For years, smart internet marketing consultants and agencies operated under the thought that, besides the amount and quality of a website’s links, more content increases the chance for ranking on more keyword searches. It stands to reason that if you have more words on your site, there is a better chance your words will match the exact search terms people enter. Google also took a cue that websites maintaining a dramatic addition schedule are contributing more to the internet in general and should be rewarded with higher rankings.
While that strategy could still bear fruit these days simply because the web centers on the sharing of information, many more factors will be considered than the quantity of words. Webmasters and online companies took advantage of the situation by churning out a ridiculous amount of pages that were redundant, unnecessary, or even unintelligible. When Google serves these sites as results in their search engine, visitors don’t like it. Search engines needed to find a way to expunge these results from their index.
The Panda Update
Google is in a state of constant improvement to return the most relevant websites as results so must change the algorithm that drives them. The most recent one, called the Panda Update, revolutionalized the way Google ranks sites by adding an element of “user experience” in the form of human judgment. Real life people are now critiquing websites on a massive level to make sure the useless sites fall in ranking. Each assessment takes into account:
- General user experience
- Relevance and tone of the content
- Website design
- Value of the actual words
- Degree of duplication of content
Scraper sites (those that essentially copy words from other sites) and spammers took it hard in the chin after this update since humans saw and exposed them as pretenders that were not adding anything to the internet experience.
Real World Example
A great example to illuminate the effects of the Panda update occurred in our own back yard. Although not intentionally “spammy”, the structure of a site we work with that sells candied fruit worked against us. We wanted their ecommerce site to have a page for each flavor of candied fruit they sell. Figuring they sell two different brands of candied pineapple and each brand comes in three different colors plus an assorted flavor that contains all colors, we ended up with eight pages that sell basically the same thing. Since there are only so many things you can say differently about candied pineapple, we ended up publishing a lot of redundant content.
Now Google has eliminated the most important candied pineapple page from the index and returns the page for green pineapples. We theorize this is because there was too much duplication on the site and the Panda update penalized us. Since the green color adds something unique to the results, they are using that page in the place of where the regular pineapple page should be in the results. To counter this action we plan on developing links to the true pineapple page and if that doesn’t work, we will combine all four pineapple colors onto one page.
New Day for Webmasters
This problem exemplifies once again that during website development, you should always operate under the principles that the most concise, value-adding content should be used at all times. Since the user experience is now an integral part of ranking factors, design and functionality are also vitally important.
If not already, Google will eventually consider “pages per visit”, “time on site,” and other analytics type factors to determine the best web results. A search engine optimization consultant or company now has to work with design, content creation, and even the entire marketing department to gain the best possible results for customers.
The “Content is King” mantra now becomes “Valuable Content is King”
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