just one of five hundred search “improvements” they plan to roll out. I loved these word from Google. I’ve been telling people for a long time to think the way Google thinks.
if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue:
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
- Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
If you have search terms that have lost a lot of ground in Google and you have no idea why, talk to a professional search engine optimizer. They can help.