Google has announced a new update that will roll out over the coming months called Panda 4.2. If you’re not familiar with Panda, it is a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that made its first debut in February 2011. The goal was to differentiate between low-quality websites and high-quality websites and give higher search rankings for websites deemed higher in quality. The original change affected almost 12 percent of all websites and was a huge game changer for businesses and SEOs.
So what deems a quality website? Google published a bullet point list of items they use to rank websites for quality and includes the following:
- Would you trust the information presented in this article?
- Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
- Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
- Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
- Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
These are just a few of the items Google started looking at with the original Panda update. For the complete list check out the blog Google originally published in 2011.
Related post: Google’s latest Panda 4.1 Update
Since this time, businesses and SEOs have worked relentlessly to create high-quality content to help their websites rank higher. Google warns that having poor quality content or duplicated content can slow down traffic to your website, so it’s best to remove those pages, block them from being indexed, or rewrite them entirely.
Google is always working to improve the search results to provide more relevant, reliable results for everyone. Google has gotten smarter and more sophisticated over time by continuing to make updates to Panda. Many SEOs used to use various tricks of the trade to get their websites to rank higher, but most of these tricks are now working against websites, causing penalties and lower rankings in the search results.
Panda 4.2 is expected to affect 2 – 3% of queries, and is considering this more of a “refresh” than an “update.” The last refresh in September 2014 affected 3 – 5% of queries, and the big update back in May 2014 affected 7.5% of search queries.
This refresh is going to be rolling out over the next coming months, but we don’t have specifics about how long it will last. All we know at this time is to expect changes to happen over a period of several months.
So what does this mean for your business website? It should be your top priority to focus on the quality of your website. Talk to your SEO expert to get their opinion on what you can do to improve your website content. Your SEO might suggest getting an SEO audit to determine what is working well on and what needs improvement on your website. An SEO audit will cover a review of the quality of your content, internal links, links coming from other websites, how effective your keywords are, citation analysis, and more. An audit is a very thorough way to figure out what you have done well and what specifically needs to be improved. But always remember that the goal is quality.
DoubleDome can help. We have a team of SEO experts that have worked with many companies on their search engine optimization strategy. Call us at 888-799-6067 or fill out our consultant contact form for more information.
