7 Top Tips For Google Panda Update

Over the last few months we have been asked by our clients and partners to help them with the new Google Panda ranking algorithm, released in February 2011, as such we thought it would be benefical to share some tips.

Google Panda had an immediate effect on natural serach results. Industry data has advised that it impacted over 10% of page rankings in the United States.

Google’s aim was in essence to:

- Reduce the rank of sites with poor quality.

- Reduce the rank of content farms, link farms etc.

- Improve the rank of sites with high quality original content.

Panda aims to determine the original source of content and promote that page, then demote or even remove any pages with duplicate content.

Panda is not a change to Google’s core algorithm but an additional ranking factor. As such it does not run continuously, it can be run every couple of weeks and Google can tweak the importance of the Panda ranking in relation to other ranking factors.

Panda Overview:

24.02.11 – Panda 1.0 – Targeting poor quality content

11.04.11 – Panda 2.0 – When conducting a Google search users can block a site from appearing in the future. Thus this data is incorporated in the ranking of sites.

10.05.11 – Panda 2.1 - Another update by Google

16.06.11 – Panda 2.2 – Targeting sites that scrape and re-publish content and rank higher than the original content. After the release the original content should rank higher.

Top rank goes to high quality content with many quality in-bound links. So if you have lost traffic, you need to identify the source. Is it site wide or specific pages or categories?

Top Tips for Google Panda Update:

1. Create Original Product Content: Implement original category page content, do not just copy content from suppliers, manufacturers etc. Of course this is time consuming, so start with the most popular first.

2. Create Original Category Pages: Implement original category page content.

3. Do Not Give Your Content Away: Do not re-publish the great content you have spent time on in every data feed. As Google’s panda may not recognise your content as the original.

4. Unique Content For Key Pages: Input quality content on high traffic pages, product, category pages.

5. Do Not Utilise Identical Microsites: This will dilute the value of the original pages content.

6. Implement Google +1: In future Google will probably use this as another ranking factor.

7. Marketing Diversification: Do not rely just on SEO, at anytime Google can change the algorithm. Diversify and use multi channel marketing – SEO, Paid Search, Comparison Shopping Engines, Social, Display, Affiliates, Microsites, Email etc.

We hope this helps provide some insight into the steps to adopt. However feel free to contact us at Newtork Intellect on how to boost your rankings and maximise your exposure and performance across the digital channels.