Search environment has changed a lot over the years and has become a very competitive playing field. The overall online community has been largely affected by the changes that Google has introduced in it’s algorithm over the past few years. Previously anyone could have inserted important keywords and given hundreds and thousands of links in their content to make it rank on top and Voila! You achieved your goal. However, now the situation has changed since Google introduced a major change in its ranking algorithm in february 2011. The change majorly aimed at lowering the site ranks of those sites that offered low-quality content and give a chance to “relevant content” to come on top. It was named as Google’s Panda Algorithm.
A lot of people were wondering which part of their SEO practices they could modify and emphasize to recover from the effect on rankings by .
The Purpose of the Panda Algorithm
Many people were wondering that what will happen to sites that were innocent and were not performing content farming. So how does this algorithm affects our SEO efforts?
We know for sure that Google runs test on algo changes whether unleashing for a couple of hours, rolling out the update on a small datacenters or it will run on a country specific version of Google to test the update before rolling it out. Amongst the marketers it is known as which might have actually been a dry run for Panda release.
Even though panda update was introduced to eliminate ‘low quality’ content but there were some of the civil casualties too that were reported. The panda update had affected sites like , , and a lot of other sites. Ezine articles being a very reputed and popular websites for guest blogging was already very strict in accepting the articles to be published on their site but they decided to be even more stricter with the articles they are accepting.
Some of the other popular websites that were affected are:(original one at: )
How to Improve Your SEO Efforts?
Since Google will keep on working on improving their efforts to serve the most relevant and “liked” content by its users, marketers need to understand that publishing content just for the heck of bringing in traffic to the website wouldn’t be enough. Google is trying to make sure that people who are trying to bring in visitors to their sites for getting clicks and impressions on their ads do not get momentum in its search rankings.
We as marketers should always keep in mind that people want real, useful, quality content- and Google is trying its best to deliver that to the visitors. Sure there have been some unwanted and uncalled for ranking penalties on those who were innocent but that’s a technical glitch just like any other which Google will patch up in the due course of time with the better and new updates.
The latest version of the Panda Ranking algorithm 4.2 was released on 15 January, 2015 which according to a study had affected 2-3% of the queries which is lower than the previous refresh of 3-5% in September 2014 and last major update in Panda algorithm was made in May 2014 which affected 7.5% of search queries.
Well this update was technically a refresh and not an update, what that means is that it is reapplying the identical signals from the previous panda updates just that it fixed in some bugs errors.
What these changes to algorithms means for SEOs is that once Google begins rolling out one of these updates, it will be too late to make any changes to the content that will have any effect during the rolling out phase period. These updates usually have a cut-off date and any changes made after this date will be applied during the next refresh or update. That is why it is highly advisable that marketers continually update content or make fresh content as much as possible.
