When it comes to online marketing and search engine optimisation,
webmasters and copywriting agencies keep a close eye on what Google is
doing. Over the past few years the world’s most popular search engine
has been constantly updating, and few can failed to have heard about the
now infamous Panda and Penguin updates.
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These algorithm updates
have often caused uproar amongst the SEO community and caused dramatic
shifts in ranking for some websites. But these updates have generally
been aimed at improving search results for users, and for the most part
they have been successful to this extent. Key targets on Google’s
hitlist of things to banish to the dark corners of the internet have
been:
- Poor quality content
- Duplicate content appearing in multiple places across the web
- Content with spammy links and thinly-veiled affiliate agendas
Few
could argue that the overall quality of search results hasn’t been
improved by these moves. But just went you thought it was safe to paddle
back into the digital waters, Google has hit again with another update –
Panda 4.1.
What is Panda 4.1?
The original Panda update went live in early 2011, and was mainly
intended to tackle ‘content farms’ – websites which contain masses of
poor quality content and content that has been ‘scraped’ from other
sites. Since then there have been more than two dozen tweaks and
revisions to the algorithm, with the most recent being Panda 4.1.
Panda
4.1 began rolling out in early October, and according to Google around
3-5% have been affected by the update. And therein lies the reason for
widespread concern over this update, with most similar updates
previously affecting less than 2% of results.
At the time,
Google’s Pierre Far said on Google+ that, “based on user (and webmaster)
feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda
identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater
diversity of high-quality small and medium-sized sites ranking higher.”
Of course, Google isn’t about to tell us what these ‘signals’ are, but
we can speculate based on the affects that the update has had.
According
to a post on Searchmetrics, some of the biggest losers from the update
have been games sites, lyric sites and portals offering medical
information. This seems to suggest (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the
update was targeted at rooting out sites lacking content, and those with
little original content. On the flipside, news sites and content-driven
entertainment and information sites have climbed the rankings following
the update.
To put Panda 4.1 in black and white terms: substantial useful content good, thin unoriginal content bad.
What you can do to avoid the Panda’s paws
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The best way to avoid being hit by Panda, and any inevitable future updates, is to create high quality user-focused content.
If
you’re currently concerned about the effect that Panda 4.1 might be
having on your site’s rankings then the first thing you might want to do
is carry out a content audit to identify any pages with content that is
too short, poor quality or just generally lacking. You should also
identify any content which is taken elsewhere from the web or even
repeated across your site. The former may be salvageable with a little
tweaking or more substantial additions, while the latter should be
binned immediately.
Once you’ve isolated any problem content you
can work with a web copywriter or copywriting agency to create content
that your visitors (and Google) will love. Content that is:
- Of a substantial length – 250 words+ is a good standard to aim for
- Well-written and error-free
- Useful and interesting to users
- Original and unique
Bemoan the Panda’s meddling if you want, but isn’t that the kind of content that will reflect positively on your brand anyway?
Reference :- http://goo.gl/I0ZF5E
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