Kickass ** POWER SEO **
What Does The Panda And Penguin Want?
Almost a decade ago, webmasters didn’t assume that the demands of two ‘animals’ would foil their attempts at building a presence on the web. Back then, search engines were more of a ‘wild west’ experience, allowing any site to rank using only simple search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
These simple SEO techniques included inserting keywords, link building and using advertisements linked to the previously mentioned factors. Webmasters only needed to do a few or all three to have some type of presence in the Web 1.0 world. In a few years, that type of search engine optimization changed.
The initial changes to how search engines ranked their corresponding results pages started ‘rolling out’ about six years ago, when older Web 1.0 SEO services stopped working. Sites that used the simplest SEO techniques abruptly stopped ranking high, forcing webmasters to close said sites or find newer ways to adapt. Most webmasters, however, chose to adapt.
By the time most websites morphed into Web 2.0 properties, SEO services started changing to accommodate them. People couldn’t choose simple keywords or link building anymore, since they didn’t have much of an effect on their website’s rankings. Instead, they started pushing web content as a viable way to rank. The phrase, ‘Content is king,’ became the mantra of most webmasters as they optimized their sites into new Web 2.0 properties.
To search engines, like Google in particular, those changes weren’t enough.
The impact of Google Panda and Penguin
The first big change occurred in February 2011—this change was actually the first cumulative action of Google’s efforts to improve how their underlying algorithms generated their search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Google Panda update ‘aimed to lower the ranking of low quality and/or content-thin sites,’ more or less facilitating the return of high-quality sites to the top of most SERPs. As a result, more news-oriented and social networking websites started placing higher in Google SERPs; websites with thin, advertisement-rich and/or spammy content experienced a significant drop in rankings.
Although the Panda update impacted many website rankings, it actually affected just 12 percent of the entire database of search results. Sometime after the update hit, webmasters reported to Google that sites with copyright infringements and/or scraped data started ranking higher than sites with legitimate content. Factors like this provided Google reasons to keep updating Panda’s algorithms, subsequently improving how their search engine works.
Panda’s counterpart, Penguin, arrived about one year later in April 2012. This update to Google’s algorithms ‘aimed to decrease search engine results page rankings of websites that violated Google’s current Webmaster Guidelines.’
Penguin, in other words, was created to eliminate websites using ‘black-hat SEO’ techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking and intentionally using duplicate content, from attaining higher rankings in their SERPs. Much like its Panda counterpart, Penguin affected a small portion of search queries: 3.1 percent in English and 3 percent in other languages like German and Chinese.
Although Google made each update to this algorithm public, it didn’t stop webmasters from more or less ‘questioning’ the viability of the changes.
What does the Penguin and Panda want from webmasters today?
As mentioned, webmasters question both Google Panda and Penguin. The updates serve to improve how Google generates their search engine results pages, but many wonder if the way they implemented each update was worth the confusion and readjustments to their own websites.
Google’s main objective with their algorithm updates involves penalizing otherwise questionable content ranking higher in their search engine results pages. According to Google software engineer Matt Cutts, around the implementation of Penguin 1.1 (late May 2012), the additional update helped ‘penalize websites using manipulative SEO to achieve high rankings’ in their SERPs. Similar ‘tweaks’ to Penguin throughout the year focused on that fact, even affecting how people used natural link building or backlink building techniques.
In contrast, Panda focused on eliminating lower quality content. The update itself was designed around a new algorithm that ‘used special artificial intelligence in a more scaled and sophisticated way than before.’ With the help of human quality testers, this new algorithm searched for differences and similarities within what the testers considered high and low quality content-harboring websites.
When it came to Google Panda’s implementation back in 2011, many websites that featured ‘thin and/or questionable content’ abruptly lost their page rankings. These sites included content directories and websites filled with advertisements. Penguin concentrated on sites using black-hat SEO and other questionable SEO practices, more or less bringing the importance of web authority back to the forefront of building a presence on the web.
What Google Penguin and Panda wants from webmasters today boils down to establishing web presence via building web authority.
Establishing web authority nowadays involves several steps, which includes producing high-quality content, participating in natural link building and getting enough resources and web traffic to make other sites link back. Web authority makes users trust websites, particularly when they reach higher rankings in most search engine results pages.
When Google rolls out an adjustment or major update for Penguin or Panda, webmasters shouldn’t worry. Both updates only make Google’s algorithms work better, improving the search experience for a wide variety of web users.
