By Chris Lake
Jan 12, 2016
You may have followed the various murmurings on Twitter and
beyond about a possible algorithm update from Google. Certainly the data
seemed to suggest that something was happening.
It was rumoured to be the much anticipated
Penguin 4.0 update, but it turns out that there has been a new roll-out of Panda, and it’s a biggie.
This time around Google has made Panda part of its core ranking algorithm, meaning that it will be
paying more attention to site quality signals than ever before.
Google confirmed the update
to Jennifer Slegg over at The SEM Post.
Panda is an algorithm that’s applied to sites overall and has become
one of our core ranking signals. It measures the quality of a site,
which you can read more about in our guidelines. Panda allows Google to
take quality into account and adjust ranking accordingly.
This seems straight-forward, though Google's Gary Illyes has sown
some confusion with this reponse to a question on Twitter from Pete
Myers of Moz.
Jennifer published a super comprehensive
guide to Panda yesterday, and has updated it to include some further pointers from Google.
A few takeaways:
Websites affected by Panda can still rank, if they have pages of outstanding quality:
“The Panda algorithm may continue to show such a site for more
specific and highly-relevant queries, but its visibility will be reduced
for queries where the site owner’s benefit is disproportionate to the
user’s benefit.”
If you’re worried Panda then you need to compare and contrast:
“If you believe your site is affected by the Panda algorithm, in
Search Console’s Search Analytics feature you can identify the queries
which lead to pages that provide overly vague information, or don’t seem
to satisfy the user need for a query.”
You need to stop thinking about the volume of visits, and focus on being useful:
“At the end of the day, content owners shouldn’t ask how many
visitors they had on a specific day, but rather how many visitors they
helped.”
Build some new paths, rather than trying to cover up your tracks:
“Instead of deleting those pages, your goal should be to create pages
that don’t fall in that category: pages that provide unique value for
your users who would trust your site in the future when they see it in
the results.”
This puts to bed a lot of the chatter about Penguin 4.0, but proves
the effectiveness of a bunch of SEO tools, which did a good job of
detecting activity.
I’d seen a bunch of comments the week after Christmas, with various
people suggesting that they had seen some ranking changes. But there was
nothing definitive.
Dawn Anderson then raised a flag late last week, pointing to data from Algoroo, which showed a lot of dramatic movement.
Other SEO experts started to speculate. Dan Petrovic said that it
looked like “a multi-purpose update”, and one that was happening across
the world.
Barry Schwartz
collated a bunch of other comments from the community and some more screenshots and data, from the likes of Mozcast.
UPDATE: Google's Gary Illyes has confirmed that Panda is part of the core algorithm, but that this part of it hasn't been updated.
In addition, while some sites may have experienced fluctuations recently, these have nothing to do with Panda.
Article Source:
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2441518/google-integrates-panda-into-the-core-ranking-algorithm
