Here are some useful insights from the team from WebProNews.com.
What we know Google is looking at with the Panda update:
- User comfort level in the trust area (think credit card/medicine comments)
- Is it considered authoritative (this would apply some indication of expertise on topics covered, I would think)
- Is the content quality good enough for print? (I’ve seen plenty of crap printed)
- Are there too many ads? (How many are too many, and does the ad network matter?)
- We know Google has its definition of what could be considered low quality
- Google uses a “classifier” to draw a line in the sand
- We know that so far, Google has not used indications from the Chrome Extension (emphasis on so far. Google hinted in the past that this data could potentially be used to tweak the algorithm).
- Google looks at feedback, at least to some extent
- Based on comments from Cutts, Google will tell you why your site dropped (getting that communication flow going may not be the easiest thing to do, but I have personally witnessed Cutts sit down with someone at a conference and look at their site with them.)
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The algorithm can still be gamed. It can still be optimized for. (If you were hit by the update, there are things you can do to get back in Google’s good graces. In
other words, you’re not necessarily banned just because of your brand.) - Most of the changes in rankings will be done algorithmically, but Google will take manual action in some instances (see JC Penney)
- If you use any auto-generated content keep it separated from the original high quality stuff, and block it from search engines. Google’s John Mu said recently, “If you do have such high-quality, unique and compelling content, I’d recommend separating it from the auto-generated rest of the site, and making sure that the auto-generated part is blocked from crawling and indexing, so that search engines can focus on what makes your site unique and valuable to users world-wide.”
Here is an interesting link that we subscribed to that is worth reading WebProNews.com – Google Panda Update: Lack of Consistency on Quality? by Chris Crum.
Here is the link to the article from the team from WebProNews.com – Google “Panda” Algorithm Update – What’s Known & What’s Possible by Chris Crum.
PotPieGirl.com has some very interesting data, after running a test on seven key phrases that attract large amounts of spammy content. This might be very telling of at least one aspect of the Panda update. The following chart says it all. Look at the difference in percentages between EzineArticles and eHow.
Another dataset looks at the same phrases for articles just from the last month:
“In the last month, Ezine Articles has had close to 39,000 urls found/crawled in the Google index that have one of these 7 phrases on them. That means that 2.82% of the EzineArticles.com urls Google has found/crawled in the last month have this phrase on them,” says Jennifer (Pot Pie Girl), who put this data together. “That is almost 39 THOUSAND web pages in the Google index in the past month with one of those 7 phrases on them – from ONE SITE.”
