What is the Google Panda update all about?   

The Google Panda is a major update on how Google rank websites. It was implemented last February 24 and has affected more than 10% of search results already. The Panda Update is also known as the Farmer and the drastic thing it did was to cut the affected website’s organic visits into half, that’s 50% decrease courtesy of this algorithm update.

What is the purpose of this update?

The objective of Panda is to eliminate websites with poor quality contents from the result pages of Google searches. An insider guy from Google had said that this update is devised to trim down the ranking of websites with low quality, redundant content, and low value to users. And also to give better rankings to websites that are of high quality, original and with useful contents.

Google is just protecting their business and at the same time providing their users with good quality information; otherwise these users might switch to other search engines if they become dissatisfied with the information Google was providing them. Owners of low quality websites should be wary about this update as this will greatly affect them.

But this update with a noble intention is not perfect in the sense that it makes mistakes in categorizing websites. A few good quality sites had reported that they were wrongly classified and negatively affected by Panda. Google knows about this and so they have asked those innocently affected by this update to give Google a notice. It is not easy to work out this kind of situation and there will always be an innocent site that will suffer.

What factors and points are used by Panda?

A lot of factors and points are being considered by Panda before ranking a website. These points are summed up in the end and if it crossed the Panda limit then your entire website appears to be affected. This means that even if a small part of your site was found out to have low quality content, then it will have a big impact on the overall ranking of the whole website. This comprises of original and good quality pages that were ranked lower than those sites with just copied contents.

What to do if your site was negatively affected?

If your site has been harmfully affected by the Panda Update you should examine the content of your entire site and enhance the quality of your web pages in general. Here are some more important things to do to soothe the effect of the Panda bite.

Determine all the links to your website, where are they coming from? Insist on the poor quality sites to remove their links – this is to shake off unwanted association.

Center your efforts on building incoming links from reputable and high quality sites.

Focus on writing original content. It is better to have your own blog connected to your website. A blog is perhaps the best means to keep your site fresh with new content.

Learn to take advantage of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. It is where most people go to these days. Google alters its algorithm several times in a year. Sometimes these alterations are small with little effect on the overall ranking of a website but the Panda Update is not an ordinary one, it made a sweeping effect to sites online. And this is not likely the end of it, more is to come....

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