Why was the Panda update released?
As with all Google updates, Panda was released to further ensure that Google provides the most relevant and high quality result when a someone types a query into the search engine. As a result, they need to address the issue of websites attempting to manipulate rankings by creating thin content or utilising spun content. If searchers are returned results that are not of the highest possible quality and offer the most value to them as users this is detrimental to the subsequent value they place on Google’s search engine.
How can I avoid being penalised by the Panda update?
The Panda update focusses on websites that contain poor quality content, however ‘low quality content’ is a rather broad term so here are a number of ways in which you can avoid your content being classes as low quality:
Focus on value for the user. If you haven’t read any of our other content on the site, this is a recurring theme across almost all of our advice. Writing content purely for search engines will inevitably can bring you close to the dangerous lands of keyword stuffing and reduce the readability of your content. User and usage data is an important quality indicator for Google so engaging your user is key. Be honest with yourself. When Panda was first released Google’s Amit Singhal wrote a list of questions that content creators should be asking themselves as a way of assessing their own content, most of which are concerned with the value and authority that a user places on the content and site as a whole.
Eradicate duplicate content on your site, both internally within your site and cross site. This can be exact match duplicate content or near match. Do not copy and paste large swathes of content from other sites without referencing the other site and do not simply change a few words thinking that this will fool Google. E-commerce sites are common violators of this through their use of manufacturer’s descriptions or data that has been pulled from another website. If you are featuring another business’ products on your site invest in rewriting the product descriptions as you see fit.
Avoid having lots of content that appears on every page on your site as this simply reduces the amount of real estate available for content that is unique to that page and will run the risk of being considered duplicate content.
Do your research and focus on producing content that cannot be found anywhere else on the web. Using techniques such as inverse document frequency (td-idf) can help you identify subject matter that is rare and may be of high value to your users.
Using automated tools such as Google translate can also land you in hot water. Automated translation tools have improved dramatically since their inception but they are still reasonably innaccurate and therefore any content that has been translated by a computer is likely to be of a lower quality than that which has been professionally translated.
Be vigilant with the work conducted by a third party SEO agency. We have seen example of websites that appear to have well researched and formulated content, only to simply copy and paste a paragraph into Google and see that it has been scraped off other sites!
Panda after 2018
However, Google are now no longer updating the Panda algorithm. In January 2016, Google announced that Panda would now be part of its core ranking algorithm and that no further Panda updates would be released. This move was hardly surprising, and was highly anticipated by the SEO community. But what difference does this make? Simply put, prior to this change Panda was merely used as a filter that was applied to results after the core ranking algorithm did its work. While Panda used to be its own stand alone algorithm, it has now been encompassed by the core algorithm as one of its many ranking elements. Therefore, it looks like Panda is here to stay – so creating quality content for your site is now more important than ever.
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