Helpful Tips on Dealing with Google’s Panda Update

Google’s recent algorithm change that impacted 12% of rankings was targeting websites with low quality content. The reality is that there are several websites on the internet that offer content that has no real value. They are fluff pieces or poorly written articles just for the sake of generating additional content. The reason that some companies have been doing this is to take advantage of the clear SEO benefit that content can provide.

Google is on a mission to only give credit for higher quality content, which is great news for the other 88% of us out there. We shouldn’t have to compete with websites whose sole purpose is to generate content that will serve up high paying Google AdSense ads. These websites usually just scrape content from other websites or outsource the writing out to low quality resources (usually content writers in India). Websites such as Wisegeek.com, hubpages.com, and Lovetoknow.com have been hit hard by this new update.

So let’s say that you have lost a considerable amount of your rankings, what should you do? The obvious answer is to provide higher quality content that is unique to your website. You should also consider removing the lower quality content that put you in this position in the first place. As it no longer offers you any value, why keep it up and running? If you feel strongly about your position that you have been wronged by this update, you may want to respond to the Google Webmaster Central post and state your case. They are encouraging everyone’s feedback.

Here is what Google’s Michael Wyszomierski has to say on the subject:

“According to our metrics, this update improves overall search quality. However, we are interested in hearing feedback from site owners and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms. If you know of a high quality site that has been negatively affected by this change, please bring it to our attention in this thread. Note that as this is an algorithmic change we are unable to make manual exceptions, but in cases of high quality content we can pass the examples along to the engineers who will look at them as they work on future iterations and improvements to the algorithm. So even if you don’t see us responding, know that we’re doing a lot of listening.”