We are very familiar with Panda updates because we’ve seen plenty of them and Internet Marketing Ninjas have been helping clients hit by Panda for ages.
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Panda 4.2
Unlike all the previous Panda Updates, this one came unnoticed: Website owners are having a bad time seeing any impact even after the official announcement.
Google has been talking about those “rolling” updates for a while: This one is confirmed to be rolling out over the course of a few months – which means that if you were affected by this update you are probably not going to see it overnight.
Instead, there will be a slow decline which you’ll be able to spot only in a few months – which makes it harder to diagnose what happened: Panda update? Penguin update? Above the fold update? Mobile update?
Do I Need to Worry About Panda?
Most people assume they don’t. Panda is all about content and most of website owners assume that their content is just fine.
Google Panda is all about content & most of website owners assume that their content is just fineClick To TweetWhile in many cases, content may not be good enough.
In the past some people were building huge websites with each page targeting a specific long keyword phrase. All of that content was what we call “thin” content: Spun content, automatically-generated content or written by cheap writers.
It worked for years: The more content, the more long-tail keywords you were able to rank for.
A little bit about the history…
In the past: Google used to say that if you have a 100,000-page website, there certainly are going to be a lot of those pages that are not so good: There’s not much content on them and not a lot of good signals. 90% of those pages might be database-driven with no hand-written content on them, hosted deep into your website.
Google would put them in what was called “supplemental results.” Google would put duplicate pages, thin-content pages, deep pages there. Any of your pages that Google has put into the supplemental index would never rank for anything with any value.
Google used to always say that pages in the supplemental index did not hurt your overall website: Those 10% of your site pages with good content and good signals which were in the main index were ranking well for competitive phrases.
You always knew that Google “liked” only some pages of your site. And part of it is how many pages your site could support: Let’s say you’ve got your 10,000-page site and it has 1000 backlinks (which is a good profile!) But if you have 100,000-page site and 1000 backlinks, Google would think you didn’t have enough trust to support that many pages, so they will only keep 10% in their main index.
Those 90% of pages in the supplemental index didn’t hurt you though.
Then Panda Came…
And suddenly, if Google didn’t like 90% of your pages, those 10% were now affected.
With Panda, if Google doesn’t like some sections of your site, those sections are now given some type of a negative score and that negative score is transferred to other pages of your site that link to that affected section.
Whenever your site is affected, almost always the answer is “You have too much thin content”, so you need to go in there not with the pair of scissors but with the hacksaw… You are making your site much smaller.
#GooglePanda: Whenever your site is affected, almost always the answer is You have too much thin contentClick To TweetTo Sum Up: Causes of Google Panda
So to sum up:
- It’s mostly about content
- Usually it is about having too much content
- Things like: low-quality pages, spun pages, duplicate content pages, thin pages, too many deep pages
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Watch the whole video here: Google Panda 4.2: What You Need to Know Jim & Ann Show
