Google's 2012 Panda update has led to a number changes in SEO strategies in order to accommodate for the new algorithm. But while some have adapted, the alteration still has many utterly bamboozled.
Panda is essentially an updated way of ranking websites on Google. The idea behind the implementation of Panda was to promote high-quality content websites and relegating lower quality sites in the standings.
What's more, Panda uses human reviewers to rate the quality of a number of websites, taking into account speed, quality and design when deciphering the best of the best. The changes were initially reported to benefit social networking sites along with news providers, while sites containing a substantial amounts of adverts saw themselves dropped down the ladder.
Obviously not all websites are human rated, just a sample, which then sets the standard for the evaluation of others. Machines then go on to rank websites based on the criteria set by humans.
Changes have been made and while some have excelled, some have suffered. Your website will need to adapt to the changes in order to optimize search engines, as this Panda isn’t facing extinction any time soon
- Panda loves content; new, fresh, updated, or whatever you want to call it just make sure its high-quality, which means reducing things such as separating out all auto-generated content, blocking indexing and disabling the crawling of low quality content on your website.
- Beware of the quality of your backlinks as you may be penalized for them. While they are important to have, you should ensure a good quality of links as this can attribute to a lowering in rankings.
- Ensure keywords don't appear on multiple pages. While some sites may operate on similar articles which center on one keyword, look to get rid of them as this repetition will drag your website downwards.
- Get rid of errors on your site, including factual inaccuracies and grammar and spelling faults.
- As important as ever with SEO is unique content, meaning that instead of copying articles and work from other sites, look to benefit from your own fresh content to separate you from the competition.
- Advertising quality is better than quantity in the sense that it will benefit you to have fewer ads on your site. To improve your SEO, opt for a small number of ads that cost a large amount of money, rather than vise-versa.
- Panda looks kindly on the 'Survival of the strongest' theory, so keep your best-quality web pages and scrap the lower quality pages.
- It's as easy as deleting 1,2,3 when it comes to paragraphs. Pages containing small numbersof paragraphs can damage your rankings.
- Duplicate content and scrapped content. Get rid of it, Panda loves fresh and high-quality content; you should see this pattern emerging now.
- Take bitesize amounts of Affiliate Links. A healthy dose is fine, but opt for too many and you may be penalized. You can also enable nofollow to help your cause.
- Other things to look out for include; posting too many outbound links containing keywords, low quality internal linking and minimizing duplicate template content.
