Google’s latest algorithm has come to be known as the “farmer update,” but inside Google it’s known as “Panda.” Unlike many pandas, who are lazy and mostly just intent on eating bamboo, this Google creation is feisty and out for blood – demoting sites it deems to be “low-quality” left and right. However, when you’re using a term such as quality, a number of subjective factors come into play; it’s difficult to know how to avoid being “low quality” since Google won’t tell us the details of what it means. As industry analysts and experts have examined the results, however, they have discovered a few things you can do to make your “post-Panda” site more successful.
The first thing that webmasters need to keep in mind is that low-quality pages will impact all the sites on a domain. While it’s difficult to say precisely what that means, here are a few things to avoid:
- Pages that duplicate content from another site.
- Content that has a lot of spelling or grammatical errors.
- Pages that have notably poor performance on analytics. You should check your bounce rate, time on page, etc., to determine which pages are poor performers.
- Content that has an ad-to-content ratio that’s heavy on advertisements.
When you find poor content, the best solution is revamp it – creating more value, polish, and retaining the total amount of content on your site. If that’s not possible, or at least not reasonable, then Googlers have advised that the content either be removed or sent to another domain name. This advice comes from none other than Michael Wyszomierski, a Project Manager at Google, and formerly the Search Quality Senior Strategist.
Google is using mathematics to tabulate an already difficult to grasp concept (quality), and it’s a challenge to say precisely what “markers” they’re looking at. However, the focus on original, value-oriented content is clear – even if it’s far from perfect at this early stage.
[via Search Engine Watch]
Update: Thanks go to Jordan, for the correction on what Pandas eat.
