Google’s Panda 2.0 Update : The Ultimate Guide to Google Updates

In two of its previous updates, the Attribution Update and Panda, Google took a strong position in favor of ranking quality content higher.  At the same time, it would drop, or sometimes even entirely remove, low-quality content from its rankings.

The Attribution Update targeted sites with low levels of original content and sites that copied content from other sites.  Panda’s main goal was to return the highest-quality result for your search.  So, if you searched for the cure to a health condition, pages from our federal government’s website would be more likely to be ranked highly than pages from someone’s blog.

As a result of these updates, Google received a ton of positive feedback from searchers, and sites with high-quality content reported receiving even more traffic.

In Panda 2.0, released on April 11, 2011, Google began to include data about sites users block into its algorithm.  It would then take those sites and rank them lower in its rankings.

Additionally, Panda 2.0 would evaluate the results of “long tail” websites.  “Long tail” keywords usually refers to key phrases made up of 3 or more words.  These words typically return lower-quality results than shorter key phrases of 2 words or less.

Panda 2.0 would delve deeper into those long-tail results and increase Google’s ability to return quality results.  Amit Singhal, one of Google’s lead engineers, noted that about 2% of U.S. search queries would be affected.

Also at the time, users could block certain sites from their search results, and Panda 2.0 took this block data into account when ranking sites.

Google stated that it was very pleased with the results of this update, and while it wouldn’t consider any exceptions to the rule, it would nonetheless take feedback from website owners into account.

How Could Panda 2.0 Affect Your Site?

As with all recent Google updates, you are being increasingly forced to focus on having high-quality content on your site.  No longer can you slam down the first thing coming to mind, spatter some keywords in it, and publish it.

Now, you have to think it through and write something people will like.  

• What is “High-Quality” Anyway?
• What is considered “high-quality” on the internet is much different that what is high-quality for print publication.  But, that’s because online reading is a much different animal than reading print publications.
• Online, people are looking for an answer to their question while having to read the fewest words possible.  Most articles go no longer than 500 words, and most people don’t even read all of those words.

Online, basically if you do the following, you should be all right:

• Make sure your content is engaging
• Ensure your content solves a problem people have
• Make sure that just about anyone can understand it
• Proofread to make sure you have no spelling or grammar errors

By following that simple procedure, your content should have no problem being labeled “high-quality”, under seo services standards.

Be sure to stay tuned for more parts in this series!

 

REMEMBER TO LIKE US ON FACEBOOK, Follow us On Twitter, and IF YOU HAVE A GOOGLE + JOIN THE CIRCLE