At the beginning of 2011 Google introduced the new Panda update to its algorithm. When Google implemented this new update it devastated and shook up the online world for good. Many websites got hit negatively by the update and other websites were blessed with more traffic and increased rankings.
Now that the dust settled is Google Panda a good thing about things.
Do You Know What Google Panda Is?
Every other month Google always updates its search engine algorithms so that it can provide relevant search results for its users. There are a few factors that Google uses when scoring a website like the number of back links to the site, page loading times, user experience etc. Google are always tweaking and changing these factors continuously.
Over the years Google has been riddled with spam, non relevant and low quality websites. So at the beginning of this year Google introduced a new update to its algorithm to deal with some of these problems, the update was called “Panda”.
What Happened?
When the Panda update was introduced many webmasters saw their websites drop in rankings and others saw their websites disappear from the rankings altogether. Basically content farms, low quality websites, spam sites and any other site that was relevant got wiped out.
Do You Have A Low Quality Website?
No one is quite sure what Google deems as a “low quality website” but we can make an educated guess. Over this year we have seen websites that have duplicate content, less original content, copied or scraped content disappear or rank poorly.
We have also seen the disappearance of many auto blogs to a point where the “.CO” domain extension or TLD has been totally de-indexed because of poor quality websites.
Websites that curn out hundreds of articles and posts per day were also hit in a big way like article directories and various other sites.
Should I Worry About Panda?
It’ a twofold answer! If you have created your website using black hat and other unethical methods like comment spamming, content spinning, content scraping etc it is only a matter of time before your website is either penalised heavily or totally de-indexed.
On the other hand if you have been building your website with unique content and other white hat methods you have nothing to worry about because “Matt Cutts” stated that these types of sites will increase in rankings and authority over time.
How To Make My Website Google “Panda” Friendly?
It’s quite simple because all Google looking for are quality websites with top quality content on it. Now if you can create a website that ticks all these boxes then you will not have a problem. Also right for human viewers and not for search engines.
There are a few other things that you can do to help your website to become more Google friendly one of the things that you should do is focus on your websites on-page SEO. You join the no problem. So I have created a video walk-through of a free plug-in that can help you with this.
It is also a good idea to also focus on your off-page SEO like manual back linking and. I have a list of over 300 high PR websites where you can leave links you can find them here.
