How Google Panda Impacts Inbound Marketing Success

We all know that Google changes its search algorithm regularly. How frequently does Google do it? About 500 to 600 times per year (or around 40 to 50 times each month).

In Feb. 2011, Google launched Panda.

Panda update affected approximately 12% of queries and was specifically targeted at low-quality or “thin” sites, as well as sites with high ad-to-content ratios.

For the first two years, Google Panda updates were rolled out about once a month but Google stated in March 2013, that future updates would be integrated into the algorithm and, therefore, less noticeable and continuous.

Google released a “slow rollout” of Panda 4.1 for the week of September 21, 2014.

In fact, Google Panda is a filter that prevents low quality sites and/or pages from ranking well in the search engine results page. The filter’s threshold is influenced by Google Quality Raters. Quality Raters answer questions such as “would I trust this site with my credit card?” so that Google can distinguish the difference between high- and low-quality sites.

More specifically, article directories (a.k.a. “content farms”)—including wisegeek.com, suite101.com, and ezinearticles.com—bore the brunt of Panda’s attack, witnessing major drops in their search rankings.

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Google Panda affects the ranking of an entire site or a specific section rather than just the individual pages on a site.

Google says it will only takes a few pages of poor quality or duplicated content to hold down traffic on an otherwise solid site, and recommends such pages be removed, blocked from being indexed by the search engine, or rewritten.

However, Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google, warns that rewriting duplicate content so that it is original may not be enough to recover from Panda, the rewrites must be of sufficiently high quality, as such content brings “additional value” to the web. Content that is general, non-specific, and not substantially different from what is already out there should not be expected to rank well.

While the release of Panda sparked outrage among some marketers, who viewed the update as a malicious attack on their rankings, other marketers (especially the ones who had been playing by the rules and creating quality content all along) welcomed Panda enthusiastically.

I believe that as the principle of Inbound Marketing* is focused on generating sales leads through providing quality content to educate the prospects on the area of expertise of the marketer, Google Panda will naturally help these marketers. As a result, their websites and networks of content will benefit from Panda.

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.

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