Latest Analysis after Google Panda Update 4.0

The internet marketing world was once again jolted by the roaring Panda Update 4.0 on 21^st may 2014. The main target of the update was to sort out websites with spammed content that was either duplicate or unoriginal. Since its origin, this Panda update has continuously rolled out its algorithms with more restrictive guidelines targeted at the websites’ content. Thus, this new update appeared to be catastrophic for those online marketing firms and businesses that were heavily relying on content spamming.

What came as a surprise was that this Panda Update was actually holding a soft corner for small businesses which were struggling to climb the SERP ladder among the strong giant website owners. These gigantic sites were able to grab the top spot because they had been using unoriginal duplicative content to achieve higher rankings.  On the other hand, the small business owners could not afford to churn out that much content for their sites and somehow it proved to be a positive step in their favor after the launch of Panda update.

There are still many websites that are being targeted by Google Panda 4.0 for their copied or unoriginal content. The Panda has been targeting these culprits through close evaluation of their on-page as well as off-page content through press releases, article spinning, and poor quality website content. This also impacted the websites that escaped earlier from penalties by Google and failed to produce appropriate changes in their websites or content structure. The websites faced poor user engagement due to thin content, horrible user experience, affiliate jumps, and risky downstream links.

Another reason the websites being hit by Panda was there were many small websites ranking on the basis of thousands of keywords. These websites lack quality content structure to support these targeted keywords and there were merely one or two pages ranking on those thousand keywords whereas there are number of other pages present with the targeted content. For example, if a site has homepage targeted with thousands of keywords, then only that page will be ranked on Google whereas the site could have used other landing pages with targeted keywords to be ranked ethically. Thus, the site was hit by the Panda update despite being of high quality.

Learning Lessons

Now that the update has penalized many sites for their low quality content structure, it is time to restructure your content strategy.

• You must plan out your content by understanding your niche and what people are looking for and then producing high quality content targeted at relevant key terms.
• You must not rank on the basis of your homepage alone but try to build up the landing pages rank through quality content using variant keywords.
• You must review your content strategy through proper audit. Get it audited from critics to point out the weaknesses in your content planning.
• Avoid Content Syndication. Even if you cannot help it, then you must do proper attribution for the content so that you can keep away from Google Indexing. Additionally if your partners are syndicating your content, they also must be advised to use noindex to stay away from search.
• Use white-hat SEO techniques for content optimization as it would automatically raise your ranking in the search engine. Make a strategic combination of producing high quality content, promote it through the help of social media and gain referral traffic on your site.
• Continue check and balance procedure on your SEO activities as Panda rolls out every month; hence, you must be alert to avoid any repercussions coming your way.