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October 10, 2011

What Google Panda Means to Your Business Website How the search engine’s latest update affects your web site

In early 2011, Google rolled out a major upgrade of their ranking algorithm called Panda. There have been 4 iterations of it so far this year and it’s proving to be the biggest change in almost 10 years.

In many ways, the update has turned the SEO industry on it’s head, but it has also leveled the playing field: creating opportunities for small businesses, companies and brands who build quality websites and generate loyal and vocal fan followings to rank higher.

Google Panda

Why Panda?

At the core, the goal of the new upgrade was two-fold:

1. Devalue the rankings of low-quality sites and kill off content farms who have managed to build relevance by taking advantage of how the system works.

2. Increase the rankings of high-quality and local web sites by judging relevance based on factors that are less easily manipulated, like the “likability” of a site by influencers and metrics like time on site.

So… What’s that Mean, Exactly?

Google’s mission is simple: provide relevant search results for people.

With millions of web pages spread across the globe and millions of people searching daily for billions of things, this is a TALL order. To deliver relevant results, Google’s programming must be able to tell which online content relates best to the search terms entered.

Previously, it did this in a couple of different ways:

By looking at on-page content like meta titles, meta description, page titles.
The more relevant these were to a particular keyword, the higher you would rank for it.
By judging the quantity of and quality of inbound links
If your website was all about selling t-shirts and someone else linked to you with the anchor text ‘Nashville t-shirts,’ then it was easy for Google to get that your website was a Nashville t-shirt website. Often referred to as “backlinks”, this one was a core deliverable of the SEO industry and the single best way to build “authority” for a site.
By relying on Page Rank
Each backlink counted as vote for a page (with backlinks from more relevant sites counting for more) and these votes helped make up the Page Rank of a site. This metric helped Google assign a numeric value to sites and then layer them by relatively.

For years, this formula worked amazingly well, but eventually people learned enough about how the system worked that they were able to tweak websites to jump ahead in the rankings.

As a result, the top results weren’t necessarily the sites with the best content anymore; they were just the ones that had done the best job exploiting the system.

Introduce Panda

With the rise of social media as curator of engaging, valuable content, and the increasing difficulty of accurately determining high quality sites, Google realized that it needed to make some big changes.

Enter Panda.

Utilizing machine learning, Panda looks at pages on a site and mimics how people would react to them to gage the quality of the entire site. It’s a human filter, designed to place higher value on what actual users think of a site than other incoming signals which can be easily faked.

It gets technical, but all you really need to remember is that while all the old factors still count, new ones now play a much more important role:

Social Mentions (especially Google’s own new Plus service) count more than they have in the past. The more times real people retweet, +1, like or share your online content the higher it ranks.

Overall design and UI matters; sites that feel overally “spammy” (with high ad to content ratio, or with lack of real content above the fold, or with empty pages) are now penalized across the board.

Preference is given to websites that publish high quality, original content on an ongoing basis. Google may also be integrating additional metrics like time on site and bounce rate, so building engaging, quality pages is even more important.

What Panda Means for You and Your Site

The bottom line is that winning the search engine optimization game isn’t just about backlinks and buying traffic anymore, it’s about taking a holistic approach to crafting your entire online presence.

If you’re designing or redesigning your site; you should be thinking about building it on an platform like WordPress that makes generating new content easy and has tools that play well with Google.

You should also be prepared to create an ongoing strategy for generating new content on a regular basis and growing and engaging your social media networks. If you don’t have a wordpress website with an integrated blog, now is the time to launch one.

Need help? Talk to us about building your new site and how we can help with ongoing digital marketing. You might be surprised at how easy it can be to take advantage of these changes and drive results for your business!