Google’s Panda algorithm update, of this past February, has certainly had a significant impact on search results and made headlines across the web – from the NY Times to a variety of blogs. The original Panda update, which launched on February 24th, altered about 12% of results in the United States. A subsequent update, launched on April 11th, changed around 2% of rankings in the U.S. Google release around 500 search improvements per year but most are minor tweaks; so what gives with the recent changes and why have they been so dramatic?
According to Google “site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find ‘high-quality’ sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content.” Low quality sites, known in the industry as content farms and/or scraper websites, produce or reproduce unoriginal or redundant content in order to game the rankings and drive traffic to their respective sites. From the Google perspective, there’s quite a bit of low quality content distracting the end user.
At RepEquity, as mentioned in previous blog posts, ‘black hat’ or low level content network building does no service to our clients or our business. Instead, we aim to create and support a brand value to our client and the web community at large. In essence, a professionally produced integrated communications digital strategy should not be at all susceptible to Google’s algorithm changes. In case you are though, feel free to browse these questions by Google Fellow Amit Singhal:
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