Google’s Panda hits eHow, but what impact will it have on your SEO techniques?
Google is by no means perfect, but it seems to have struck another blow in the fight to make its search results as relevant as possible with the news eHow has experienced an significant drop in referrals.
Most web users will have stumbled across eHow at one time or another, in fact that’s the whole point of the site. Demand Media, the company behind the project, say it is designed to offer useful information on a range of topics. Its critics say it’s a hodgepodge of poorly written but well optimised content designed to attract visits through search engines in order to help generate ad revenue.
Google clearly felt something was amiss with eHow (along with similar sites) and earlier this year launched Panda, an update designed to penalise sites with low-quality content which didn’t actually provide people with what they were looking for.
Now in an earnings report Demand Media has revealed just how hard it has been hit by Panda, with search referrals falling by 20 per cent in the second quarter of the year and overall traffic dropping by 12 per cent. Clearly, the company has some thinking to do.
But what about other firms using search engine optimisation techniques? Should they worry about the impact Panda might have had on their traffic levels? The short answer is “not if they’re doing it properly”.
Google wants people to find what they’re looking for and as long as your SEO efforts are relevant and involve high-quality content then there’s no reason to fear Panda. In fact, you should probably welcome it – with sites like eHow being penalised there could be more chance of potential customers finding their way to your site through Google.
Of course the advent of Panda means getting your SEO techniques spot on is more vital than ever before because each time Google tweaks its algorithm, the margin for error gets smaller and smaller.
2 Comments
Rex 7th, May 2011 at 3:29 am
In my own opinion, what google did is right and really beneficial to users or searchers. Like me as searcher, of course I want to get quality information from the topic I'm searching for in google. I don't want low quality information particularly if I'm gonna used it in my project or research paper. By the way, all of my sites are not affected negatively by this Panda. Thanks to this new algorithm.
web optimization consultant 7th, May 2011 at 6:06 pm
Hi there yes this is a good things and just goes to show that good content is king and that's what Google is all about it makes sense maybe for these SEO experts to foucus more on copywriters and journalism instead?
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