Google Panda Algorithm Update 2011

For those who spent much of their time on the internet in the last couple of weeks, they probably have known about the Google “Panda” algorithm update. But for those of you who do not know yet, let me summarize the announcement launched by Google last February 2011. This update has caused a lot of concerns for online businesses and writers with websites. One of the change they made was meant to make Google search results more effective, useful and desirable.


For sites which rely greatly on Google traffic, vanishing from the first two pages of their search results (the point at which more than 95% of searchers give up) can mean the difference between your financial life and death. Google also released a Chrome browser extension called Personal Blocklist in February. This feature can stop any site that you dislike from appearing in your results and at the same time you will be helping Google out too.

You can check for your recent visitors to your website using Google Analytic and see whether you are one of those who already being ‘hit’ by the panda. A member of Google’s Product Quality team, Michael Wysz who works with webmasters and has given an important and useful piece of advice. In short, write a good quality content and avoid low quality content.

The panda’s main aim is to remove every poor quality sites from their list as well as to pull down any sites with their spammy backlinks. According to Google, this panda update is mainly designed to provide better rankings for original and informative content. Google also have said that low quality content on part of your site can impact its ranking as a whole.

Google uses the length of time in a web page to determine how important or useful that information is. The longer the visitor stays in your web page, the more useful Google will think your web page is. High percentage of visitors returning to your site is also one of the important factor you need to obtain.

Page content doesnt match with the page title tag as well as keyword stuffing can also make your site vulnerable to panda. If your page has a large number of dupe (of your own copy), no or few content, improve it or remove (and 301) it or block it from Google with robots.txt. You can also add rel=canonical tags to those ‘duped’ pages so that Google will not see those pages as dupes.

 Google Webmaster Tools suggests that you should not have too many javascript and ‘lookups’ in order to speed up your page load time.

You should have your keyword/s in your domain name and URL (space replaced with hyphens). You should have your keyword/s in your title tag (10 – 60 characters), description (less than 200 characters) and keyword (less than 10 words) meta tag. Every word in your Keyword meta tag must appear somewhere in your body text and no single word in this tag should appear more than twice.
You should also have your keyword/s in your H1 – H3, links or anchor texts (to site pages).

Try not to exceed 100K page size, smaller size files are preferred (less than 40 K) and less than 100 links out total is recommended in one page.

According to wordtracker, the “panda slap” is only applied at the page level and not site-wide. Therefore certain pages of yours might get hit harder than the others and some of the pages also might did well out of panda.

Other than that, certain things remain the same, like building backlinks is still one of the most recommended way to get your site ranked well. Sites which use tools such as autoblogging or sites that are built for the purpose of adsense are always not recommended.