Google’s “Panda” update has been rolling out in phases for 3 years now, with each new release refining the algorithm to improve the overall search quality. Panda is a query based algorithm that’s supposed to remove redundant, irrelevant content and spam from Google’s index.
Last week, Panda 4.1 made its debut. The most negatively impacted sites were those with very little content, among them lots of lyrics and game sites.
We were very pleased to see the sites we worked with after the previous update had their Panda penalty lifted. Why? We helped them with what’s often called a “Panda diet”. This diet consists, among other things, of removing pages that no or low quality content from the search engine’s index.
If your site has old, tired content, now is the perfect time to refresh, or delete those posts and pages. Get rid of: coming soon, under construction, link lists, photo pages without titles/captions –pretty much any page or post with less than a paragraph of text, or with duplicate content.
If you’ve been hit in this or previous Panda updates and need help, order a site audit and we’ll be happy to help you out.
May all the charms of Autumn be yours!
