Google’s latest search algorithm update entitled ‘Panda’ (by Google) or ‘Farmers’ by others, was focused as improving the quality of its search results. Now that the dust has settled somewhat, the majority of people think that the update has led to an improvement in the quality of search results.
The Google update has been said to have targeted content farms; websites that spew out lots of low value content all over the internet. This is great for SEO people that use predominantly ‘white hat’ (ethical) search engine optimisation techniques; but is probably not great for those that use ‘black hat’ (dodgy) SEO practices, such as using article spinners (when you create an article and use a computer program to make loads of copies of that article), and people that use automated link building & article software. (So no surprise there – the quick fix & shortcut techniques come up short again).
Here are some things that we believe Google is targeting with the update:
- Is the website/content considered authoritative?
- Is the content produced good enough to make it into a magazine, newspaper or other printed medium?
- Are there lots of adverts surrounding the content?
- Google is likely to be using user feedback in some form or another (be that bounce rate, social media pointers etc…)
- The algorithm has still got flaws and can therefore still be gamed by ‘black hat’ techniques.
- If your website has been affected it does not mean that you will not be able to regain your former ranking.
- Auto-generated content should be separated from, high quality valuable content. This can be done by making sure that the search robots are blocked from crawling the auto-generated content.