The Google Panda Update – Part 1

Bamboo served with a side of link farm.

We have had quite a few questions about the Panda update, and what that means from an SEO level.

Back in late February, Google went live with a set of indexing updates lovingly referred to as “Panda”. Over the past months, we at Snazify have been watching repercussions and how they have impact on our client campaigns. Panda was specifically released to adjust results against “link farm” style practices, and at the time of release it was thrown around that over 10% of indexing results were bumped or pushed back from priority in some way.

The general target of Panda is a respectable one: removing poor quality, link-farm driven websites from the top of Google’s index results. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam, defines this a bit more for us:

"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

So, in effect... Panda is an algorithm change, a somewhat drastic update in how priority results are returned. It is a change that defines barriers for how your content is indexed, and if your site crosses the imaginary “bamboo line” look out – we are talking total site indexing adjustment, even pages which have a huge amount of SEO copy writing.

So what adjustments, if any, should you make in order to compensate for this update? Have you actually seen specific downtrends in traffic and conversions starting in March? We'll cover that in Panda Part 2 – SEO kung-fu.