Google's Panda Update: What Does It Mean For The Future?
Written by Bruce Townsend
Thursday, 11 August 2011 00:00
Google rolled out its Panda update for all English language searches in April this year (2011). Some sites were badly hit as a result, losing many top rankings. In some cases, lost rankings were recovered as things settled down after the update. By now, though, the ripples from Panda should have stilled, and you can expect the status quo to be maintained for a while.
So how should sites respond that were impacted by Panda? And what does it tell us about future optimisation for Google?
We have to see Panda in the context of Google’s war on spam. Site owners and online marketers are constantly trying to boost their own rankings by exaggerating the factors that Google is known to favour. In the meantime, the search engine is trying to filter out the noise and identify the pages that are most deserving of the highest ranks. Whenever a fashion develops for stuffing a particular element with excessive keywords – or spam – Google downgrades its value. So far it has:
- Responded to spam in the meta keywords tag by ignoring the tag altogether
- Changed its handling of keyword-rich links to block ‘Google bombs’, in which groups of bloggers used numerous links with the same keywords to drive inappropriate content to the top of the rankings.
- In the Panda update, attacked content spam by downgrading links from article libraries and other similar sites
- Fired a shot across the bow of domain spam, by indicating that excessive keyword-rich domains could be a future target
The essential lesson from all of this is, the more closely you focus on trying to achieve good rankings on Google, the less likely you are to succeed. On the other hand, if you provide unique and useful content on your site and give it visibility in appropriate places on the web, Google will find you and give you due credit.
It’s like the old story of the wind and the sun competing to strip the coat from a man. The harder the wind blew, the more tightly the man held the coat to himself. But when the sun shone brightly, he removed the coat of his own accord.
In the same way, if your site is buried deep in Google’s rankings, spin, spam and bluster will not release it. The solution is to make it outshine the competition – both in the value of its own content, and in its visibility elsewhere on the web.
Bruce Townsend is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and online marketing specialist at Actinic. Originally published on The Marketing Donut.
