What is Google Panda?
Google Panda was designed in 2011 to filter out websites with poor content quality or low content count and is an integral part of the Google search algorithm and Google’s efforts to mitigate black hat SEO practices.
Google’s Panda update is known widely to be one of the most significant changes to the Google search algorithm, while most updates can show subtle changes in the SERPs, the Panda update changed the SERPs considerably, penalising websites that utilised black hat SEO practices to manipulate rankings.
What was so important about the Google Panda update?
The Google Panda update was significant because it was the first time that Google Search really started quality-controlling the content being shown in the SERPs. Huge websites that developed pages for the sole purpose of ranking were the first to be targeted, the commonly known “content farms”, they were utilising black hat SEO practices to rank pages without offering any real value to readers.
This was the first sign of Google’s E-A-T (Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) framework, and its purpose was to provide informative and helpful content to its users.
Best practices for Google Panda
Google Quality Raters Guidelines and E-A-T
Google uses a document known as the “Search Quality Rater Guidelines” to help assess the quality of the search results. Human quality controllers refer to this guide when doing an assessment and report back to help improve Google’s search algorithms.
The E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) framework is part of this guidelines document (now commonly known as E-E-A-T) and is among the strongest ranking factors when checking page content quality. This makes it essential for content creators to keep up-to-date with the latest in search algorithm updates, so their content meets the guidelines and performs well in the SERPs.
To help improve your content in line with these guidelines, you can start by:
- Build a stronger backlink profile
- Check your content to make sure it’s accurate and up-to-date
- Content freshness is also important, so it’s a good idea to check back and update older content on your website.
Improve web pages with low-quality, low-value content
Now if you’re doing an audit on your site and find content that you consider “thin” or doesn’t really add any value to readers, don’t just delete it, it can be a bad look if the next time Google crawls your website that your page count has halved because you’ve deleted all your thin content.
Here are a few tips on what to do if you do find thin content on your website:
- Read the content, is the content in your niche? For example, if your website provides health and beauty tips and advice, having an article on how to change the oil in your car doesn’t make sense. This is where authoritativeness comes in, you want to focus on your niche and build helpful content around this which in turn helps build trust with Google and your readers, so pages like this could probably do with being removed.
- If the content is in your niche but doesn’t provide much value, Rewrite it! This not only provides fresh signals to Google that you are making a conscious effort to improve your site content quality, but it shows effort, this is another point that’s commonly made by the Google Search Team.
- If you find multiple pages with duplicate or near-duplicate content, this is where canonicalisation can be helpful.
Be cautious with advertising
This is simple, using advertising on your website is fine and there’s nothing really wrong with doing it, but pay attention to how much you’re doing, your ad-to-content ratio should be as low as possible, the lower, the better!
