Panda Update: Bamboo Doesn’t Come Easy

When you think of the word ‘Panda’ you tend to imagine a black and white bear eating bamboo, sneezing away and practising in the art of kung fu. However, the most recent Panda is an algorithm update which has been released by Google forcing two major changes to the way its search engine filters rank websites.

What's The Big Fuss About, You Ask?

As a result of this update, many sites have dropped considerably. So, the first element to this update was responsible for dramatically lowering the rankings of websites considered to have ‘spammy’ content, which provide little to no original information mostly copied from already existing original content. The second factor was removing ‘low-quality’ websites that offered no real content and tended to be full of adverts based on certain keywords. Recently, Overstock.com was punished for questionable link building practices which have been ruled out with the new Panda update; filtering out low quality links. So it just goes to show that getting thousands of quick spam links, even if your competitors are doing so, is not the way to go and Google will penalise users for practicing this strategy. To make sure you don’t become the next Overstock, do your SEO research properly to avoid wasting time and money.

Steps You Can Take To Avoid Penalties

It may not even be these links that got the competition where they are at the moment, it could simply be that they deserve to be there for that keyword because their brand and reputation is worthy enough. If you know this isn’t the case, it’ll only be a matter of time before this fighting Panda kicks them down for using these spammy back links.

How is it then you determine a valuable site? Google doesn’t tell us the specific details of what determines these low quality sites, but we can gather a few pointers from a site before we begin link building with some tell tale signs.

• Ads and plenty of them: If you see chunks of Google AdSense and text links plastered across the site, then you can determine the site offers no real content and should definitely be avoided.
• Content: If the site is not moderated and the articles are approved instantly, this is another website that should be avoided. Your content may be a great piece of work but you can bet most of the other content will be crammed full of spam with no attention to spelling and grammar. It’s therefore better to use strictly moderated sites requiring approval, however, be weary of websites where paid links maybe a factor. The same moderation should be applied to blogs and social media sites, so if you see a bunch of spammy links under a post update, you definitely won’t want your link next to it.
• Content with no traffic: A blog with a Google PageRank of 6 seems like a great place to leave a comment, but if that blog doesn't have good influence in terms of send/receive data and social sharing, then it may be thrown down in the future.

With this in mind try to focus on your content because around 90% of companies use high quality content on their blogs, webinars, whitepapers, infographics and such for natural link building which provides clients with those desired leads. If you think your website doesn’t abide by Google’s algorithm laws, it’s time to change your link building strategy.