How to work with Panda 2.2
Pocket-lint’s website took a hit when Google updated Panda earlier this year. This is how the site recovered, it explains in a blog post.
It simplified everything. “We’ve treated the Panda update as if it was a 5-year-old child. That means anything complicated has gone. If your kid or your grandma can't understand the design, it should go.”
It consolidated and cleaned up. It pulled pages that didn’t offer much value add to readers; others it merged to create a cleaner experience. “Google has openly said that lots of poor quality pages on your site can bring down a website’s ranking even if it’s got plenty of good pages too.”
It scaled back adverts. “Having too many adverts can make Google think you are just there to serve ads rather than inform (much like the voucher code websites Panda specifically targeted).”
No duplicate content - including mobile. “Drastic measures sometimes call for drastic actions and part of that was ditching our mobile site for fear of it being seen as duplicate content within Google. We now have one site and only one site.”
How to Make Sense of Google’s Search for Authenticity
SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin thinks something is new in Google’s algorithm, namely “a metric or set of metrics that looks for some form of authenticity in a site and passion in the content created on a page.” Fishkin gives some interesting examples why he thinks ‘authenticity’ is part of the mix now. For SEO, he suggests the following items Google might be looking at:
- About/Contact details that show the site is created by a real person/team
- Connections to the rest of the web via social accounts, job posts, a resume, partners, clients, and so on
- Diversity of traffic sources
- An offline presence in the real world (“how Google measures this is beyond me right now,” Fishkin says)
- Connection to other humans - that is, people list it in LinkedIn profiles, in Twitter accounts.
