Feed the panda.
October 10, 2011 —
Once again, it’s new rules, new tools.
Google’s new algorithm, nicknamed Panda, measures the relevance of your website, and rewards (or punishes) you for your perceived value to searchers. Ignore these changes at your peril, since appearing in search engine results before your competitors is still golden.
So what’s new?
There’s more emphasis on design, for one thing. An ugly site will be downgraded, as will a site with overly complicated navigation. If that sounds like human judgement … it actually is. Real live people will be involved.
Perhaps the biggest change involves content. Content is king is dead. Long live Original content is king. Scraping content from other places will have little or no value, while original thinking will be elevated.
There are other quantitative measures that have been promoted, such as stickiness, diversity of traffic, or how often your pages are shared, but those are byproducts of having fresh, authentic content. Be of value to readers, and you feed the panda.
So original content is bamboo?
Posted by Mike on Oct 10, 2011 at 11:52 am
Bamboo leaves, yes.
Let’s not talk about when they shoot.
Posted by Bob on Oct 10, 2011 at 2:46 pm
It’s about time Google grew up. If this works like it ought to then it must be a step in the right direction. Content has been compromised to suit the robot for too long. Now let’s have the robot start to think like a real person. After all, websites are for people not machines.
Posted by Keith Hague on Oct 10, 2011 at 5:06 pm
I agree totally. Search results are flooded with directory sites that mechanically seem like they are about the search terms, but are merely a delay in getting to the substance. If Google does it right, original content will trump these mere aggregators, and we’ll all get to what we want sooner.
Posted by Bob on Oct 11, 2011 at 10:45 pm
Aargh! I got killed on the last logorithm and my hits have dropped off, and the only thing I can see is because of the geographical relevance. I’m in Canada and most people hitting my tags used to come from the States, now I’m not getting US hits anymore unless they’re direct.
Why should I even care who sees my website anymore. I’m not American, I’m not going to get the hits I want anyway. :(
Sign me sick and tired of playing the “guess what you need to do now to qualify your SEO” game.
Posted by Tina Brooks on Oct 13, 2011 at 1:38 pm