Website publishers have had about three months to react to Google’s “Panda” algorithm update, which primarily targeted “content farms,” sites that the Web search giant has long aimed to squash from its results because it views their information as basically identical to that found on other sites, or just too sparse to be useful.
Google claimed that Panda, at least in its initial late February release, affected only about 2 percent of U.S. search queries. However, the dramatic hits taken by some well-established sites dominated headlines in the Search Engine sector for months after the rollout.
“When a client’s site is pretty clean, it’s been a pretty easy cleanup,” said Dave Davies, the CEO of Beanstalk, an SEO consultancy based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Davies did note that Panda has been “huge” in terms of impact, but sites are making a comeback. “Google is not really interested in punishing sites long term; it is just trying to protect its results,” he said. “So, if you correct your issues, you can re-build your reputation.”
Davies and other SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) professionals who spoke to IT Business Edge suggested that if an otherwise reputable site took a hit after the Panda rollout, it probably was because it:
- Failed to take Google’s advice over the last few years on technical housekeeping issues related to the way it identifies and filters out duplicate content from its results, or;
- Had not adequately invested in what Google would determine to be high-value content, or;
- Relied too heavily on just a few link-building tactics or the grey or black-hat margins of SEM, and suffered collateral damage as Google purged disreputable pages and the reputation they had previously passed on to their own domains.
“Google doesn’t think like your business,” said Matt Law, the founder of Law Marketing Systems, an Internet marketing and SEO consultancy based out of Orlando, Fla. “They think like a bunch of California yuppies who run the Internet. And they do.”
In this first part of our two-part series, we’ll look at the issues surrounding the “Panda penalty” for duplicate content and the best tactics for ensuring Google and other search engines identify your site pages as unique. In part two, we will look at the general guidance Google and SEO experts offer for making sure your content is valuable enough to rank highly in search results. We’ll also take a look at how Google may be using user behavior and social interactivity to gauge that value.
So, what is the big deal about duplicate content, anyway?