Google Panda Spotted in Australia

This morning the most recent update to the Google Algorithm called "Panda" or  was rolled out into all English speaking countries.  Up until now the update was live only in US searches.

Below is the official Google Webmaster Blog announcement:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html

For a quick synopsis of the change and the roll out read the following Search Engine Land blog post:

http://searchengineland.com/google-rolls-out-its-panda-update-internationally-and-begins-incorporating-searcher-blocking-data-72497


What was the Panda Update about?

In Late February, Google launched a substantial algorithm change (known as “Farmer” or “Panda”) aimed at identifying low-quality pages and sites. These are pages (often seen on so-called “content farms”) with text that is relevant for a query, but may not provide the best user experience. (Google calls it a “high quality sites algorithm.)

How does Panda Work?

Here are the key elements of Panda:

This algorithm specifically targets sites (not necessarily content farms) that are low quality in a number of ways, such as:

• Shallow content (not enough content to be useful)
• Poorly written content
• Content copied from other sites
• Content that’s not useful

What is the Key Takeaways?

• Substantial low quality on a site can cause the rankings for the entire site to decline (even for the high quality pages)
• Evaluate your web site for poor quality pages (not useful, poorly written, non-unique, or thin) and remove them
• Overall user experience is likely important: design and usability, ad-to-content ratio, brand perception
• Look at both content and page templates (do the templates overwhelm the pages with ads? Provide a poor user interface?)
• After ensuring all content on the site is high quality, focus on engagement and awareness (through social media and other channels)
• Diversify into other channels and even within search, look beyond web search at Google News and “one box” style results such as blogs, images, and videos
  

About the Author: Edmund Pelgen is the Director of Search Engine Optimisation at Traffika. He shares his perspectives on how to use Search Engine Optimisaiton to achieve your business goals on the Traffika Digital Marketing Blog.  You can follow Edmund on Twitter @edmundpelgen.