Google Panda in 2012

Hi, I’m John, the Resource Coordinator here at Koozai. For anyone involved in SEO, one of the biggest changes that you will have noticed was the introduction and update of Google Panda. Put simply, this was a change in the ranking factor for the algorithm that Google uses, and it was introduced on a global scale in April 2011 to focus on quality control within search and to also punish the ranking of sites using poor or duplicated content.

Initially, it was believed that the change affected the rankings of almost 12% of all search results. The update has brought with it a lot of debate among SEO professionals, and no doubt we will continue to see further changes to the current algorithm in the future. However, the change was brought in to display what Google will value as good quality sites in the search engine results pages.

So how is this done? Well, with the current ranking factors for Google’s algorithm, in order to feature higher up in the search results pages, your site should not include low quality content, excessive adverts and branding, too many keywords within the text, and weak interlinking between your sites and affiliate pages. All of these will only serve to decrease your rankings and therefore decrease your traffic.

Since its introduction, some websites for small and large businesses have been punished by Google. In this case, if you definitely know that you’ve been affected, there are a few things that you need to implement. If you’ve been hit by the big Panda, you need to block weak pages, remove poor or duplicated copy, gain valuable links through social media and blogs, and improve your site speed in order to counteract a loss in rankings. One way of looking at it is quality will be more important than quantity.

So how has this impacted the Internet? Google rolled out these changes on a gradual basis. One of the advantages is that they now have a greater amount of control in punishing content farms on the Internet, which are considered to be part of the black hat methods for some SEO professionals. It does, however, mean that Google will have more control over what they deem is a quality website, and this can sometimes be hard to define.

Even so, it makes us all aware of the SEO techniques we implement when we are building our campaigns and using them to improve our rankings. With these changes in place, we’re likely to see the current algorithm ranking factors adapt over time. Along with this change there will be many challenges for those involved in SEO.

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