Panda becomes core. So what?

January 25, 2015: Google recently announced that anti-spam algorithm Panda, which measures site quality and has become one of Google’s “core ranking systems,”will now become further assimilated within its core logic. Google has been integrating Panda (and its brethren Penguin, which targets link spammers) into its core system for the past several years, so the announcement provides no surprise.

What impact for marketers?

Panda has already made a huge impact on the Web. Content farms are practically extinct, and most publishers realize that to compete one must host original, high-quality content with some depth and (human) thought behind it.

Because Panda looks for specific signals that flag the algorithm into thinking a site is “low quality,” webmasters must steer clear of:

Content that contains syntactical, spelling, or editing errors.
Content that lacks authority and authorship attribution.
“Thin” content that lacks substance and originality.
Web pages with missing elements, broken links or other obvious defects.
An excessively high ad-to-content ratio.

The list above is not an exhaustive itemization of signals that can trigger a Panda penalty. It only indicates what Panda is looking for: sites which are well-written, accessible, error-free, and authoritative. Its entire purpose is to separate sites that provide real value to the user from those which simply provide scraped, syndicated, and non-original data in the guise of something real and relevant.

How to improve your site’s performance with Panda

Creating high quality content is expensive. While adding higher-quality content to one’s site will endear you to Panda, you can also increase your odds of a favorable encounter with Panda by removing any content on your site that is mediocre, outdated, or just useless. Perhaps you have old blog posts that are now obsolete, or ancient press releases collecting digital dust. It’s time to clean house!

There’s a real SEO benefit here, because trimming away your useless pages will concentrate your own site’s page authority in pages associated with your main goals. By reallocating your page authority in this way, you can strategically boost certain site areas (say your “about” or “services” page) that can in highly competitive rankings battles cause them to advance over those of your competition.

But the real beauty of doing this content reduction exercise is that it forces you to think about changes you can make to better serve your search audience, by eliminating extra clicks and pages that don’t do anything but link elsewhere.

Pruning the tree

Using Google Analytics, identify pages, posts, or other content that meets your criteria for deletion. Perhaps your target is duplicate, or partially duplicated content. Maybe it’s content that is attracting the wrong kind of traffic. Clean up any historical messes you may have inherited. Cautious users running WordPress or other modern CMS can simply put old pages and posts in “draft” mode to effectively unpublish them.

Most webmasters won’t want to kill their old content without consulting with Search Console, which will determine whether any of this content is being linked to. If there are links, you must redirect them to current content. Wordpress has several good plugins that make the process of putting up 301 redirects simple and risk free (no, you won’t have to mess with your .htaccess file).

When your pruning work is done, file new sitemaps with Google through Search Console and you’ll be done.

Keeping Panda happy in 2016

Panda in 2016 will keep looking for what it’s always looked for: high quality sites that provide something real and relevant for searchers. Webmasters can take meaningful steps to enhance their Panda-worthiness (including the page reduction strategy mentioned above). Beyond this, there is the never-ending task ahead of supplying users with fresh, authoritative, original content — a hard job which can benefit from automation but can never itself be completely automated.

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