Google Panda – Further Thoughts…

• By: admin on Jul 8th, 2011
• Internet Marketing, Web Design

Hopefully you watched the video in my last blog post regarding the recent Google Panda updates?  If not, you can take a look here.

Like many of you I’m sure, I have been considering how Panda has and will continue to affect my sites and it is clear that the way we all look at SEO in the future has changed dramatically.

Before Panda it was enough to have pages of good quality, unique content and a few inbound links to your site in order to rank well in Google.  Now, as the search engine becomes smarter, it is clear that this method of SEO is not going to be enough.  Instead, Google are fine-tuning their methods of assessing the whole user experience on our websites.  In other words, if the user isn’t having a good experience then why should your site be ranked highly in Google’s results?

So how are Google able to assess user experience?  Well although the algorithms etc that Google will be using are, no doubt, massively complex, the basics of how they can assess user experience is actually quite simple.  Google has access to an absolute ton of data gained from both the way searches are conducted to Google Analytics (which so many sites use now as the standard visitor tracking software).  Let’s look at just a couple of aspects of this data…

Firstly, page views.  If Google can tell how many pages a visitor is looking at on your website, it helps them to understand how interesting your site was to that visitor.  Same goes for the time they spend on your site in total.  In an ideal world you want visitors looking at lots of pages and spending hours on your site.  Of course, in the real world this isn’t going to happen but if you look at your stats and see that people are, on average, looking at one page per visit and spending seconds on your site then you may have problems with Panda.

Secondly your bounce rate.  Bounce rate is expressed as a percentage and it is, quite simply, the number of people who visit your site and leave after viewing just the page they arrived at.  This could mean that they click an external link on your site or that they arrive from Google and just click ‘back’.  If the latter, Google are going to assume that your site wasn’t helpful in terms of their original search and guess what?  Yup, down the rankings you may go!

Now whilst the Panda algorithms will definitely help Google to clear up its index of poor quality ‘made for Adsense’ sites etc it may also affect many legitimate webmasters who offer high quality content for free.  For example, I have a number of sites which offer lots of content for free and which earn a modest income from advertising.  This blog is a prime example – there is nothing for sale on this site and the only income it receives is from advertising.  Pre-Panda, I didn’t have too much of a problem if someone visited the site and clicked on a Google Adsense advert, after all, they would have just earned me some money.  Now though, my focus needs to be slightly different.  I need to be thinking about trying to keep a visitor on the site as long as possible before they click an advertising link and that is a much harder thing to do…

The reason it is hard is because you have to find the right balance.  If your content is ‘too good’ the visitor will be inclined to stay on the site and any advertising will blend into the background and be ignored.  If you make the advertising stand out more than your content then you are risking a high bounce rate and low page views/time on site.

So whilst you might be able to improve your key SEO data, it may be at the risk of losing advertising revenue.  Who knows how things will actually pan out but with more Panda updates planned over the coming months, one thing is for sure, it won’t be too long before you see the impacts of Panda on your websites.

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