Panda: The Game Changer for Content

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

2858 ratings

University of California, Davis

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

2858 ratings

Course 1 of 6 in the Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ever wonder how major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo rank your website within their searches? Or how content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users? Welcome to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This course is the first within the SEO Specialization and it is intended to give you a taste of SEO. You will be introduced to the foundational elements of how search engines work, how the SEO landscape has changed and what you can expect in the future. You discuss core SEO strategies and tactics used to drive more organic search results to a specific website or set of websites, as well as tactics to avoid to prevent penalization from search engines. You will also discover how to position yourself for a successful career in SEO should this subject prove interesting to you. We hope this taste of SEO, will entice you to continue through the Specialization.

From the lesson

Current SEO Best Practices

In Module 3, we'll be discussing items that SEOs spend a great deal of time dealing with: SEO best practices, the algorithm updates that look for them and potential penalties for not adhering to them. By the end of this module, you'll be able to illustrate the concept of relevancy as it applies to search results, compare and contrast the functionality of search engine algorithm updates, and critically examine the ways in which webmasters attempt to circumvent these algorithms. You'll also be able to define important ranking factors used by modern search engines, and learn the necessary steps to avoid (or correct) any penalties applied by search engine algorithms.

Current SEO Best Practices0:53

Introduction to Search Engine Algorithms6:48

SEO Best Practices and Ranking Factors7:46

Early Algorithms: Florida, Austin, and Brandy6:48

Updates: Personalized, Universal, Vince, and Caffeine6:37

Panda: The Game Changer for Content7:25

Cleaning Up Links with Penguin9:18

Refinements: Hummingbird, Pigeon, and Mobile6:39

How You Can Avoid Penalties5:57

Meet the Instructors

Rebekah May
SEO Manager & Lead SEO Instructor, Lead Qual
UC Davis Division of Continuing and Professional Education

Time to shift gears a little bit.

In this lesson, we'll mainly focus on what is known as the Panda update.

While not a traditional algorithm update as we've been discussing,

Panda nonetheless had a huge impact on the search engine landscape.

After this lesson,

you'll be able to recognize a variety of pages that are of concern to an SEO and

learn about how to avoid being targeted by Panda and updates like it.

The first algorithm update I would like to discuss is known as Panda.

Rather than a one time change, this is a search filter,

which means you will continue to see updates rolled out from time to time.

This algorithm was created to prevent sites with low-quality

content from ranking well in search.

Because this is updated on a somewhat regular, though unpredictable, basis this

means that if your site was previously penalized during a panda update.

But you took the time to improve your content and make

the appropriate changes to your website, you can begin to recover from the penalty.

Ongoing updates will also help catch penalized sites

that may have escaped past updates.

Lately, rather than seeing specific updates, panda is rolling out more slowly,

over several months at a time.

Google has confirmed that this is due to an internal issue related

to technical updates.

Previously, the filter would be applied over a few days' time, and webmasters

would immediately know if changes to their site was due to a Panda update.

I recommend you watch the provided Google Hangout video,

where Google's John Mueller addresses questions related to the Panda rollout.

This starts at the beginning of the hangout and

ends approximately seven minutes in.

The link is provided in your study materials.

What we know of panda is that it targets low quality or thin sites.

Thin sites means that the site has very few pages that contain content useful or

informative to users.

This could mean that you have pages which contain largely the same content,

pages with no content, pages that lead to forms.

Or pages where a content is syndicated or scraped from other pages on the web.

To get a better understanding of what Google views as thin content,

read the Google support page titled, Thin content with little or

no added value, and watch the embedded video.

I have provided a link to this resource in your study materials.

Another thing Panda will look for is duplicate content.

This could mean pages you have duplicated within your own site, or

pages you have scraped content from and placed on your site.

Since these duplicate pages offer no additional value, they don't rank well.

Duplicate pages on your own site will end up cannibalizing one another and

then neither will get the rankings they deserve.

Generally, when it comes to content duplicated or

scraped from another web site, the website that first published that information

will receive credit and will rank for that content.

The site copying the content will not rank well, and in some cases,

if you have massive amounts of scraped content, your site will be penalized.

Additional things that may trigger a Panda penalty

are excessive amounts of ads on the site.

If you have a page with very little content that is surrounded in

advertisements, that isn't providing a lot of value to the user and

the page will not rank well.

This would be considered a thin page.

Google will also look at things like your site navigation, whether or

not the navigation is intuitive and if it links to all of your content.

So you really want to make sure you're providing a good user experience for

your users.

Google has published a post on their official blog

that provides some guidance on what you can do to build high quality sites.

I recommend reading the post at the link provided.

The initial panda roll out surprised a lot of webmasters and SEOs.

We knew that the trend of updates had changes which were meant to get web

masters to provide more value to users, but the update hit several websites hard.

Many never recovered.

The website Pandalized.com was created to keep track of how Panda

effected large sites.

Several well-known sites were severely impacted when this algorithm rolled out,

and some never returned to normal.

Here are some charts from the site.

And you can visit the site directly to see more of how the panda filter

affected these sites.

Some examples of the type of content Panda targets

includes things like automatically generated content.

Automatically generated content is also referred to as spun content.

And it's content that is created by a program, and enters applicable keywords.

But most often, the article is gibberish or very poorly written, and

is difficult for users to understand.

Another type of content targeted by Panda are squeeze pages.

Squeeze pages are like a landing page, where it's one main page that features

all of the content, and you have to just keep scrolling down for more information.

The content is usually broken up by forms and and buy now buttons.

You will sometimes run into sites which you cannot easily

exit due to pop-ups asking you to cancel.

Another issue Panda looks at are doorway pages.

Doorway pages are pages which were built for search engines rather than users.

These pages often rank for one thing, and then when clicked on,

will redirect the user to a page or a site about another topic.

This is usually done for commercial or malicious intent.

In order to get the page to show in search engines,

webmasters would often use what is known as a meta-refresh.

Which means that once you land on the site,

it will then refresh to another site before you can hit the back button.

Google began penalizing sites using the meta refresh technology.

And then, webmasters began using JavaScript for tricking the visitor

into visiting the desired destination through creative linking.

Panda also began penalizing low quality guest posts.

Because gaining links to your site is very beneficial for

SEO, a trend called guest blogging became widespread.

Unfortunately, as things do when they get popular,

some individuals began taking advantage of this and

created low quality sites dedicated to guests posts on a variety of subjects.

This caused Google to sit up and take notice, and

they began to penalize sites that published these low quality posts.

Unfortunately, some good sites where you could go and

find writers to guest post on your blog were also caught in the crossfire.

Basically, to avoid being penalized by Panda,

view your site as a user would view it.

Look at what information is helpful and valuable to them and

what might be unnecessary information that would be better served elsewhere, or

just removed entirely.

Always ask yourself, how your site can differentiate itself from other sites and

add value.

That completes the video portion of this lesson.

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