In the past year or so, Google has released some mammoth updates. The first, Panda, was released last February in a bid to counter the spread of poor quality content and to prevent spun content and sprawling websites from boosting search engine rankings.
The aim of Panda was to encourage webmasters to question the quality of the content on their sites and the sites linking back to them. Google wants everybody to have the best user experience online, but with bad quality copy, spun content, link and content farm websites and poor quality controls, they were up against it. Algorithm experts within Google however, had a few tricks up their sleeves and the release has brought about some major changes and improvements in the way content is indexed. Content farms and other poor quality sites took a massive hit and rightly so.
Google allowed the dust to settle for a few months before unleashing Penguin. Penguin wasn’t so much about the quality of content, but the reliability of the links coming into to it. Savvy webmasters would have already responded well to Panda and have made every effort to improve the content of their websites to increase the level of authority and trust that it commanded within its industry or niche. The rule is simple – good quality content attracts good quality links and Google loves that.
However, not all was well after the Panda update. The unintended result of Panda was that thousands of low quality sites got pushed down the rankings into obscurity where they were used solely to build links. Publishers created huge networks of content teeming with spun content and total garbage. This meant they could still build links whilst keeping their own websites free of the trash. This worked fairly successfully for a time until users started to question the search results. Sure, they were getting the results they wanted with regards to keyword searches, but the sites they were being presented with were bad, very bad. If you’ve ever seen a page full of spun content you’ll know what we mean.
Consumers are becoming more and more aware of scams and bad quality content so whilst their search engines might present a page of trash to them and they might click on the link to get to it, they won’t stick around. Visitor engagement is all about keeping people on your site long enough to make a purchase or an enquiry and no spun content is ever going to achieve that.
Penguin uses a filter that detects the garbage and then ignores the content and any links coming from it. As you can imagine, not everybody has welcomed the change with open arms and this is largely because it chucks out a few false positives.
However, both Penguin and Panda are both in their infancy and you can rest assured that those clever people at Google will do all they can to keep the bad guys at bay.
