Those who own a website or work in digital marketing understand the pain of getting hit by any of the Google Algorithm update. The harm in some cases is so high that it’s hard to recover. As they say prevention is better than cure, here is all you need to know in order to avoid getting hit by Google panda Algorithm. In case you doubt that your website might be one of those which has got major hit don’t panic, contact us and we will get you out of that zone.
What is Algorithm and Algorithm Update/Change?
In order to show the relevant, unique and meaningful result for the search terms to searches Google uses a bot (Google Crawler) and the bot works on a program which decide how to rank websites, this program is called Google Algorithm. Now to assure that the results are relevant and that no spammer get into the top results the bots needs to get smarter as the time passes.
Google has almost 81% market share according to a report by NetMarketShare when it comes to searches and to attain this figure Google has employed some of the brightest mind of this era at a high salary. All these ‘above average talented’ group of people do is try to make Google Crawler and algorithm smarter to assure proper result to end users and hence returning visitor to the search engine.
The changes in algorithm is done to insure relevant result to searchers which eliminating chances of spammers getting in the search result. Google do many such algorithms, lots of them are minor updates which doesn’t have major impact on websites whereas a few are major changes which becomes a buzz and a thing to worry for most of the webmasters or web owners. One such algorithm is Panda Algorithm.
What is Panda Algorithm?
First launch in February 2013, this algorithm was a big deal and still holds a lot of value. The algorithm was launched with a purpose to show high-quality sites higher in the search engine result page and pushing low quality sites down on the ranking list. When launched the algorithm has no name and the internet fraternity famously started calling it “Farmer” update as the focus of the update was to tackle content farming. The content farming is the process in which site owners or content developers steal the content from one website and use it on their own website. This algorithm update later got its name after one of its creator Navneet Panda.
The panda Algorithm impacted quite a lot of website when it came in existence for the first time, given that a lot of website use to practice content farming back in those days it was certain that the impact would be large, at the same time a lot of website got benefitted by this algorithm update. Panda being a site-wide update it doesn’t only impact the page with low quality content but also impact the ranking of website at a whole. Whenever Panda detects a low quality content on your website, Google consider the whole website to be of low quality and hence demote the whole website and the impact is so hard that it takes months and in some cases years to come out of its impact. If you own a subdomain or a news portal, you might find that the impact is on a particular section of website and not the website as a whole.
Site-wide Update: The updates which impact the whole website and not only a particular page is called site-wide update.
How to determine if the content of a website is of low quality or not, well here is a blog by Google Employee Amit Singhal which gives us a check list of all the factors that is included in deciding the low quality content of a website. While the list is a large set and understanding the details would be difficult for many, we have made it simple for you, here is all you need to know:
- Content Thickness: What is the volume of words used for the content, a content with low volume means not enough research on the topic while writing and hence not much of information for the end users and in such cases Google consider you to have low quality content. Try to create content as detailed as you can while still keeping the readers interested in it, do lots of research before writing a new piece.
- Originality of Content: Is your content original? While coming up with a completely original content cannot be an easy task it is advisable to add value to your content. Make sure that your content is not directly copied from any source or that the content does have information which might not be available at other online resources.
- Quality of the Content: Any grammatical or spelling mistakes or sentences not structured properly can cause in signaling a low quality content issue to your website. Make sure that you proof read your content before publishing it online.
How To Recover Panda Algorithm Update?
Manual recovery process seems to be good for theory but the fact is you cannot do much in this case but to wait for the Google to update algorithm again. The algorithm gets updated every month and Google’s crawler crawl each website and index them as a fresh content and if you have identified and improved the quality of all those content which might be of low quality you have a great chance of coming out clean and you will start seeing improvement in ranking once again. Ranking being the area of concern here, remember the rankings will not get recovered in a sudden. It will take time and effort to get back to where it uses to be. But the good news is we have got your back. If you think your website might be one of those which has got hit, because you see a lot of decrease in ranking and traffic to your website contact us. We do free analysis of website and provide recovery services at a very low cost.
In my opinion, although Google Panda Algorithm is a history (2011), we must always learn from history, do not make the same mistake in the future. If you does not know how to optimize your search engine optimization and worry by doing wrong step it will affect your search ranking, you may always contact us, we are a digital marketing agency who help our client to optimize their website in term of on page and off page.