Did you say Google Panda or Kung Fu Panda?
Images courtesy of Google and DreamWorks
You’ve probably heard Website Specialists talking about Google Panda right?
Or maybe you haven’t, having glazed over when the technical geek speak started?
Did you say Google Panda or Kung Fu Panda?
Well, in any case this has nothing to do with DreamWorks’ animated adventure; Kung Fu Panda.
It actually has everything to do with your website being visible in Google search results and how you will definitely feel the pain of being Kung Fu kicked off the 1st page if you don’t play ball! (maybe you’ve experienced this?)
With that in mind have a quick read of this article so you can get some insight and take some action to make sure you don’t lose customers simply because they can’t find you on Google (most people don’t look beyond the 1st page of search results).
You’ll be pleased to hear that I’m not going to bore you by going through all of the Geekery involved.
I’m just going to give you a little background so you have a general understanding of what it is and what you should do to avoid a Google Panda Kung Fu kick (let me know what you think in the comments at the end).
Okay, so let’s start with…
What is Google Panda?
Google’s mission as stated in their own words:
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
(Quoted from https://www.google.com/about/company/)
This is a great mission for those of us that want to find what we’re looking for straight away in the top four results, without the hassle of trawling through lots of results and pages.
I’m sure you will agree that for the most part Google does this pretty well.
However, some business owners and SEO specialists might say otherwise, having been “punished” by Google.
I may not be popular in saying this next bit but hey.
This might not necessarily be the case (okay I said it). Google hasn’t necessarily punished you and your website (you may disagree).
They haven’t gone out of their way to target you because they personally dislike you or your company.
It’s just that they see that a number of websites designed and behaving in a certain way aren’t actually adding value to the people that visit your website.
Your website is not adding value to the visitor as the content is poor amongst other things.
What makes them the authority on what’s adding value?
Well in short nothing really makes them the authority but if it means customers get what they’re looking for that’s all they’re bothered about.
Plus there’s an awful lot of people using Google to search for companies like yours so why be the “rebel without a cause” and give your competitors your potential business?!
I know what I would do and that’s exactly what I advise my clients to do. Learn from Google, SEO experts and play ball!
How do you play ball and avoid Google punishment?
Basically it’s not as simple an answer as we would like, simply because there are always groups of people that bend or break the rules wrecking it for everyone!
That being said, the main things Googles’ intelligent computers look for in making a decision about your website are the following at this time (yep, that’s right these change as they update what’s seen as important! Don’t believe me check this update history article):
- Duplicate low quality content – not unique, has been copied from somewhere else (kinda like how you used to get punished for copying someone else’s school work)
- Thin pages with not much content – only a few words and paragraphs on a page that are generally speaking, useless.
- Irrelevant content that nobody would find value from (basically don’t write nonsense and useless content that has no citations or means nothing).
Please don’t think these are the only factors, these are just key ones.
It’s not really important how these computers work this out (they use algorithms – Google It) just be aware that you shouldn’t do any of them!
So that’s it in summary about Google Panda. However this is not the end of the story about optimising your website because Google also uses other Zoo Animals (algorithms) to rank websites and achieve their mission of:
“organiz(e)ing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Such as Google Penguin, the deadly Hummingbird and more believe it or not!
Thanks for reading, feel free to Like, Share and Comment and I’ll add more posts soon to cover such things.