Alex Walters

Google Panda: Turning SEOs to “Web Strategists”

In March, Google implemented a new search algorithm called Google Panda and it is driving SEOs crazy. Created by Navneet Panda, it ranks websites for a Google query based more on user experience (UX) than keyword spamming. It sounds like a great way to remove spam like sites from the first page of Google but it’s current implementation has some major drawbacks.

Let’s first see how exactly Panda ranks sites. As mentioned earlier, Panda tries to rank pages based on UX. It does this by being mindful of bounce rates vs. browse rates, average time spent on a site, and the click through rate from search engines. On top of that, Google has it’s quality raters provide feedback on websites that they visit. All of these metrics are a way of trying to put the sites that an average user would want to see at the top of Google’s list.

To the SEOs out there: it is no longer sufficient to stuff keywords into a page and consider it optimized. Google Panda is turning our jobs into a strategic position of truly improving our websites. To appear on the first page of Google, we must WOW our users. Link sharing is still present but in the manor of someone wanting to share your site based on the UX.

While this sounds like a great way to improve search queries, it has severely hindered some companies that had high ranking search results. Their web traffic has dropped significantly because they aren’t currently following the Panda suggested guidelines. They may have a site of rich content and a great UX but if the quality raters see something wrong with it, their site sinks. This drives these companies to work harder on making a more Panda friendly website but as it stands now, Panda does not crawl as often as it should (I’ve heard as long as 7 weeks!).

It’s a step in the right direction but it won’t make everyone happy… ever

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