Google Panda Update – Panda’s Punitive Punishment of Good Content.

The Panda will Punish your Good Content if you have Bad Content as well….Panda Inflicts Punitive Damages on your Good Content…(but hey, Google says it’s not a penalty…it’s just an algorithm change).

On Friday May 6th, Google’s Amit Singhal wrote an interesting post on the Google WebmasterCentral Blog called, “More Guidance on Building High Quality Sites.” On Saturday I was in a partly silly mood and I published some tips and some tongue in cheek comments about each of the 23 questions Amit suggested that we ask ourselves about our content. I can understand these questions for “content sites”, but for e-commerce product sites, it seems to often come down to BRANDS.

Aaron Wall also questioned the questions that Amit asked as well – it’s a must read that should be picked up by every major news organization. Aaron already has 32 results in Google for
site:seobook.com panda hypocrisy that gets me boiling each time I read them…bless you Aaron!

But anyways, there was one sentence that I wanted to point out that Amit said in that same post he did where he gave the 23 questions to ask yourself in creating great sites….

Did everyone catch this sentence…or the significance of this sentence???

“One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.”

I’m not sure if the world understands the significance of this…really…. Remember how I talked about the history of the supplemental index, and its relations to Panda… well, back then, if you had pages that were “deep” in your site (poorly interlinked overall within your site as a whole)…or pages with duplicate or unoriginal content…or pages with little content…then Google would toss them in what used to be known as the Supplemental results index.

They then assured us that pages that Google put in the supplemental index would not hurt you. As Matt Cutts said in January of 2007:

“As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results…. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all…

So for years….even if a client had duplicate content, or mash ups, or weak content, or buried content, the worst anyone ever figured that Google would do is to “Supplemental index” the pages…..But today, it seems to me it’s pretty clear that Google will not just hurt your “low quality” pages, they will now take this a step further and are now also delivering punitive damages to your “good quality” pages.

Does this seem fair to you? What’s your plans for Content Optimization?

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• Google Panda Update – User Behavior and Other Signals – Examines user behavior as a factor, query entry, the
  SERP behavior, and click backs. Also looks into when you can get out of being Pandasized.
• Thoughts and Solutions from Jim Boykin – Post discussing the background of the Panda Update, including the supplemental
  results, caffine, and beyond. This post also looks at, " if I were Google what I would look at," and at solutions.
• Google Panda Update – A Overview of Analytics of 5 Panda II Affected Sites – This post discusses the analytics
  of five affected sites
• Google Panda Update – Google’s Content Guidence and Jim’s Take – This article goes over the list of 23 questions of
  the ‘Google MMindset’ for the Panda Update and outlines Jims thoughts for each.
• Google Panda Update – Short Clicks and Long Clicks / Pogosticking – this post talks about how Google uses its logs and
  click information, particularly for short clicks, long clicks, and pogosticking to help evaluate and rerank search results.
  The post further discusses potential implications on the Panda update.
• Losing Clients to Panda. I Just Lost $17,500/Month – Sharing of experience on the Panda Update as well as reflection
  on previous updates
• Google Agent Rank and Reputational Scores…It’s About Content and Writers and Panda! – Breakdown of what ‘agent rank’ means
  and a view from a Google Panda lens.
• Google Panda Update: Content + Design = Usable, Trustworthy Websites – discussion of website usability and implications
  on Google Panda Update
• Google Panda Update: Your Site is Going to Survive (funny) – Jim’s Panda Update remake of, "Country Boy Can Survive"

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