It has been some months since the “Panda” update has been rolled out by Google. Initially it was known as the “Farmer’s” update as it targeted low quality content farms. That is certainly a good move in the right direction by Google has it’s search results have been dominated by low-quality websites and it can be frustrating for a user doing serious research. For example, “how to” searches on Google would generally return virtually useless and duplicate content sites. By reducing targeting these sites, Google hopes to generate more relevant and authoritative contents in the search results.
Has the Panda update been successful? Lets not look at it as the silver bullet to solving the problem of returning low quality content. To some extent, “how to” searches generally return more relevant results since “Panda” but that hasn’t rooted out all the problem. This is to be expected as Google relies mostly on its algorithm in generating what it thinks to be relevant to the searched term. On the other hand, as long as the process of indexing web pages is automated, it would be difficult to monitor the avalanche of spammy content that is added to the Internet daily.
The “Panda” update also has some drawbacks. Primarily, even good quality sites have been dragged along and relegated to lower rankings in Google. Naturally, this does bring about some untold worries for SEO companies whose clients depend on Google for traffic to their website.
The question is, what can be done to avoid being given a black eye by “Panda”? The short answer is: quality content.
Although it sounds cliché, but quality content is still valued by Google. After all, a search engine is useless unless it can return relevant content to its users. So, whether it is the content on your website or the content of the websites that link to yours, ensure that the content is of good value. Avoid SEO companies that offer massive amount of backlinks. It is not the quantity of the links but the quality of the contextual links that matter most. Although Google has categorically stated that pagerank is not that important, one cannot disagree that links that come from high PR websites will result in better ranking for your website.
As responsible SEO consultants ourselves, we have completed several projects on behalf of our clients after the “Panda” updates have kicked in. Not only did the sites survive the update, the ranking for very competitive keywords actually jumped to the first page of Google. We attributed quality content as the main contributor to such results.
Therefore, if you want to rank well in Google, ensure that you have meaningful content on your website in the first place.
