What the Google Panda Update Did and Didn't Change About SEO

I have been reading lots of articles and weblog posts recently about the changes that Google panda has made to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION. I've heard reports of it fully killing sites, dinging reputable article directories, removing giant retailer outcomes, you identify it; in the event you obtained dinged; it's the panda. However did Panda really change the WEBSITE POSITIONING game? I do not assume so.
The Google panda update did ding a whole lot of sites, however the main focus of the replace seemed to be getting rid of content material farms. If you happen to're not conversant in a content farm, it is basically a relentless stream of posts and articles (either distinctive or copied) that simply exist to place more content material on a webpage in hopes of focusing key phrases and attracting backlinks from pingbacks and re-posts. You possibly can have a staff of outsourcers that might write literally hundreds of subpar articles and publish them to enhance their search engine optimization efforts. And it worked; not less than for a while.
Some massive title companies had been even caught up within the content material farm scheme - look what happened with J.C. Penney. In a single simple replace, Google took away what had labored and worked surprisingly properly for months. Throughout this time content material was king - the extra you had the higher - it didn't matter the place it got here from or how nicely it was written; content material was content.
Now the question is, did content farming work for everybody? Not likely. Like it still does now, Google relies very closely - despite the fact that they vehemently deny it - on its own metric of PageRank or PR and the age of the domain. Older websites had been able to (and nonetheless can) publish lots of of links to their websites a week with out taking any ding in search results. This is one thing a new area could not and nonetheless cannot do; or they're going to be destined for the sandbox (although it's probably not as bad as it sounds).
So what did Google do? They decided that as an alternative of fixing the foundations for older sites vs. newer sites, they'd change how they learn and grade content; which makes for a extra even playing area in the long term. The particular person with the higher content will get the recognition; websites which might be merely copying and pasting are considered junk; however authority sites and older domains nonetheless have the benefit - they simply need to provide some decent content for a change.
Now there was an unfortunate side effect of the Google Panda replace, article sites had been hit, and hit exhausting. Particularly EzineArticles and Articlebase, which noticed their search rankings take a huge smack from the Panda. Google's new algorithm regarded these websites as content material farms. But anybody who writes articles understands that these websites should not content farms. These sites have groups of people who learn, edit, and approve articles for these websites; there is no such thing as a duplicate content and the standard is excessive. So why the hit?
Well, even though these sites were not (and nonetheless aren't) content material farms, they did leverage an unimaginable amount of power from being such prominent domains. At the peak of search engine optimization before the Google Panda replace, I might choose a keyword (nearly any key phrase you could possibly imagine) write a correctly optimized article, publish it on a high profile article site, and get it on the first web page of Google within 3 days. No joke. It took barely any effort to get these excessive within the SERPS - these sites had change into so highly effective, they fully dominated the search outcomes. It was uncommon to discover a area of interest key phrase where an article listing or eHow page wasn't in the top 10.
So was the panda hit on these sources deserved? Sure and No. Yes as a result of it was too easy to get high rankings and results from articles alone, and No as a result of a few of the articles had been legitimately written and possibly deserved the rankings that they had achieved.
Though article directories might have taken an unfair hit, one thing is for sure, eHow deserved it's slap. eHow was, and still is a content farm. Most of their articles are simply junk items, written quickly and without much care, and are loaded, absolutely filled to the brim, with ads. Yet after the Panda dust settled, I still discover eHow ends in the highest 10 for practically 50% of the key phrases I am researching. Why is that? Has eHow found a strategy to game the Panda system or has their content gotten better. Something tells me it's not the latter.
The reality is, after the initial hit and far of the dust settled, most of my sites are doing manner better than they ever had been earlier than the Google Panda update. A few of them have improved approach higher than I anticipated, however that actually does not come as a shock to me. What Google panda did was do away with the junk of their SERPS and reward those with good link construction and content.
Anybody with good seo is aware of the basics of on page and off page WEBSITE POSITIONING and the importance that content material and stable one way links convey. Not paying for hyperlinks, not spamming, not content material farming, these were all things individuals knew they shouldn't be doing, but they did anyway, and why? As a result of for some time it worked. However like each Google replace before it, Panda was there to close the exploits, ding the black hats, and reward the white hats.