Search and Ranking Updates

The Panda Update roll out by Google is still unrolling. This will take months and will affect many sites as it unfurls. The update is a spam filter that is programmed for remove sites which violate the guidelines of the search engine. 

This augurs good for the websites which have been affected by earlier roll out but have rectified accordingly. Hence websites that have removed spam elements will see favorable results as far as organic search is considered. 

In order to avoid being hit by such updates one need to follow guidelines set up by major search engines. Elements like external and internal duplicates, shallow and irrelevant contents face penalty. Excessive use of tags, improper internal linking, keyword stuffing are some of the factors that invite Panda.  

Panda Updates: What Are They?

Panda Updates are rolled out time to time in order to prevent on page spam. Google does not like misuse of on page elements that are purely embedded for increasing the rank on SERPs. Hence the company introduced a filter that could discover spam elements on the page and deal accordingly.       

Content farms where the most targeted using this filter. Blogs and websites using inadequate contents in order to rank higher were pulled down. I had come across many blogs acting as content farms which were of very low quality written by novice writers. The articles  were used to publish on blogs, scraper sites and websites in order to rank high and eventually benefit from the published Ads.      

Google also targets such sites by making changes to its algorithms. The search engine giant has been busy cleaning up the mess. Many sites that have escaped the filters would eventually come under the net in future roll outs. 

Hence the moral of the story is that one should have unique informative contents if you wish your site to rank well and attain impressive traffic. Misuse of on page elements like H1, H2, H3 tags, repeated keywords and irrelevant and shallow literature on sites will result in rankings going down.     

Likewise link farms, as portals having too many links then is natural are also the target. Spam link architecture in order to promote few pages is also discouraged.

Though it is anybody's guess as to what content the search engine ascribes as unique. But it is simple approach that matters. No copied contents, no internal duplicate contents,  no verbosity or garbage. Be sensible in order to avoid online penalties which the search engines may impose.

Penguin Update - How to Overcome?

Since April 24th for many website owner and web masters the World has com tumbling down. The cause is the Penguin Update that Google has implemented in order to cut down web spam. Earlier Panda Update was a major update many versions of which have been implemented. 

From time to time Google unleashes these changes in order to improve the quality of sites on the top for the users. Most of these changes have come about through the algorithms but the Penguin Update is not one of them. It is more like a filter which checks for the web spam and qualifies or disqualifies the site, or on some instances lowered ranking may be the outcome.       

Though the update has created lot of flutter especially from those who have been hit badly. But there have been lot of instances where good sites have been hit as well. Well this could be due to that one or the other element on their web page which may have been qualified as spam albeit it may have been in place unintentionally.   

The finger clearly points out at duplicate content and too much formatting. Some on page factors like excessive use of H1 tag, bold tag, and  yes keyword stuffing. Websites that do not pass through a good seo may contain lot of search terms, which most of the web designers add out of impulse or lack of knowledge. Many web designing companies do not have content writers, hence the site contents are usually palmed off from a similar site on the net. Improper contents arise due to bad quality and cheap content writers. 

The Solutions

Hence the cleaning process would involve removing duplicate content, H1, H2 tags if too many and excessive internal links. Changing anchor text of internal links to natural and such that similar anchor text is not repeatedly used. There are many finer points to writing contents but that is for experts. You can write simple meaningful contents yourself which should be original and readable.

Ads: This is another issue that has come up in recent times. Your advertisements should be placed as such that they do not obstruct the contents or distract visitors in any way. The focus should not be selling advertisements or affiliate links but on creating a good website first.   

After you have worked extensively on your website then wait for Penguin Refresh or the spiders to do their work and improve rankings.