Google Panda in Perspective

Google alone handles over a billion queries a day. In the past year, Google's search algorithms have changed as a result of their "Panda update". Google Panda, first launched in February of 2011, was aimed at weeding out low quality sites from their search results. "Low quality" sites are defined as websites who publish low quality content in order to drive traffic to their websites which are primarily there to serve ads to the publish. This change also targets content farms - sites that spin out low quality content to multiple sources - instead prioritizing sites that publish original and well-researched material.

As a result, CNET reported a surge in rankings of news websites and social networking websites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising (Source: Wikipedia).

RSS feeds, the frequency of website content updates, premade content, all play a role in Panda's ranking system.

Panda, like PageRank, is a factor that feeds into Google's existing algorithm, not an overhaul of Google's overall algorithm. This distinction is important to anyone whose site has been affected by Panda. If you do notice a sudden drop in your search engine rankings on Google, do not panic. It may be a temporary glitch on Google's end, in which case checking your rankings from another location may be all you need to know that your site is still being ranked. Contact us for assistance - we will check this out for you at no charge.

If your site has indeed been demoted by Google, there are several things we can do to help you get back up on the boards. the change is verified, it may be indicative that it's time to freshen up your content and resubmit your site to the other directories, or even rework your website from the ground up by migrating it to our new CMS then indexing all of the new pages (we recommend using 301 redirects on all of the old ones so that the upgrade is handled gracefully in the search engines). Since Panda is a site-wide, domain specific penalty, we can also follow Hubpages lead and look into using subdomains on your website to categories your articles, thus compelling Google to reindex your website.

The following infographic is presented by Search Engine Land - it's a comprehensive overview of Google Panda and how it has affected the industry, and what you can do about it if you feel your site has been affected by Google's Panda Update.

For help with your search engine optimization, please contact us or visit Grassfrog's SEO Services page.

If you want to improve your Google rankings, why not join our Google +1 project? It's easy and it's free to participage.