Panda
Date- Feb 24th ,2011
Panda update is named after google engineer, Biswanath Panda. Google was facing below concern on results of search query.
Hazards: Duplicate, Plagiarized, or thin content , user-generated spams, keyword stuffing.
Thin content is low- quality content which does not benefits the user or the site on which its published.
Poor- quality content- Articles having lot of grammatical error, overall meaning of the post not delivering any meaningful answers to search query.
Unhelpful, untrustworthy content: It’s a type of article that causes harm and towards the user and does not help them in any other way. Google usually does not tolerate this kind of hazard.
Duplicate text: It’s often referred to as ‘duplicate content’. Lot of copies content from other sources was not a at all recommended and search engine will act against your website if found the same.
Article spinning: Using different words but keeping the same content meaning which is already published on another website. Google recommends for original content only should be published to your website.
User Generated Spams- Effective website is being exploited by spammers and black hats. Here google is asking site owners to get their own home stored.
SEO experts should keep regular checks on above changes in search engine parameters, based on new requirement and to avoid low quality content google is continuously making changes in algorithm. Change in SEO strategies is need of the hour as old strategies might have negative impact on search ratings.
What should SEO experts keep in mind?
They should focus on key factors that improves overall ratings by focusing on quality of the content, on- page optimization, images and video optimization, keywords etc.
Reason of creating Panda.
Google was facing low quality search results due to rise of content farms, a practice in which a company employees’ large number of employees to generate articles, textual content, video so that website ranks highly in search engine results. Though companies were earning huge monies on their websites by advertising revenue with major focus on attracting large number of views, it was not benefiting google users as search query was no providing any meaningful and correct results.
Googles caffeine update of late 2009 did speed up Search engine’s ability to display content rapidly but also lead to “non required & poor content” Google’s index. Basic problem was in google algorithm give more importance to abundant and plentiful content over quality content.
Hence, google had to respond by developing the Panda algorithm which was planned to reduce ranking of low-quality websites – which was not useful. On the other hand, it provided better ratings to high-quality websites which had original, detailed with informed research and meaningful analysis.
It was difficult for analyze about the quality of the website but google sent sample / test questionnaire to check the human quality rating by asking question like
• Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card?
• ‘Do you consider this site to be authoritative?
• Would it be okay if this was in a magazine?
• Does this site have excessive ads?’
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
This helped Google team to separate a good website from the bad.