For digital agencies company, when it comes to search engine optimization and online marketing, they need to keep their eyes on what Google is doing. Because for last few years, the biggest search engine in world keeps updating its search algorithms, and for some companies that didn’t know or follow about Panda and Penguin algorithm update, their sites are on trouble. The algorithm updates that Google did became main topics in SEO community, because they caused huge difference in ranking of search engine result page for most websites.
Even though, the main priority why Google did these updates is for improving search result for their users and they proved it with the success of their updates for the most part up until now. The main target of Google’s algorithm updates are poor quality content, duplicate content that appears in multiple site around the internet, and content that has spammy links and thinly-veiled affiliate agendas. But, not everyone agree that Google’s algorithm updates improving its overall quality of search results. Now, with Google made another algorithm update for Panda 4.1, business owner needs to know how this update can affect their business.
The first Panda algorithm update was made in the early of year 2011, and it was made to banish so called content farms, or websites that have many poor quality contents and identical contents like in other website. From that, Google made lots of tweaks and revision of this algorithm, and it latest update was Panda 4.1. The newest update was begun to roll in early October, and Google said this update affected about 3-5% of search results. And this is what business owner need to worry about, because the last update of Google algorithms only affected less than 2% of results.
Peirre Far from Google said this on his Google+ page:
“Based on user (and webmaster) feedback, we’ve been able to discover a few more signals to help Panda identify low-quality content more precisely. This results in a greater diversity of high-quality small and medium-sized sites ranking higher.”
It’s obvious that Google won’t tell what signals that their using to identity low quality content, but many SEO experts started to guess from what the update has affected. From an article on Searchmetrics, said that lyric, games sites and medical information portals are the biggest losers from Panda 4.1. This result is quite reasonable because those sites didn’t have quality and original contents. On the other hand, news sites, information sites with content-driven entertainment are the winner and have better rankings with Panda 4.1. To summarize Panda 4.1, useful content is good, and thin unoriginal content is bad.
To avoid penalty from Panda 4.1, business owner need to order his content staff to create high quality content with user-focused type. For business owner that worry about their sites got bad effect from Panda 4.1, the first thing that they need to ask their employee is to do content audit to look for lack quality contents and contents that are too short. Business owner also need to tell their staff to monitor any of his contents that got copied in other sites or duplicate in his own sites. For sites that copied contents could be salvageable using few tweaks or adding more substantial, and for duplicate contents in owned site should be deleted immediately.
After that, business owner can move to the next step which is ask their copywriter to create content that will make their visitors and Google will love. They need to create original, unique, well written, no typo, useful and user-focused content with length is about 300 words. With this practiced, business owner doesn’t need to worry getting bad effects from Panda 4.1 anymore.