Google Panda and What it Means for You!
Google Panda is changing the way we use SEO
HAS GOOGLE PANDA
TAKEN OVER OUR WORLD?
Have you heard of Google Panda? It’s been around since February 2011. Since then Google has released an update that may impact small websites. The algorithm itself actually starts with human manpower looking over hundreds of sites, after these humans have done enough, machines take over and spread the human research over millions of other different pages. Google Panda uses a variety of signals to measure levels of activity. Things such as time on site and whether people are actually active on the site are both highly considered. It seems that Google is creating a new way of usage metrics to help users for the relevant pages. Panda does not just focus on pages of a website, it focuses on the entire website. So in other words, if you have pages that rank low on the Panda spectrum, even if you have good relevant content, the entire website will be effected. The algorithm focuses on content farms. These sites such as ehow, squidoo, Hubpages, and many others were hit hard in the initial release of Goggle Panda. Many of the content farm sites are still working to take back traffic lost from the Panda program. Now, since we know a bit about the Goggle Panda program, let’s figure out how this relates to traditional search engine optimization, or SEO. Many companies use a program called Google Ad Keywords to find words that will drive them to the top of Google. With the recent Panda update, many of the smaller sites with an abundance of keywords will be targeted. Google says that this in an attempt to only get the best sites to the top, instead of having useless sites and wasting the time of the consumer.
We all know that SEO has been around almost as long as the Internet itself. So are we looking at a push from Google Panda to drive out the strategies of SEO? Let’s not be so quick to judge that. Taking the strategies of traditional SEO is still a good thing. One great strategy that many websites use is link building. It requires time to do this, but can be can have very productive results. Your goal is to include keywords in the anchor of all of these links. This helps to generate a good return to the user when they are searching something relevant. Even if they land on another page, having good and relevant links can lead to them clinking on it from another site and being redirected to your page. Google is acting as if they control the entire Internet, which some would argue they do. But there are still other search engines. Yahoo, MSN, Bing, Ask, and AOL are all ranked within the top 100 websites in the world. We all want to be at the top of Google, but to take away everything we have learned about traditional SEO and just focus on nailing down the details of Google Panda would not be a good use of time. We should still focus on the keywords and we should still focus on making sure that the website we run is relevant. If we were to take Google Panda and learn everything there is to know about it, we would end up in the same place that we are in now. Let’s take an example. Say you are a new company that makes a special blend of water that has vitamins in it. If someone was to search vitamin water, guess what would pop up first? Well, Vitamin Water of course! You have to think about what the consumer is thinking. Looking at the alternate words that have a low competition rate and high search rate is the key to getting to the top. This means in some words, that we have to still learn what we can about the new system, but we should in no way abandon what we have learned about the traditional SEO.
So, what does this all boil down to? Well, it pretty much means that we can’t just abandon the lessons we have learned on SEO. We can’t just drop everything and stop posting relative keywords to our website. Google Panda changes some aspects of what we are doing such as making sure that there isn’t a strong repetitiveness of keywords. We also have to verify that the pages on our sites are all strong and relevant. Like I said before Google Panda focuses on the entire site, so if one page is weak, it could bring down the entire site. Don’t focus too much on Google Panda, keep focusing on evaluating your site and making sure that the content and keywords are strong. If you do this, it seems Google Panda will not have an adverse effect on your site. I will leave you with four words: STRONG LINKS, RELATIVE KEYWORDS.
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