Google Updates Creates Panda-monium

September 23, 2011

Google’s Panda updates make one point black and white: the world’s leading search engine has a mission to produce quality search results.

While Google makes continuous changes to their search algorithm throughout the year to enhance user experience, Panda is their newest weapon in ridding search results of low quality, ad festered web junk. Let’s take a closer look.

In Google’s Eyes

The most central point to make is that Google can make or break success of any Web venture. The Google algorithm is always updating in small doses, and in most cases these updates go unnoticed. Panda is the exception, seeing a new version every month or so, but the effects have been drastic. Some of the most recent updates have caused websites lost up to 94% visibility, even forcing some webmasters to consider other options for retirement.

Pre-Panda, there were a variety of methods that developers would use to “trick” Google’s algorithm, creating search results that were less than subpar. Many search queries on Google would produce dozens of useless websites chock full of ads and regurgitated information. Searching on the web became more of a chore than a user friendly experience. Big G finally took action.

Panda Losers

90% of a website’s authority (ranking power) came from backlinks (quantity and authority of the inbound links) and as such, developers would backlink the heck out of their websites through link farms, trading links (with any webmaster they could), paying for links, and even the insidious act of link spamming. The content was more or less keyword stuffed jargon, barely illegible by most people.

Many “Black Hat SEO” developers were exploiting the loopholes in the algorithm, climbing their websites right up to #1 or #2 in the Google rankings. High quality websites that had not been properly designed to favor Google’s algorithm plummeted in place of low caliber websites that perfected the algorithm. This was not beneficial for business or consumer.

So Who Benefits From Panda?

For high quality websites that have sat on the bench in favor of the juiced up cheaters, justice is being served, at least for now. The “steroid era” baseball reference was too easy, but the Google Panda updates have effectively focused on quality over quantity, that is, how relevant a website’s individual pages are in terms of content. Google also places more weight on usability and engagement which is determined by time spent on a website and each individual page of the site from then on, usefulness of information on the website, and speed of the website.

So it only makes sense that websites that produce high quality content will persevere from the Panda updates. Websites that have continuously implemented “White Hat SEO” methods will see the biggest gains from these updates.

These white hat methods are the core of Google’s shift in their algorithm. Why reward those who have cheated Big G’s system as in the black hat SEO webmasters? Google owns 2/3 of the search engine market share and suffice it to say, they have A TON of Web authority. In business, entities work together and with the Web, those entities are the developers and Google. Entities that want to cheat the system usually go out of business.

How Your Website Will Succeed

The most important factors of a websites success in the year of the Panda and the foreseeable future are:

Great Content

Google’s intent was to weed out the shallow, “get rich quick” advertising graveyards on the Web. Their less obvious and oft mentioned aim is to track usability and engagement. Bounce rate, average time on site, and repeat visits are three important factors to a site’s success and they are measurable statistics.

A website’s success depends on content; rich, practical, relevant content. If your website is contains high quality content, the traffic will simply be a positive result of your hard work. There is not one factor that is more important.

High Quality Links

Links from websites that are of high quality and are also highly relevant to your site are extremely viable to stay afloat on the Web. This means that your inbound links (same as backlinks) should originate from reputable web sites with relevant content to your own. The stronger and more relevant the website, the stronger the link to your site will stand.

Website Usability

Consistent traffic to your website tells Google that you have great content and a solid reputation on the Web. The next step (which should really be your first step in the development process) is to make sure that your website user friendly. It should be structured, easy to navigate, and most importantly appeal to your audience. Before designing the website you should know your audience, what their need for you website is, and how they will interact with it when it’s available.

Load times are important regarding usability because they are part of the user’s experience. Slow load times are not viewed as positives by Google and thus your page should be optimized to load faster. This includes the site itself and the content on the site. Slow load times could result in loss of traffic.

White Hat SEO Methods

Up to this point, all factors of a website’s success after the deployment of Panda are equal in importance excluding content, because content is king. Without great content, none of this matters.

There are many of on and off page SEO techniques that are acceptable and even encouraged by Google. Content, hypertext descriptions, and page architecture are the three most significant on page SEO strategies while links, social media, author trust, and personal reputation are important off page SEO methods. Comparatively, any violations such as link spam, hidden and stuffed hypertext, paid links, and thin content have negative impacts towards both on and off page SEO.

Content Management Systems, SEO, and Panda

Google analyzes content by crawling HTML documents so from a search engine standpoint, a content management system will not have any bearing on SEO. Where a CMS does has the advantage is that it utilizes a framework of PHP, databases, APIs, CSS, Javascript, and template files to manage the process of rendering a web page’s HTML to the browser. Once rendered, the hypertext contains information to codify and categorize the web page.

Drupal has the option of turning on clean URLs which is great for SEO. Clean URLs allow the URL to be legible by a human reader and not just the browser. You may have seen a URL look something like http://www.example.com/services?page=1231&, but with a clean URL you would see something like http://www.example.com/services/SEO. Google and most other browsers like clean URLs.

Websites created with Drupal also benefit from SEO ready modules such as Pathauto and XML Sitemaps. Pathauto creates a URL for the page title related to the page content. Sitemaps are of the utmost importance on any website as they tell Google and other search engines what is on your site and how it is structured. Having a sitemap is always a huge plus when it comes to SEO, and the XML Sitemaps module creates one for the developer without any extra work.

Bamboozled

Google’s Panda updates are 2011’s big bang from the world’s leading search engine. Developers who work by a code of SEO ethics have reaped the benefits of properly building a website while those who have cheated the system have lost credibility. It looks like the Panda is too much to bear for the cheaters.