We’ve discovered some interesting learnings from the Panda update, which Google rolled out late February 2011.
The web is littered with websites that have been decimated by this new algorithm. Others have dug a little deeper and discovered why they’ve been hit in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). One of the biggest killers is duplicate or low quality content.
Internal Duplication
Duplicate content was one of those early ‘ah hah’ moments with Panda. This sort of content can be lurking in a number of places, both inside your own site as well as externally.
To keep it simple to understand, websites often have their own internal URL creation mechanisms to make your web addresses human friendly and easy to read. A potential downside to this is they can often create multiple addresses for the same piece of page content - and that’s a bad thing as far as Panda goes.
A simple way to start determining how your site rates is through the Google Search itself. Using a site search of site:last-part-of-some-site-url-content will result in Google returning a list of SERPs. If you start to see the following display, you’re likely to have a site (as determined by Google) that contains lots of duplicate content and/or low quality.
Discovering which pieces of content are low quality or simple uninteresting to your site visitors allows you or your site administrator to either remove that content or, my personal choice, disallow Search Engines from indexing the content altogether. There’s a simple trick for this which is placing a ROBOTS meta-tag descriptor of ‘NoIndex,Follow’ in the offending content’s header.
External Duplication
Now externally, we have a pile of sites that are content collectors. Automatic scripts are continually trawling the Internet in a process we call ‘scraping’. Why?
The more collected content they’ve pulled in in the past has seen Google attribute them with higher search rankings due to fresh content. These sites are able to monetise on content, which isn’t theirs.
Sometimes we create our own duplicates when we syndicate or republish our content onto other blogs.
Leslie Rohde, the SEO who initially discovered the power of keywords in anchor text, recently made his thinking public. His reasoning is that Google is using a mechanism to measure the number of times that your content does not appear at the top of the search results in searches.
In a situation where another website displays content where the page title and meta description snippet are similar or the same as your page title and meta description, and you do not rank number 1, the implication to Google is that your site is hosting scraped content and there fore should not rank highly. Your site effectively gets a demerit.
The more of these demerits your website accrues then the next time the Panda update is run, your site may well drop in the search results.
The obvious solution then is to ensure you make sure that your website has a unique page title and meta description and that it is not republished elsewhere.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps can be a boon for website owners. They can also have an innocuous impact when it comes to duplicate content too. We’re talking about XML sitemaps that search engines collect to tell them what they should be indexing. If your sitemap is misaligned with your other duplicate content eradication methodologies, they’ll continue to believe you want them to index these other pages located in the sitemap - that’s a bad thing, obviously.
Unique Content
The current content master rule is uniqueness as well as great quality.
Content is still very much King BUT that King has a number of Queens In Waiting - User Experience, Design and Bounce Rate (i.e. Does the site visitor peruse other content on your website which is an indication the site has wider ranging appeal and therefore subject matter authority).
Producing all these things should work into your normal day-to-day website operations though.
Interesting, thought provoking and/or informative unique content is always the main objective.
Make sure your visitors can easily find content through a clean navigation and design template - that’s a great user experience
Provide in-content links and/or ‘Related Content’ sidebar links to other relevant posts. Don’t do crazy on these either. We’re talking relevant to provide added value to visitors. It isn’t a visitor Spam exercise.
Rewards
At the end of the day, Google wants it’s audience (the searching Internet audience) to find good quality content and websites. Following these easy content rules will see your site and SEO efforts rewarded, your ranking increase as well as visitor traffic.
Have you got any other tips or insights around the Panda update? Do let us know in the comments
Martin is the General Manager at Traffika. Follow him on Twitter @Martin_Cooney or Google+
