What is Google Panda Algorithm Update? How it Works

The Google panda can be mentioned as a search filter which came to light in February 2011.

The main aim of Google Panda is to find out sites which hold poor quality content in the search results conducted by Google.

A quality classification is assigned to pages, by the algorithm developed by Google. These algorithms are utilized internally and after quality, ratings performed by humans.

Google Panda Algorithm Update

What is Google Panda Algorithm Update?

The online world stunned after the update of the Google Panda algorithm in 2011.

It was for the first time that those webmasters who broke Google’s guidelines were fined with penalties.

Also, all searches about 12% were badly inflated.

Google Panda algorithm concentrated mainly on sites, pages, and contents which had lower quality.

Panda focused on a number of factors which had a negative effect on navigation, page content and search result of Google. Here are a few factors of the Google Panda algorithm.

  • Thin content: when the content is not sufficient and beneficial for a particular page.
  • Keyword stuffing: hiding keywords or forcing them within the content so that search ranking is boosted.
  • Broken links: links provided in the content may be broken and they may not navigate the users to the right destination.
  • Inappropriate content: contents which do not sink with the titles, keywords and other aspects in the content.
  • On-site duplicate content: contents that are duplicated or found similar across the pages.
  • Off-site duplicate content: when made a comparison to the pages on other sites, duplicate or similar contents are identified.
  • Content farms: more amount of contents are developed by sites mainly for SEO purposes.
  • Deceptive contents: in order to deceive users, contents are designed. Few examples can be added making which similar to usual content so that the number of clicks can be obtained.
  • Broad topics: sites which focus on more number of topics and they may not be themed or appropriate to each other, and sites which do not possess a specific focus.
  • Machine generated content: contents which are generated by the software are ones which have low quality.
  • Non-optimized pages: pages which are not optimized for search at all.
  • Poor grammar and spelling: contents which are difficult to read due to errors.

The effect of the Panda algorithm was vast and the big names like eBay and Wikipedia were also hit by Panda’s algorithms.

By 2014, the algorithm also concentrated on marketing sites which did not have beneficial data and pages that concentrate on more number of keywords with a similar copy.

How Google Panda Algorithm Update Works?

The best update for Google algorithm apart from penguin is the Panda.

When initially Panda was released, the organic search results had an unembellished impact.

In order to battle the upsurge of the mass of websites who had a ranking excessively higher with respect to quality guidelines which they did not follow, required an algorithm update.

The main intention of Google Panda was low-quality contents present in low-quality websites. It was in the first position that these websites were present in order to gain revenue from Google Ads.

There were also many websites which use to steal content from other sites and publish them as their own. These sites ranked in a higher position than the sources they stole from before Panda came into presence.

A higher position in search ranking is rewarded to websites from Panda for superior quality websites. In the same manner, scraped content or contents with lower quality would be pushed down the ranking ladder.

A Complete Guide to Google Panda update:

Blog post regarding the update was published by Google on February 24th, 2011 and mentioned that they released an algorithm enhancement for ranking.

The main aim of Google panda update is already mentioned above. Danny Sullivan, search engine land founder called it as “farmer” update.

Finally, it was believed that internally it was called Panda by Google. “Panda” is an engineer’s name who designed the idea for algorithm invention.

Familiar people in the SEO industry got to know the familiar sites which were hit hard by the algorithm through analyses made by SISTRIX and search matrix.

Few such sites were articlebase.com, ezinearticles.com, wisegeek.com, hubpages.com, suite101.com, buzzle.com and plenty more.

After the Google Panda update, wikiHow and eWiki content farms did a better job. Updates which were made later hit these content farms where about $6.4 million was lost in 2012 of the fourth quarter.

The greatest change found in the SEO industry was that the “article marketing” was affected the most. This is because low-quality articles were published by SEO practitioners on a few sites, for example, ezinearticle.com and this is done for link building.

It is also necessary to be understood that the most badly hit articles had bloated word counts, fewer eye-catching designs, uninteresting phrasing, low editorial principles, poor research and wasn’t trustworthy.

How To Recover from Google Panda Effect:

There are few steps needed to be followed to recover from Google Panda effect. They are

1. Writing quality content:

Writing quality content really means to write a complete post which has all the aimed keywords without fail.

Remember that the post should not be a random one and must be optimized for specific keywords. Though the post is a quality one, it can become useless when targeted keywords aren’t present.

Appreciation and praises can be obtained for a quality post but without keywords, the post won’t get a place in the search engine.

There are few aspects about a blog post which must be kept in mind as Google looks for length, word count and quality in a serious manner. A simple example can be a topic such as “how to recover from Google Panda” can be written in a detailed manner or in just simple five steps.

The reader’s choice can be understood but it is also important to think about the search engine too. More keywords are added to the article when detailed writing is done as more data is written. It is mentioned in an SEO debunked study that lengthier articles rank well.

2. Unrequired posts, pages can be removed from Google search:

Hunt from the domain to get to know what all pages and posts are associated with Google. Only mandatory posts and pages are to be possessed.

There is no value for useless posts and pages and they just are a part of the search engine.

Remember to use no index tags in case you have indexed with Google as categories and tags do not assist the search engine.

Also, disclaimer, contact pages, newsletter page, privacy policy are also ones which do not add value to search engine. Hence no index tags are to be used for such links.

Meta robots WordPress SEO plugin can be used to turn your tag, date, category archive pages as no index. Also, it is important to keep your internal links as Dofollow.

It is an advice from Google to make use of noindex tag so that bots do not index any post or page and also crawling admin is ceased by robot.txt. with “site:domain.com” it is easy to find out indexed pages in your domain. Domain.com is replaced with a real domain name.

3. Low-quality content to be removed:

Google is very strict about the low-quality post and hence short, not well framed and untargeted articles should be made into high-quality articles.

It is good to work on at least length and SEO details. This can lead to internal linking of a new and old post.

In order to provide good quality to readers, these changes are required. Do you know about what low-quality content is? It should be answerable for the following questions.

  • Is the content properly researched?
  • Is it beneficial for readers?
  • Are the customers ready to provide credit card details?
  • Is it from a trusted source that the content is framed?

Let me provide a few details about finding a low-quality content.

  • Contents which do not have Google traffic are to be found and optimized.
  • Posts which received less than ten visits in two months are found from Google analytics. It is necessary to evaluate the content of the post and find if it’s appropriate and beneficial. No index, updating or deletion can be based on the post.
  • It is important to look at bounce rate more than 85% and work in a manner to bring down the bounce rate. There are also many techniques which can be followed in order to reduce bounce rate.
  • Posts which have word counts less than 250 can be evaluated about the traffic by installing admin word count WordPress plugin.

4. Duplicate content:

Your search engine presence would be surely affected by duplicate content.

It is really mandatory to avoid duplicate content by working on all details in your SEO and site structure.

It is also necessary to battle against plagiarism and never forget to use URL canonicalization.

Plagiarism should be considered seriously and in case you spot out any sites replicating your content you may very well make a report to the Google team.

In this way, the reports are reviewed and URL’s that are replicated are removed from Google.

A DMCA notice can be filed or you can also request the webmaster to immediately remove the content.

All copied posts can be found by making use of online anti-plagiarism tools and also by reporting to Google. Once the copied contents are removed, the posts are said to gain in more traffic.

5. Getting to know SEO:

An individual who would like to get into blogging as their career must first get to know about SEO initially. Future would be in dark unless everything about SEO is understood. This is because just a single algorithm can turn up everything and make you meaningless.

Hence it is required to know the basics of SEO, and with this, the user would get to know what changes would be from the algorithm and also modify the websites so that new changes are met. Some important aspects to know about SEO are

  • Creating backlinks
  • Keyword research
  • On-site SEO
  • Keyword optimization
  • Social media promotion
  • Robots.txt

6. Social media promotion:

It is always a good start to social media promotion as website ranking would be enhanced by possessing Facebook likes, Google+ votes, and Twitter. Such services are also available from third-party sites.

7. WordPress theme for SEO friendliness:

There are many options such as free WordPress theme, premium word press theme and genesis theme.

By installing any of these themes, the blog is turned into an SEO friendly one. It is necessary to note that no index attributes are added for categories, tabs and for hopeless pages by making use of this options panel.

8. External links:

For ones who do for paid review or sell paid links should stop because linking to any bad neighborhood would surely affect the search engine ranking. Users can make use of Nofollow attributes when linking to a bad site.

It is pretty well understood that in order to take complete advantage of the Google Panda algorithm the site just needs to be optimized.

Once you decide to follow the guidelines then nothing can affect the site even by an algorithm change. All SEO blogger should hence know all the SEO basics.

For bloggers and webmasters who are affected by Google Panda can run through the above points and get recovered. Google Panda thus is a beneficial algorithm which focuses mainly on quality and rewards the right blog posts.

Hence quality and well-formatted blog posts or sites are sure to gain their reward due to the Google Panda algorithm. Google Panda kept updating and making changes to the algorithm. So enjoy the best and useful aspects of the Google Panda algorithm.

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