Are SEO Experts Any Closer to Understanding The Google Panda Update

It is several months since the Google Panda update and still people can’t agree what the changes mean. Does it mean a new type of SEO and that everything done to date is wasted? Or, as many think, does it mean that quality content, that the best SEO experts have always recommended, is now absolutely key and poor keyword stuffed content has no value at all anymore?

Well an important part of the new algorithm is said to look at how long searchers spend on a site they have clicked on, this won’t affect your pagerank but will impact on how you rank for particular keywords. If you try to rank high for keywords that you aren’t relevant too or which are too ambiguous you will get a high bounce rate and Google will see that and adjust how they rank you. No more can you optimize for a popular keyword to get thousands of visitors even if only a small percentage stay on the site. You now need to be focused and ensure you actually offer something to everyone, even people that are never going to buy from you you may want to serve up great content to.

Duplicate and spun content is on it way out as well: this includes content that you put on to your own site that you take from an article bank or spin from someone else’s article It also includes using content put up on to article banks in order to get links back to your site. Google will it seems still respect the original version of an article and give it value: if it didn’t this would in fact discourage people from writing good quality articles that others would actually take although the shady practice of simply stealing someone else’s article has little value any more. Real SEO experts and site owners who create quality content will be only too pleased to know they will have a better chance of keeping their own content: as long as Google finds it on their page first that is of course as some surprisingly high profile, high pagerank  websites are known to have stolen content.

Original content then with the right keywords in is more important than ever then for building rankings but what about building links? Is it still valuable and is it still possible? If you have links coming to you from poor quality duplicate content websites the value for SEO since the Panda update is limited. Therefore more time and effort is going to be needed but you can now rank higher with a few good quality links than with many links from aggregated duplicate content. A good SEO strategy is to work with blog owners and other sites which require quality content and provide them with content that will link back to your site:  by doing this you can have links from better quality sites that link to relatively few other pages increasing the value of the link. Whether it is on page or off page SEO then since the Google Panda update it is high quality and unique content that is essential to your rankings, as well as relevant and unambiguous keywords.