Google Big Panda Update – What’s in it for Bloggers?
It’s been a few weeks that the Google big Panda is live and hit the United States market, people are twitting about their websites ranking fluctuations. According to some SEO experts in UK the Google panda update has hit the UK market too. Lot of experts and blogs has updated the news, case studies and analysis about the change they see after the big panda update by Google. Some websites gain the ranking on different keywords and many big websites encounter a big negative change in their SERPs and traffic. Mahalo.com was one the first website who faces a negative change right after the update goes live in United States and Mahalo.com cut their 10% of the total staff.
The big panda update is the series of effort Google team put in, in order to produce most relevant results for the user quires. Google updated their official blog and stated that ‘our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.
Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.’
Every one talk about what is happening and what is the exact target of the update and who got affected from the new algo update. In this flood of tweets about this Big Panda one of my blogger friends asked me a very good question! He asked, ‘What I should do? How can i prevent my blog from this Panda by Google?’ what’s in it for bloggers?
Obviously, there is much for bloggers in this update as you can see that this update is all about content farms.
Before I tell you how to how to get yourself or blog safe from this update lets discuss a bit about what are content farms? According to Wikipedia:
‘In the context of the World Wide Web, the term content farm is used to describe a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views.’
Sir Rand of SEOmoz published a great analysis on their blog discussing about the Winner vs. the looser bucket after the update goes live.
I don’t want to go in to the exact details of the websites who are getting the tough time after the update but here the names of big content generation websites like ezine articles, ehow and mahalo.com is worth mentioning. Ezine articles and Mahalo.com get a negative impact and the websites has been pull down for many long tale keywords and ehow, unlike ezine articles and Mahalo.com get a positive impact that get on top for many queries and naturally gain website traffic.
What’s in it for Bloggers?
Many of the quality blogs I know who upload tons of creative and quality data every day, their prime source of getting money is through Advertisements. Here we are going to compare the blog with the website that faces the negative impact from the Google update to determine the changes they should make as quickly as possible in order to stay away from the Panda update.
Got Duplicate Content? Remove it right now!
Duplicate content is no rocket science now, everybody know that duplicating the content can harm their blog and their rankings in SERPs if caught. The new Google Panda update is the series of actions Google is taking in order to fight against SPAM. Large website that had the duplicate content within the website or from other websites get pulled down from rankings and replaced by original unique content available on the internet.
Tip: If your blog have the duplicate content issue just remove it right away or you ll be the next victim for Big Panda.
Making money through Ads? Be careful!
If you are not the service provider and running an industry blog and generating unique and interesting content for users from time to time, it’s not hard to predict that your prime source of making money is Advertisements. Ads on the blog are not bad! Everyone have a right to earn especially when he is providing some great information but Ads should have some limit. Let’s take the example of the Panda Effected website like EzineArticles.com. The website has tons of Ads even sometimes you encounter the ads in between the articles (very annoying). Don’t annoy people, remember good experience to people is Good experience to search engine (at least search engines are trying to act closely to Humans).
Tip: If you have lots of ads on your blog then you have to reduce the ads and place it which didn’t sounds like SPAM. If you are not going to compromise on ads, in a longer run you might lose your Ads as well as Search engine rankings.
Is Design Important?
This is in debate from a time that is design important for search engine rankings? May be yes because in general Panda affected the website with low quality content and ugly design, the websites with considerably better design like ehow.com gain a positive impact.
Tip: May be design is not the ranking factor but from the usability point of view it is very important, and in order to let your readers stay on your blog good design is a must, so why not consider design as important as unique content and authentic information is.
I tried to cover some important point after the Panda update goes live, Google is trying hard to give the best results for the requested query so it is important not to play black/gray hats techniques and act ethically for the better tomorrow.
Do you find any other point that might help bloggers to stay away from the Panda attack? Please share!
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