Our View On The Panda Update - What It Should Of Done And What It Did Do

The main objective of the Panda update was to remove the "rubbish" from the Internet and this included sites that were or included:

· Link Farms
· Duplicate Content
· Spam / Advertisement Heavy
· Poor Quality Content

In theory, any decent SEO company would have welcomed this update with open arms, a gentle hug and a big kiss on the cheek for Google, because it seemed that this update would reward any good search engine optimisation techniques, which of course focus on quality content and onsite optimisation amongst other things.

Reportedly, the new Panda update was the first update to actually include some element of "real people" and their searches, because there are rumours throughout the industry that suggest that some of the algorithm changes focused on how users have used Google and the gathering of this data.

Although the update went live in the USA last month, the update for the UK search only really started to have an impact within the past couple of days, with early reports showing massive losses for sites that probably shouldn't have been penalised in such a manner. Some massive sites in the UK have reportedly suffered massive drops in traffic, including review and article websites, even though the content was pretty much original and these sites were in no way disguising themselves as being something they were not.

With the latest update we have seen more focus on the local results, which of courses pushes the rest of results down.

For example, if you were to search for "washing machines Gloucester" the first 3 - 5 listings after the pay per click results are local listings, or Google Places results, which means if you used to rank first naturally, you are now looking at a rank of 5 or below, as users will see the results this way anyway. This raised the question to us that if you just have a good Google Places listing, do you really need to bother with SEO, as what is the point if these results will always push other results down?

Whilst we and any reputable SEO company will welcome the supposed objective of this update, the early results do indicate that with more focus on the local listings, sites that have tried and worked hard on their SEO could now suffer because poor sites with a Google Places listing are now coming first.

We are all for getting rid of the trash from search engines, who wouldn't be, but one of the main concerns of this update is the new focus on the local places results and also the fact that some sites that should have been rewarded haven't, indeed, with some, it has been quite the opposite and they have suffered major drops.

The fact is that Google can change the way it delivers results at any time, but the fairness has to be for the sites that have worked hard on SEO, something that Google has always recommended web masters partake in.

If however, you can simply get top of the listings with a dodgy Google Places listing for a couple of months, you then have to start to question where does this leave the future of SEO?

Read More About:

Related Articles: