Can your business handle a 50% drop in organic (non-paid) visits from Google? That’s what might be coming your way courtesy of Google’s Panda algorithm update.
As of 24th Feb 2011, a major update by Google on how it ranks sites has affected 11% of search results and halved many sites’ visitor numbers. Named the Farmer or Panda Google Update it’s only affecting US Google results as I write but if you’re outside the US it is coming to you soon. Here’s how to find out if you have already been hit, are going to be and what to do about it.
The aims of Panda are noble: to remove poor quality sites from the top of Google’s Search results pages. Or as Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam, puts it in a blog post announcing Panda:
"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."
The last thing Google wants is searchers being unhappy with what they find. They might try another search engine if that happens.
The question remains: how do you prevent being labelled as a low-quality publisher, especially when sites like How remain untouched?
Hello, my name is Lotus. I'm a 50 year old self-employed person from India.
Excellent tips. Really useful stuff .Never had an idea about this, will look for more of such informative posts from your side.. good job...Keep it up
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