Google Panda Update: Quality Content is more Important than Ever

Google’s latest algorithm update known as the “panda” penalized a lot of low quality and shallow content sites, affecting the sites ranking and burying  them deep in the search results . The change is said to have impacted 12% of US search results.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s main focus is making content farms and low quality content sites less visible in search. Google’s algorithm changes frequently in order to crawl and return the most relevant and trustworthy results for their searchers. The main focus with the Panda algorithm update was to lower the amount of spam that is found in search results. Penalizing sites with low quality, copied or auto-generated content helps to make search results more relevant to users and lowers the amount of spam on the search engine results page.

How can you avoid being penalized by Google for low quality content?

1. Focus on creating original, unique content relevant to your audience;
2. Make sure the content aligns with the page’s keyword strategy;
3. Create “likeable” content that can be shared in social media channels;
4. Shoot for high quality content that is informative and trustworthy.

Google’s goal is to return the most relevant and trustworthy results to the searcher, and through the panda update Google rewarded those sites that are creating original content and penalized the “copiers.” It is always important to focus on quality over quantity, and we should all strive to make our websites useful and relevant to our target audience. The panda update is just a reminder that building a website is also about building trust with our audience, not only to increase our ranking, but also to increase conversion.

Source:
“Google search and search engine spam”, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html

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Contributed by: Meagan Hasenoehrl, e-Strategist, Milestone Internet Marketing