What the Google Panda Update is likely to mean for your website ranking
There is strong speculation that the Google Panda update is to hit the UK search rankings this week having been launched in the US a few weeks ago.
Almost 12% of US websites were effected by this major change to the Google Algorithm.
The main focus of the panda update is poor quality links into your website.
Previously Google had a neutral view of poor links into websites, in that it had no positive effect on your Google ranking. However it DID have a mostly positive effect on your Bing & Yahoo rankings – which meant that if you had built 100′s of links for a fairly major key phrases, you could get quite an increase in traffic to your website – which in turn filtered through to your Google rankings, as Google saw an increase in your website visitor numbers (and popularity of your website is one of the ranking factors in the algorithm).
So what are poor links?
These are links that point to your website from other websites or article sites that either have no relevance to your industry or service, or worse, websites that have been created with the sole intention of providing a “link farm” back to hundreds of other sites.
Sites were created that had an “add url” option which were exploited by “link building companies” – meaning literally hundreds of meaningless links were being created back to websites they had been “assigned” to create good quality links for. These are very likely to get “caned” as the expression goes!!
So what can you do?
Firstly – check your site to see what links are actually pointing to your website. Probably the most accurate checker is the site explorer by Yahoo as this will often find more links to your website than trying Google’s search (which is link:websiteaddress without the www).
Secondly – if you haven’t got access to or haven’t installed Google Webmaster tools – then do this immediately as you will often see the links that Google can see (but don’t show up in the normal Google Link search mentioned above).
Thirdly – if you find links that are not relevant, or are part of a huge page of links to everyone under the sun – get them removed as quickly as possible. This can be done by trying to contact the website owner and asking them to remove them with immediate effect.
Fourthly – Keep a look out for your website showing on “fake blogs” – these are blogs that have been created solely to put a link into the editorial content of the blog (as these were seen more favourably by Google) – the easiest way to spot these is to look at some of the other blog posts – often you will see these are almost identical across several blog sites despite “supposedly” being about completely different subjects.
Links are meant to be useful to human beings – they are suppose to “add value” to a blog post by pointing people through to more information about a particular service (that they might be interested in when reading the blog), or they can be used to help people to navigate around your website whilst reading your content. Equally that can appear on industry relevant sites that people may have come across and might want more information on the type of work your company does.
They are NOT meant to be random, useless or add no value to a human being – and Google is doing something about these. It is about time IMHO as the good Search Engine Optimisation companies and consultants have often been hampered by some of these practices.
About author:
Liam is a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Search Engine Optimisation consultant and also teaches Social Media to businesses. He specialises in reducing the costs of PPC campaigns but increasing the number of clicks and conversions a company receives from its Google AdWords strategy.
All entries by Liam Lally
Hi Zaddle,
nice to read your blog.
I’d like you to clarify something in this quote “as Google saw an increase in your website visitor numbers (and popularity of your website is one of the ranking factors in the algorithm).”
We’re all learning all the time.
My question: When did Google know the visitor volumes to any website? / webpage The only time I can think of this occuring is when Google Analytics is installed, sending Google Server tracking info of the page to a Google server.
Does the reference to ‘popularity’ not mean something else?
Hi Tweetsbyskeet
Thanks for the comment
My understanding is that Google will pull information from three different areas:
1. Google Analytics – great (until websites haven’t got it installed)
2. Alexa Traffic Rank – reasonably accurate (but only counts people with the Alexa toolbar installed on their computers)
3. Site Usage Data – I can’t prove this but I have spoken to several SEO & Google people who insist that Google WILL collect site usage data as part of the algorithm without the need for the two items above.
The site popularity is “relative” to the other websites within that industry (or within that search term) – however if people have cheated by using link farms to rank highly for highly searched phrases (and as a result have topped Bing & Yahoo which they often do, since these search engines “allow” all links into the website), then they will get a significant increase in traffic.
My question would be – if Google currently ignores links from link farms (which it definitely does) – why have the panda update to punish those that have “cheated”? The only logical reason I can think of is that it has impacted the website listings in Google a different way, and the only way I can think of this happening is through an increase in site popularity.
Hopefully this (sort of) answers your question
I understood ‘popularity’ was largely based on QTY of links, where each link was scored in terms of QUALITY too. i.e. +1 from BBC with Factor of 100 = 1×100, where as +1 from Forum with Factor of 1 = 1.
I’m interested in this stuff and would have liked to have come to Lincoln to listen the other week.
Will be listening for more updates.
Quality of the links is definitely a major ranking factor and we will see a further shift with Social Media becoming part of the algorithm.
It is “speculated” that your social media ranking factor (towards your website SEO ranking) will include the reach of your tweets, your follower to following ratio, and the “rank” of the people who follow you.