Have you noticed a sudden drop in your Google rankings? Chances are, you are a victim of the Google Panda Update, the search behemoth’s latest attempt to weed out low-quality content sites that depend on shady linking practices to float to the top of the rankings. Now you may be wondering how the move affects you because you do not use such techniques, but unfortunately, legitimate businesses too have seen a drop in their rankings after this move by the search giant. To understand why legitimate businesses are suffering however, we need to dig deeper into what the Google Panda Update classifies as a low-quality content site.

Google uses something called a ‘document level classifier’ to scan through a piece of content. This classifier identifies the language the document is written in, as well as the category it falls under, e.g. newspaper article, blog post, research paper, product description etc. Additionally the classifier also scans the document for keywords, and that is when it measures its value. Awkward or stilted content that is clearly written for the purpose of keyword stuffing, or content that does not follow traditional linguistic structure, indicating it is machine generated, gets flagged as low-quality. Content that contains keywords that are popular but have little or nothing to do with the business of the website also raise red flags.

Another factor that may get your website labeled as low-quality is duplicate content. Recently, One Way Furniture, an online furniture store heavily dependent on online search for their business found their Google search rankings crashing. This was shocking for the management as the website had never employed any unscrupulous SEO techniques in its nearly decade-long existence. After much head scratching, it was discovered that Google was flagging their product descriptions as duplicate content because the website would use the descriptions from the furniture manufacturers its pages.

This anecdote illustrates two very crucial factors responsible for rankings in the post Google Panda Update world:-

1. The importance of unique content cannot be over-emphasized. Even though the website had legitimate right to reuse the content provided by their suppliers, they were flagged by the search engine’s new algorithm.

2. Duplicate content on just a few pages were enough to bring down the Google rankings of the entire website as a whole. This means you need to have high-quality, original content in not just some of the pages of your website, but ALL of the pages.

Finally, there is the ‘Personal Blocklist’ extension for Google’s Chrome browser. This extension allows users to block websites appearing in their search results and send data about the websites blocked back to Google. While the search engine says the data isn’t used in rankings yet, one cannot rule out such a possibility in the future, especially as secondary validation, much like Google uses user click data today.

Pi Services offers high-quality content creation and internet marketing services that are crucial for survival in a post Google Panda Update environment. Google Panda Update represents not just a risk, but also a wonderful opportunity for websites with truly original, powerful content to shine even brighter. Pi Services can help you take advantage of this opportunity.