Beating the Google Panda

In late February Google rolled out a change to its automatic day-to day way of assessing web content commonly know as its ‘algorithms’. The change to Google’s “site quality algorithms” was designed to help Google users to find high quality websites more easily by simply reducing the number of low quality pages. Since we as human visitors are likely to be the best overall judge of what makes a good experience when arriving at a web page, Google acknowledges that creating an algorithm to assess ‘quality’ was a “difficult task”. We as web users and webmasters, and online business people can be very much affected by whatever Google chooses to focus on. Also we are not party to the exact content of and changes to Google’s algorithms. Throw into the mix then the fact that just being asked to create ‘quality’ may be subject to subjectivity and it seems only fair that we have a bit more guidance.

What It isn’t

Google’s latest guidance isn’t a direct disclosure of any part of the mighty “site quality algorithm”. It’s also not an extraordinary occurrence to change or “tweak” algorithms. Google points pout that there have been over a dozen algorithm “tweaks” since Panda which may have affected your web pages, and that there are likely to be 500 or so further “improvements” to algorithms to be made over the rest of this year.

What It Is

The latest guidance is a chance to “step into Google’s mindset” and to see some of the kinds of questions that Google asks itself when developing algorithms to assess site quality. It is also another chance to read between the lines which is often necessary in order to get a better understanding of what an algorithm is actually about.

Some Specifics

Two specific and important pieces of information given alongside the guidance questions are that:

1. The rankings of a whole website will be affected by the inclusion of low quality content on some parts of the website.
2. Rankings for the whole website can be helped by indentifying the “shallow” pages in your website and then merging that content into other pages, improving those pages, or even moving the low quality pages to a different domain to stop them from having a negative affect on the whole website.

What Are The Questions?

Visit the Google Blog for the Whole List of 23 questions. To summarise here some of main topics of the questions that could be the basis of Google’s current thinking on website quality:

• How authoritative the source is e.g. whether the site is a recognized authority and whether it’s written by an expert or enthusiast.
• How much trust we can put in the information and website e.g. can the information itself be trusted, would be happy to give our credit card number on the website, and would we recommend or share the pages with our friends?
• How much care has been taken in the production of the content e.g. the spelling, the style and the editing.
• How much depth there is to the content e.g. is it comprehensive, insightful, dos it give both sides of a story, and is it more like the quality of something that would appear in printed magazine or book?
• How original the content e.g. is it duplicated from or overlapping of existing content?
• How focused on the search engines rather than people is it?
• Is the content going to provide ‘value’ to readers and a good experience?

Educated Guess

For those people who are familiar with the things that Google already rewards the ‘Panda’ change simply appears to go a bit further down those roads. Important themes and considerations appear to be making sure you avoid duplicate content and to keep producing high value, interesting and original content on your web pages. It’s clearly a good idea also to avoid using short pages which are ‘shallow’ on any real facts and useful information. It’s clear also that we should be creating environments within our web pages which make our website visitors feel comfortable, and we should be offering them concrete and overt reasons why they can trust us. Paying attention to the little details which actually matter the human reader such as spelling and grammar, and making pages accessible, easy to read and comprehend also appears to be something that could help our websites.

Focus On The Long Term And The Big Picture

With the announcement of this latest guidance Google would like us to think of the ‘big picture’ rather than individual algorithms, and to look at how we can ensure that our websites rank well and get good amounts of traffic in the ‘long term’ by thinking more about our own website quality control.