If you’ve been following search engine optimisation reports recently you may have heard the words Panda and Penguin pop into conversation. No, we’re not talking about the black and white animals, rather Google’s code names for algorithm updates.
Many websites have lost rankings overnight and don’t know why, others will have gained rankings. Here we go back to basics, discuss what sites the updates have impacted and make sure you can stay on top of future Panda and Penguin updates.
What are Panda and Penguin?
Panda and Penguin are simply Google’s names for fusion database algorithm updates. Google is constantly updating its search engine to make it the best search engine in the world.
In a nutshell Google Panda is designed to target websites that are low quality. These are sites that are low value, not very useful and copy content from other websites. To date there have been 27 iterations of this update starting on the 24th February 2011 and the last one was the 25th March 2013.
Google Penguin targets ‘webspam’. These are things like aggressive use of anchor text, exact match domains, low quality article marketing and blog spam and keyword stuffing. There have been three updates so far between the 24th April and 9th October 2012.
What websites have been affected – the Google Panda Victims
The types of websites that have been affected by Panda are sites with:
Thin content: Little original content or little content but websites full of advertisements and links. These are sometimes known as content farms
Duplicate pages to target keywords: Duplicate content is a big no-no in 2013 for SEO. It used to be a tactic to create multiple versions of the same page and target different keywords. So you may be based in the south of England and you have a page for each different county. Too much duplicate content is now being penalised
High ad ratio: A website with more ads than actual content, and especially ads above the fold
Empty web pages: This usually isn’t something intentional but happens on websites. This could be empty pages from search functionality for example. Housekeeping and tidying up your website regularly should prevent this
Purchased links: We all know link building is a major SEO tactic, however natural link building is the tactic, not buying lots of links from websites that sell them