Google Panda and Solutions?

Google Panda continues to be-devil webmasters – the original stated intention was to kill content farms, but the collateral damage has been huge. Google claims on 12% of searches were effected, which sounds pretty low, but when you consider there are 100’s of millions of searches every day, the actual number is huge.

Some of the best solutions I have seen are Jim Boykin here.

The logic behind the update is very clever.

From Google Webmaster:

One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

This forces sites to review and clean out old content, which previously was not a problem – now it is and it has to be dealt with. Otherwise sites build up more and more of mediocre content. Some have suggested that simply cutting and cleaning out pages isn’t going to help. I disagree – the logic of G’s move is so clearly focused to provide an incentive to do just that, I can’t believe it isn’t going to help.

And going through hundreds of blog pages on several different sites, I do indeed find that G has somehow managed to identify low quality filler pages and other pages which I think are well written and informative, G has indeed identified as well. So cleaning out content isn’t going to hurt.

The other interesting thing many have pointed out is that no one has come out saying “my traffic is back.” That shouldn’t be too surprising – one of the last Google wrath of God updates several years ago, G penalized link selling and turned up the dials so to speak. There wasn’t another page rank (the key metric for selling links) for some months as G starved out the link sellers.

Manually reviewing hundreds of pages of blog posts using 3 or 4 different metrics, which unfortunately can’t all be seen on the same screen, takes a huge amount of time. G knows this and is waiting.

Should be a few months yet before we see any changes.