Webmasters were caught by surprise two weeks ago, when Google released many new statements about their Panda algorithm to The SEM Post. Traditionally, Google tends to be rather quiet about their search algorithms, but their new comments were a departure from this. Google was quite transparent and shared a lot of new Panda-related information that many SEOs weren't aware of.
Here are what I consider to be the top new takeaways from Google about the Panda algorithm. These are all things that SEOs can put into action, either to create new, great-quality content or to increase the quality value of their current content.
First, the Panda algorithm is specifically about content. It's not about links, it's not about mobile-friendliness, it's not about having an HTTPS site. Rather, the Panda algorithm rewards great-quality content by demoting content that's either quite spammy in nature or that's simply not very good.
Now, here are the most important things you should know about Panda, including some of the mistakes and misconceptions about the algorithm update that have confused even the expert SEOs.
Removing content Google considers good
One big issue is that many SEOs have been promoting the widespread removal of content from websites that were hit by Panda. In actuality, however, what many webmasters don’t realize is that they could be shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.
When performing content audits, many penalty experts will cut a wide swath through the site’s content and remove it. Whether claiming that X% of content needs to be removed to recover from Panda or that older, less fresh content needs to be removed, doing this without the proper research will cause rankings to decrease even further. It's never a "surefire Panda recovery tactic," despite what some might say.
Unfortunately for SEOs, there's no magic formula to recover from Panda when it comes to the quantity, age, or length of the content on the site. Instead, you need to look at each page to determine its value. The last thing you want to do is remove pages that are actually helping.
Fortunately, we have the tools to be able to determine the “good versus bad” when it comes to figuring out what Google considers quality. And the answer is in both Google Analytics (or whatever your preferred site analytics program is) and in Google Search Console.
If Google is sending traffic to a page, then it considers it quality enough to rank. If you were going to remove one of these pages because it was written a few years ago or because it was below a magic word count threshold, you would lose all the future traffic Google would send to that page.
If you're determined to remove content, at least verify that Google isn’t sending those pages traffic before you add to your Panda problems by losing more traffic.
Your content should match the search query
We all laugh when we look in our Google Search Console Search Analytics and see the funny keywords people search for. However, part of providing quality content is also delivering those content expectations. In other words, if a search is repeatedly bringing visitors to a specific page, you'll want to make sure that page delivers the promised content.
From the Panda Algo Guide:
A Google spokesperson also took it a step further and suggested using it also to identify pages where the search query isn't quite matching the delivered content. "If you believe your site is affected by the Panda algorithm, in Search Console's Search Analytics feature you can identify the queries which lead to pages that provide overly vague information or don't seem to satisfy the user need for a query."
So if your site has been impacted by Panda — or you're concerned it might be and want to be proactive — start matching up popular queries with their pages, making sure you're fully delivering on those content query expectations. While this won’t be as big of a concern for sites not impacted by Panda, it's something to keep in mind if you do notice those "odd" keywords popping up with frequency.
Ensuring your content matches the query is also one of the easiest Panda fixes you can do, although it might take some legwork to spot those queries that under-deliver. Often, it's just a matter of slightly tweaking a paragraph or two, or adding an additional few paragraphs to change the content for those queries from "meh" to "awesome." And if you deliver that content on the visitor’s landing page, it means they're more likely to stick around, view more of your content, and share it with others — rather than hitting the back button to find a page that does answer their query.
Fixable? Or kill it with fire?
"Fixing" versus "removing" is another area where many experts disagree. Luckily, it's been one of the areas that Google has been pretty vocal about if you know where to find those comments.
Google has been a longtime advocate of fixing poor quality content. Both Gary Illyes and John Mueller have repeatedly talked about improving the quality of content.
In a hangout, John Mueller said:
Overall, the quality of the site should be significantly improved so we can trust the content. Sometimes what we see with a site like that will have a lot of thin content, maybe there’s content you are aggregating from other sources, maybe there’s user-generated content where people are submitting articles that are kind of low quality, and those are all the things you might want to look at and say what can I do; on the one hand, hand if I want to keep these articles, maybe prevent these from appearing in search.
Now, there are always edge cases, and this is what many experts get hung up on. The important thing to remember is that Google’s not talking about those weird, random edge cases, but rather what applies to most websites. Is it forum spam for the latest and greatest Uggs seller? Of course, you'll want to remove or noindex it. But if it's the content you hired your next-door neighbor to write for you, or "original" content you bought off of Fiverr? Improve it instead.
If you do have thin content that you'll want to upgrade in the future, you can always noindex it for now. If it’s not indexable by Google, it’s not going to hurt you, from a Panda perspective. However, it’s important to note that you still need to have enough quality content on your site, even if you're noindexing or removing the bad stuff.
This is also what Google recommended in the Panda Algo Guide:
A Google spokesperson also said this, when referring to lower quality pages. "Instead of deleting those pages, your goal should be to create pages that don’t fall in that category: pages that provide unique value for your users who would trust your site in the future when they see it in the results."
Still determined to remove it after checking all the facts? Gary Illyes gave suggestions during his keynote at Pubcon last year on how to remove thin content properly.
Ranking with Panda
One of the most surprising revelations from Google is that sites can still rank while being affected by Panda. While there are certainly instances where Panda impacts an entire site, and this is probably true in the majority of cases, it is possible that only some pages are negatively impacted by Panda. This is yet another reason you want to be careful when removing pages.
From the Panda Algo Guide:
What most people are seeing are sites that have content that is overwhelmingly poor quality, so it can seem that an entire site is affected. But if a site does have quality content on a page, those pages can continue to rank.
A Google spokesperson confirmed this as well.
The Panda algorithm may continue to show such a site for more specific and highly-relevant queries, but its visibility will be reduced for queries where the site owner's benefit is disproportionate to the user's benefit.
This comment reinforces the idea from Google that a key part of Panda is where Google feels the site owner is getting the most benefit from a visitor to their site, rather than vice-versa.
Duplicate content
One of the first things that webmasters do when they get hit by Panda is freak out over duplicate content. And while managing your duplicate content is always a good idea from a technical standpoint, it doesn’t actually play any kind of a role in Panda, as confirmed by John Mueller late last year.
And even then, John Mueller described fixing duplicate content on a priority scale as "somewhere in the sidebar or even quite low on the list." In other words, focus on what Panda is impacting first, then clean up the non-Panda related technical details at the end.
Bottom line: Duplicate content can certainly affect your SEO. But from a Panda perspective, if your main focus is on getting your site ranking well again in Google after a Panda hit, leave it until the end. Google is usually pretty good about sorting it out, and if not, it's fixable with either some redirects or canonicals.
Word count
Many webmasters fixate on the idea that content has to be a certain number of words to be deemed "Panda-proof." There are plenty of instances of thousand-word articles that are extremely poor quality, and other examples of content so great that even having only a hundred or so words will trigger a featured snippet… something Google tends to give only to higher-quality sites.
Now, if you're writing content, there’s nothing wrong with trying to set up certain benchmarks for the number of words — especially if you have contributors or you're hiring writers. There’s no issue with that. The issue is with falsely believing that word count is related to quality, both in Google’s eyes and from the Panda algo perspective.
It's very dangerous to assume that because an article or post is under a specific word count that it needs to be removed or improved. Instead, as with the case of considering whether you should remove content, look to see whether Google is sending referrals to those pages. If they're ranking and receiving traffic from Google, word count is not an issue.
Advertising & affiliate links
The role that both advertising and affiliate links play in Google Panda is an interesting one. This isn’t to say that all advertising is bad or all affiliate links are bad. It's a topic that John Mueller from Google has brought up in his Google Hangouts, as well. The problem is the content surrounding it — how much there is and what it's like.
Where there's an impact is in the amount of advertising and affiliate links. Will Google consider a page that is essentially just affiliate links without any quality content as good? It’s not that Panda is specifically targeting ads or affiliate content. There are lots of awesome affiliate sites out there that rank really well and are not affected by Panda whatsoever.
The problem lies in the disconnect between the balance of useful content and monetization. At Pubcon, Gary Illyes said the value to the visitor should be higher than the value to the site owner. But as we see on many sites, that balance has tipped the other way, where the visitor is seen merely as a means of revenue, without concern about giving that visitor any value back.
You don’t need to hit your visitors over the head with a huge amount of advertising and affiliate links to make money. That visitor brings a lot of additional value to your site when they don’t feel your site is too ad heavy. From the Panda Algo Guide:
There are also benefits from traffic even if it doesn’t convert into a click on an affiliate link. Maybe they share it on social media, maybe they recommend it to someone, or they return at a later time, remembering the good user experience from the previous visit.
A Google spokesperson also said, "Users not only remember but also voluntarily spread the word about the quality of the site, because the content is produced with care, it’s original, and shows that the author is truly an expert in the topic of the site." And this is where many affiliate sites run into problems.
There's another thing that often happens when a website is hit by Panda: naturally, the revenue from the ads they do have on the site goes down. Unfortunately, often the response to this loss of revenue is to increase the number of ads or affiliate links to compensate. But this degrades the value of the content even further and, despite the knee-jerk reaction, is not the appropriate move in a Panda-busting plan.
Bottom line: There is absolutely nothing wrong with having advertising or affiliate links on a site. That alone won't cause a Panda issue. What can cause a Panda issue, rather, is how and how much you present these things. Ads and affiliate links should support your content, not overwhelm it.
User-generated content
What about user-generated content? Sadly, it's getting a pretty bad rap these days. But it's getting this reputation for the crappy user-generated content out there, not for the high-quality user generated content you see on sites. Many so-called experts advise removing all user-generated content, when again that's one of those moves that can negatively impact your site.
Instead, look at the actual user-generated content you have your site and decide whether it's quality or not. For example, YouMoz is considered to be fairly high-quality user generated content: all posts still have to be approved by editors, and only a small percent of submitted articles make it live on the site. Even then, their editors also work to improve and edit the pieces as necessary, ensuring that even though it is user-generated content, it's still high quality.
But like any content on the web, user-generated or not, there are different levels of quality. If your user-generated content quality is very high, then you have nothing to worry about. You could have a different contributor for every single article if you wanted to. It has nothing to do with how you obtained the content for your site, but rather how high-quality and valuable that content is.
Likewise, with forums or community-driven sites where all the content is user-contributed, it’s about how quality that content is — not about who contributes it. Sites like Stackoverflow have hundreds of thousands of contributors, yet it's considered very high-quality and it does extremely well in the Google search results.
If your user-generated content has both its high point and its low point regarding quality, there are a few things actions that Google recommends so that the lower-quality content doesn’t drag down the entire site. John Mueller said if you can recognize the types of lower-quality content on the forum or the patterns that tend to match it, then you can block it from being indexed by Google. This might mean noindexing your welcome forum where people are posting introductions about themselves, or blocking the chitchat forums while leaving the helpful Q&A as indexable.
And, of course, you need to deal with any spam in your user-generated content, whether it's something like YouMoz or a forum for people who all love a specific hobby. Have good guidelines in place to prevent your active users from spamming or link-dropping. And use some of the many forum add-ons that identify and remove spam before Google can even see it.
Do not follow the advice of those who say all user-generated content is bad… it’s not. Just ensure that it's high quality, and you won’t have a problem with Panda from the start.
Commenting
You may have noticed a trend lately: Many blogs and news sites are removing comments from their sites completely. When you do this, though, you’re removing a signal that Google can use that shows how well people are responding to your content. Like any content, comments aren’t all bad simply because they're comments — their quality is the deciding factor, and this will vary.
And it's not just the Google perspective that dictates why you should keep them. Having a comment section can keep visitors coming back to your site to check for new commentary, and it can often offer additional insights and viewpoints on the content. Communities can even form around comment sections. And, of course, it adds more content.
But, like user-generated content, you need to make sure you're keeping it high quality. Have a good comments policy in place; if you’re in doubt, don’t approve the comment. Your goal is to keep those comments high-quality, and if there’s any suspicion (such as a username of “Buy Keyword Now,” or it's nothing more than an “I agree” comment), just don’t allow it.
That said, allowing low-quality comments can affect the site, something John Mueller has confirmed. I wouldn’t panic over a handful of low-quality comments, but if the overall value of the comments is pretty low, you probably want to weed them out, keep the high-quality comments, and be a little bit more discriminating going forward.
Technical issues
No, technical issues do not cause Panda. However, it's still a widespread belief that things like page speed, duplicate content, or even what TLD the site is on can have an impact on Panda. This is not accurate at all.
That said, these kinds of technical issues do have an impact on your overall rankings — just not for Panda reasons. So, it's best practice to ensure your page speed is good, you’re not running long redirect chains, and your URL structure is good; all these things do affect your overall SEO with Google’s core algorithm. With regards to recovering from Panda, though, it doesn’t have an impact at all.
"Core" Algo
One of the surprises was the addition of the core algo comment, where Google revealed to The SEM Post that Panda was now part of the core algorithm. But what does this mean? Is it even important to the average SEO?
The answer is no. Previously, Panda was a filter added after the core search algo. Now, while it's moved to become part of that core algo, Panda itself is essentially the same, and it still impacts websites the same way.
Google confirmed the same. Gary Illyes from Google commented on it being one of the worst takeaways from all the Panda news.
A2. I think this is the worst takeway of the past few days, but imagine an engine of a car. It used to be that there was no starter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter_(engine)), the driver had to go in front of the car, and use some tool to start the engine. Today we have starters in any petrol engine, it's integrated. It became more convenient, but essentially nothing changed.
For a user or even a webmaster it should not matter at all which components live where, it's really irrelevant, and that's why I think people should focus on these "interesting" things less.
It really doesn't make a difference from an SEO's perspective, despite the initial speculation it might have.
Overall
Google released a lot of great Panda information last week, and all of it contained advice that SEOs can put into action immediately — whether to ensure their site is Panda-proofed, or to fix a site that had been slapped by Panda previously.
The bottom line: Create high-level, quality content for your websites, and you won’t have to worry about Pandas.
In the debate about removing content or improving content the important element is TIME.
If you can improve your content quickly then do it. However, top-quality content requires time to produce.
Lets say you have 200 vulnerable pages, 600 top quality pages, and just got whacked for half of your traffic with rankings down across the site. If the work of improving those 200 pages is very slow and you can only do one per week (a four-year job to improve the entire 200 pages), then you better get that poison content off of the site and get the 600 good pages back into top rankings.
What if you can hire a couple people who can improve four pages per week? That is still going to take a year. It might still be a good idea to remove the poor content and publish the improved as it becomes available. That will improve the average stature of your site and perhaps Panda will rank all remaining content better. Keep in mind that Panda is supposed to be running continuously. Fixing your quality ratio immediately might be beneficial.
That is one thing I recommend... if it is slow to update the poor content, then noindex it and upgrade as you go. But just make sure those "poor" pages are the ones Google thinks are bad... check your Google referrals on those pages before you noindex them, otherwise you could be sabotaging your traffic because of it. This is a really common mistake which makes the issue worse.
I loved your post! About the quality content, as a business owner, I also think that unique content is the best. Some people to save money buy content on content creation platforms and it turns to be a loss of time and money. You better pay someone who creates good contents and in the end, you'll see the return of your inversion.
Yes, I have seen a lot of content that is of such poor quality it isn't worth the price of the $5 per article fee or the price of the content spinner. Great quality content on the other hand has a great ROI :)
It's nice to hear directly from the horse's mouth about the Panda algorithm. You did a nice job summarizing everything in this article. As long as you focus on providing true value to the end user then I feel like you will always be aligned with Googles future updates.
Thank you :)
Another hit on UGC. I have to agree with it though, most of user generated content is created to promote something and then, at best, gets somewhat edited to fit certain guidelines. Then these same "authors" run around being upset that no one accepts UGC anymore...
There are definitely sites that accept UGC - this site is one - but the bar has definitely been raised. Five years ago you could submit an article from an article spinner that was complete crap and you could get it published. Now, sites that are still willing to accept that crap are not the sites you want to be associated with. But there are definitely opportunities for UGC, but only IF you are producing high level, unique, quality content.
As a content creator myself, and someone who co-owns three different sites in different industries, this article means a lot. Not that these were things previously unknown to me, but seeing a mapped out perspective on all of the Panda hype in recent days is very refreshing. Thanks for sharing.. Clipping Path Services
Amazing article, thank you, Jennifer! So nice of you to put it all into one piece of writing; it's much more convenient than going there and back again to collect data.
However, we've all grown accustomed to "write great content", "content is king" etc. but I do not seem to find what good content is vs. poor content. I mean, you said it yourself: sometimes, two lines of pure gold are better than a 2000-word bull - so what are your criteria for QUALITY content?
Thanks in advance!
Readability is one big thing, and something Google seems to be able to figure out. Article spinners for the most part do a crappy job at this, same with using Google translate to create content. Google has said how many visitors have you helped? So your content should be helpful to visitors, not so useless those visitors go elsewhere to get their info or find their answer.
I see. Even Google does not like its own child - text produced in Google Translate. :-)
Well, that pretty much covers my question. Thanks!
Well Google translate is awesome if you need the context for something, but it will never replace a native speaker/writer producing the same content in the chosen language. Hence why articles via Google translate tend to be a Panda target.
And I support that!
I am also a translator and I've seen things... The so-called "translations" that came out of Google Translator's mouth. Well, let's just say they don't look native. :-)
Nice, informative article! It is interesting, I always thought Panda was a 'domain-wide' penalty? I can't say I seen any rank above Page 5 for the entire website. Interesting to hear Google say that a Panda Penalized site can still rank highly...
Definitely a lot of sites that tend to have low quality content have that low quality content across the entire site. But there are some sites where only parts of it have low quality content - for example if a site has a forum with low quality posts, or a larger site that covers a ton of different topics might not have an editor with as high editorial standards for publications in one section. So while it isn't as common, it definitely can happen.
Hi Jennifer,
I was only knew that the Google Panda algorithm is determined only high quality and original content and penalize the websites who have poor content quality.
But after reading this post about Panda algorithm, i think that the panda algorithm is more than that. Here you have mentioned nice things to do when site get penalty from Google Panda Algorithm.
Well Panda specifically doesn't "upvote" great content. But as it hits lower quality sites, naturally better quality sites will move up in the search results to take their places.
Thanks Jennifer for writing such an informative post but it is quite confusing for me to read that "Technical Issues" don't cause panda. Glenn Gabe has also discussed in his case study that Technical Issues also cause panda penalty because Panda is site wide.
I'll be very thankful if you can help me to get rid off this confusion or share any case study in which a site having technical issues was recovered.
Thanks,
Technical aspects are definitely part of the algo, which is why it is so important. It is just not part of the specific Panda algo.
Added: Also, a site is never impacted by just one algo, but a mixture of multiple ones... so it wouldn't be unusual for a site affected by Panda to also have other things impacting it, like technical.
Thanks Jennifer, makes complete sense.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks for such a nice post. i have learnt many new things. i am a newbie in blogging. yes i am also found many funny keyword in Google Search Console Search Analytics. its make me worried. but now i am sure it happened to all.
Great recap Jennifer,
The comments trend is a disturbing one. Search engine land removing their comments section seemed downright stupid. If you spend the time to build up a solid community of folks that look forward to engaging with the content you provide, it's silly to remove that capability from the equation. I would love to see stats on if social shares for such publishers/blogs go up when commenting is turned off or if folks start to abandon the publisher for places where they can engage with each other and the author of a post. I'm sure this is felt far more in niche spaces like SEO blogs.
PS: Even more odd that Search Engine Land didn't put out an article about thier choice to remove comments...
heres and email i recently sent to a previous client who wanted a link "removed"
Please note removing links en-mass can create greater imbalances in your link mix than adding new links; hence please be careful with the rate in which you remove them... i.e. dont send mass emails as this way many links will drop at once. If you are to remove links go slowly and work your list in a priority fashion.
Otherwise you might trigger a ban by removing links and not for placing them...
heck as a link building I could just strip the link and leave the content... what kind of signal is this sending... man panda was a big trap most SEO's jumped into by themselves.... Some people went up when it hit, but man, we are still talking about this sh!t some 4 years later, Big Daddy eat your heart out.
IdcX
Nice post- what do you think about customer reviews?
Customer reviews can definitely be helpful and provide useful content. Amazon does a brilliant job with this and they have some great lengthy and helpful customer reviews. You also notice they usually don't display (or put at the very end) the very short reviews.
Another example for reviews is also IMDB.
Yes, and of course examples like Yelp and TripAdvisor who have built business models around reviews.
Yup!
What can summarize them all? They have lot of moderators and community managers that can very quick hide, edit, disable or change in other way of moderation anything published.
What about those blog who only provide product review content.
Nothing wrong with sites that are just review sites, so long as the content is original and high quality.
What should be average length of a product review content?
I would look more at what your competitors are doing, especially reviews that get shared a lot. It isn't about how many words you think Google wants, but providing the best reviews for your visitors.
I asked this question the other day. Got some pretty useful responses. One that stood out was that reviews solve the problem of keeping content fresh on a page. If happy customers keep posting reviews, you'll not only get more content but it'll be fresh too.
Yes. Personally when I am interested in a product, I look at how recent reviews are. If I see there have been none left by visitors for some time, I start looking to see if there is a newer model or updated version people are buying instead.
I think the biggest takeaway is that once more marketers, SEOs and business owners are thinking for the search engines and not for their users. You shouldn't count the number of words if you are writing an article which you plan to be useful, complete and in-touch with your customers needs - yet again and again we are worried about what Panda will do or will not do.
To me, the only strictly SEO-related issues are the technical ones such as crawability, internal links structure (partially) and HTML/code quality. The rest should just be the consequence of a nice, rich and useful set of web pages.
Just my €0.02... ;)
Yes, in my longer version over at The SEM Post, I had an example of a site that had less than 100 words, yet Google still considers it quality enough to have the featured snippet. That is why the word count thing that some "experts" insist on can actually backfire. It doesn't matter how long/short it is, as long as you are answering the question that led a user to your page in the first place. And these featured snippets with low word count show that Google is pretty good at figuring that aspect out.
I've already read a quite large number of articles about Panda, but always ended unsure about what to do next or how to apply all the theoretical concepts they depicted.
But now, after reading your post, I've got a pretty clear and all the ideas that were wandering around my head started to make sense. A real "aha" moment!! Thanks for that.
Always glad to give people that "a ha!" moment when it comes to Google's algos... they can sometimes be confusing even for experts.
The number of people who always mention the fear of change that apparently grips SEOs after an algo' update always amuses me because the message Google has sent out after every single update for the past 15 years has always been the same: produce great content, get great links, we'll give you great rankings. This is yet another example of that message.
I completely agree with your point on determining whether to fix or kill content based on whether it's ranking and whether it's providing value. These two questions should be on every SEO's mind, though, not just those hoping to recover from a Panda penalty.
Yes, Google always stresses the importance of quality content, but many SEOs will try to do the least amount of work possible to still rank :)
Wow this is an awesome, informative article. Thanks for posting it up!
Have you ever had any experience with content related to porn? My brother (psychologist) has a blog and in one of his posts he wrote about porn addiction.
He believe he was penalized because of that, does it make any sense?
If the quality of the content was high, then no. But it could have flagged the site as being adult content, at least for those pages, so it might not come up for those searchers with safe search turned on.
Did you know that a bamboo is heavily cyanide toxicity? Well not for Panda...
Have you checked your content with CQS?
What is CQS? We have developed a tool named CQS (Content Quality Score) checker https://www.cqscore.com (free) that checks Readability, Duplicate Content and 10 other content factors in one run! It gives a CQS score for your content and a breakdown for the score reason.
Such kind of Google is able to Separate Out Low Quality Content, Focus On Unique Content, Concentrate on Clout & Authority, Keep Advertising Ratio Healthy, and Recognize & Track Panda Updates. I just read these useful functions somewhere!
Very insteresting article. Thanks for post it
Cool article, is itself a great example of quality content
Great great article, my ahref recently dropped dramatically increase on my site went from 9,000,000 to 28,000,000. and have a feeling it is due to panda update. we hire out for content and now are shooting our self in the foot.
[Link removed by editor.]
Nice post , Can u share me some off page activity how is done in best way.
Jennifer would like to thank you first of many. And really I am very impressed with your blog. I'm looking for writing such a long time. You better hope for the future.... And my website clipping path service will work in accordance with the rules given to you. Once again, thank you very much Good luck [Link removed by editor.]
Thank you so much for this update
I was founding many this kind of good information about panda you have shared my wants. Great post.
I am finding Information about google update panda and I have found here. So happy to know that I have learn lots by this post .other post are also very learn full for all . thanks
I agree 100% about duplicate content. I set up a test on a website where every page is duplicate, yet the 'keywords' have changed for different regions. The cool thing is that they are all ranked on page 1 now for highly compeditive marketing services...But like you did mention, it is high quality, long form content that brings value. So another indication that its not all duplicate.
Me quedo claro que panda se encarga de la calidad del contenido y no del https, pero entonces cual es el algo que se encarga del https? Porque quisiera saber si ya impactó en los rankings o solo fue mercadotecnia.
Great post Jennifer, I've saved this article to my Pocket for future reference. :P
I have a quick question. You mention that "For example, YouMoz is considered to be fairly high-quality user generated content: all posts still have to be approved by editors, and only a small percent of submitted articles make it live on the site." I'm curious how difficult it is to get an article featured on Moz Blog or YouMoz? How small the percentage is?
I asked about this, and it was in the 10% neighborhood I think? This wasn't a YouMoz submission though, although I do think some of the best YouMoz posts sometimes do get promoted to the main blog.
In my view mainly Panda update is always regarding content. If any changes or updates come it always related to the duplicate content present in the website.
Google has publicly said that duplicate content and Panda are two separate things. And there are plenty of low quality sites that have been hit by Panda which don't have any duplicate content.
Hi Jennifer, Thanks for the useful insights on Google Panda, and helping me understand the update better.
I would like to ask you about a specific situation regarding duplicate content. Suppose there is a new ecommerce site, where the seller (or the owner) is using same product descriptions (on the individual product pages) which he is already using on plenty of ecommerce sites like Amazon and others. So technically every product page of this new ecommerce site has duplicate content.
Is panda update applicable in this situation?
Does this new site have any chance to outrank existing websites with same content or it will need unique content?
Thanks!
So Panda and duplicate content are two different things. But from an SEO perspective, duplicate content from descriptions on a variety of ecommerce sites can cause issues, and will likely mean the newer sites won't show up unless they have a ton of other content on the page. That is why it is so important for ecommerce sites, especially those dealing with product/affiliate feeds, to rewrite the descriptions etc. I would be very surprised if a new site could outrank existing sites without unique content, especially if there are hundreds/thousands with that same content.
Take a description in question, and throw it in Google with " " around it and see what the search results return. It isn't unusual to see thousands of pages that show up after you click the "many similar websites were also found" link at the bottom of the Google search results.
Also, a look in Search Analytics will also show if you are ranking for any of those keywords for those pages.
Thanks for the reply, It's a new site, so it doesn't have much search traffic, traffic only coming from social campaigns. There are around 200 product pages, and every page content is already present at hundreds of pages. There is not even a single product page that has original content. So according to you, it's going to be quite difficult to rank this website without making descriptions unique.
If you are happy just with social traffic, you wouldn't need to rewrite it. But if you want to rank well in Google, you will need to rewrite those descriptions and get original content on your site.
Great post about Panda, Jennifer. Great help to people like me who doesn´t understand too much about Panda Algo. My favourite tool for SEO is my common sense and a big knowledge of my business... but i know that is not enough. I reached one point i can not go forward. And these kind of articles are really helpful. Thanks! :)
I was joking on Twitter earlier today that some SEOs are lacking in common sense :) But also many are just looking for the path of least resistance - how to make content quality enough to not get hit by Panda or a manual action while not having to make it much better than that.
"Many blogs and news sites are removing comments from their sites completely" - I have also noticed other websites removing the no follow links to the commentators website/ profile after having been approved by the moderator and been on the website for years. There are also websites which do not allow any links at all on the comments.
Yes, it all depends on the site. I would be careful commenting on sites that do allow follow comments, even if they are approved. I suspect if you dig around, you will find links sneaking through that shouldn't. Nowadays, nofollow is pretty common for sites I would consider to be quality.
Great post - What I want to know is, how does the Panda impact eCommerce sites? It can be hard to add quality content to category/product pages. Just keep the descriptions unique?
Unique descriptions is key... your products won't rank if you use the same stock/supplied description everyone else uses. But also think about content that complements your product area, like how to do/install/change/update. Think about the questions people have about your products, they can often be turned into articles.
Hey Jennifer, what about if you are the manufacturer and other sites use the same descriptions. Does it make sense to deliver different descriptions to them, or will it be important where it is first published?
So where it is published first will play a role, but if you have other search algos negatively impacting your site, then those other sites could potentially outrank you.
If you have a feed you give to affiliates/sellers, then rewriting those descriptions would be a good move. Then if you find a seller copying the descriptions on your site, you can say they need to either use the descriptions you provide through the feed, or write their own.
Ok that is what I thought as well. I guess a shortened version would also be enough to rank better as it would mean less relevant content compared to the original. Thanks for the article
Yes, but you also want to think about it from the sales perspective... you don't want a short non-complete description if those result in the sales of your products :) And identical-but-shorter version could potentially cause issues still, especially if things like specs are on the same page as well.
Jennifer,
What about jobs portals having duplicate jobs descriptions? Employers post the jobs descriptions simply copying the published ones and do not care about unique job description - just change the company name and location. Will Panda or any duplicate content penalty can impact SEO rankings for jobs website? Thanks:)
That would fall under duplicate content. But if all your pages are essentially copied from elsewhere, Google isn't going to consider that site very high quality. But as far as being the company doing the hiring, they probably don't care as much about the duplicate content issue specifically, since it would lead to their site for someone to apply regardless.
But if you are a site just reposting these job listings, then I wouldn't expect you'd do well with what is essentially duplicated/copied content.
Hey Louise!
I just wanted to add, I had many clients in unique niches that were thought to only need product descriptions. However with some research I was able to devise questions for the company that they could address (with their expert knowledge) in blog articles. We went from 'how to', 'top 10', and many more types of articles that were useful. I made them think about their industry from an outsiders perspective (one of the biggest assistance I can provide while working in an agency). We worked on keywords and content together, but we created useful artciles that performed very well!
Just like Jennifer said, think of content that will compliment your products.
Yes, it is surprising how many content ideas you can come up with if you start brainstorming.
Yeah "Write great content and they will follow", but in reality there are many things that can prevent this.
Example - MFA sites. They may have great content but used to drive people clicking in ads around it.
Doorway pages, same IP with "content farms", proportion of text/links and many more.
That's why we didn't know (still) all aspects of Panda. And fixing "algo" mean adding new signals or removing them. Or just change their weight.
MFA sites have been having a harder time since Panda launched. But they have also been having a harder time with other algo parts too, like the above the fold and even the pirate algo to a certain extent. So many traditional MFA sites are increasing the quality, but it comes down to are they providing value to their visitors or not?
True... this is related with "over 200 ranking factors". So if content is one of them there are over 199 possibilities.
Same is with affiliate sites. Example is mine own site (link in profile). So i have links to Apple AppStore and Google Play because this is where apps are published and sold. That's right - i'm in gray zone just as many other software publishers. I'm not software aggregator with tons of software, i have just 10-20 apps that are mine.
Well, I don't think content is just one ranking signal... many other signals are somehow related to content as well, hence why Google is always stressing the importance of quality content.
One or two affiliate links isn't a problem. But when it is limited content that is only promoting a ton of affiliate links, then it is heading over to the "not quality" side of the fence.
Hi,
Is there anything a content aggregation site can do to avoid Panda problems? The aggregation service is a valuable add to the user as it saves them going everywhere else in a disjointed sector and gives the latest news all in one spot.
Maybe have to add additional commentary of our own to each article?
Thanks.
There aren't many content aggregation sites that do a good job... ie. why should someone want to go to your site rather than seeing it on Twitter, etc. Adding commentary is one way to do this. Or techmeme does it by grouping what they see as important articles that relate to a specific story.
I wonder if it's more around the technical nature on "how" you are aggregating and presenting the content. If it's just an abstract and you link out vs. pulling in all of the content into your framework; you might be apt to perform better. In the latter, you have the opportunity to tailor the content and perhaps focus on the content that drives 80% of your traffic and just make sure it's damn good. With all the feed reader tools out there, seems like an uphill battle.
It is very hard to pull off an aggregate site that is also useful to visitors. There are countless sites out there that simply repost blog posts from other sites, either the snippet or the whole thing.
And that is just it, if you want to do an aggregate site, how can you make it better than someone just using their feed reader or Twitter.
NIce post about Panda, Jennifer. It i s very helpful for all people like me who don't understand too much about Panda Algo. And these kind of articles are really helpful. Keep writing please Thanks! :)
Thank you, I will :)
Great post Jennifer. How can we know when Google releases a new panda update.
They have said publicly that we very likely won't be able to see when it updates anymore. John Mueller went into some detail in a recent hangout on it, the transcript of what he said is here:
https://www.thesempost.com/google-panda-unlikely-seos-will-notice-when-panda-updates/
Hey Jennifer,
As a content creator myself, and someone who co-owns three different sites in different industries, this article means a lot. Not that these were things previously unknown to me, but seeing a mapped out perspective on all of the Panda hype in recent days is very refreshing.
Personally, these were areas of my work where I've been irrationally fearful for the first two years of creating content and managing websites. But thanks to sites like Moz and the inbound community around the web, it eventually catches up with you. There was still some effort lost down the drain though... I guess that's why it bugs me quite a lot when I see all of the Panda hype nowadays.
As for what you've shared, I see the biggest mistake people make in removing comments. Some of the best performing articles of mine have over 600 comments and I strongly believe that it helps them rank where they currently do. Comments have a way of helping conversions immensely as well. And this creates a cascade of positive ranking signals.
It's not easy at all reading every comment to the letter, and deciding whether to allow it or not. Especially when it comes to a content-rich website. But it pays off. My advice would be to follow what bloggers like Ramsay Taplin do- read and respond to as much of the comments as they can. This encourages more engagement, and ultimately more time spent on site, better conversions, and slowly but without question- higher rankings.
Yes, it is definitely one of the unfortunate side effects of Panda. There are lots of sites that used to have really valuable comments, sometimes even more valuable that the article itself, and those are now gone.
For duplicate content, if I put one content version in English and the same content in my native language my SEO rank still affect in one content version.
Definitely use hreflang for the same content in multiple languages in this scenario.
Google has a ton of info on it here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Once it is confirmed that the content quality are more important than the technical problems, Google rewards even more good content.
Such a details overview of Panda algo and its major factor I suppose.
Would love to share with other folks as well. Thanks
I am using unique content for all the website that's why i did not feel any changes in SERP in any projects.
Very good summary Jennifer
In my view this Panda algorithm update is one more indication to think on users and not search engines. If you feel your content is not being read by your users, delete it easily. and So on..
Yes, Google has been pretty vocal in the last few months about publishers needing to ensure that the benefits to the visitor outweigh the benefits a site owner gets from having them there, the whole "how many helped" not "how many visited" thing.
Panda, the word itself creates a feeling of fear especially in the mind of the "SEO" :)
Since its release and updates, many sites have been shown to be terribly affected by the algorithm, but the worst rumor here is, they can do almost nothing to recover the ranking and traffic. As per my experience, we should have to take below mentioned precautions to prevent from the panda because “Prevention is better than cure”:
Well, if you are creating high level, quality content, you really don't need to fear Panda. Just those who are creating content using shortcuts (spinners, translate, etc) or "$5 per article" type of services for their site's content
Nice post on Panda Algo.
Good article, I enjoyed it. a greetingdo