What is Google Panda and How does it affect traffic of a website?

Google Panda is the recent changes in the Google search algorithm that was released last year in the month of February. Google Panda changes aim to hit website with spammy and lower quality content. The main targets of this website are spammy/scraper sites. It rewards websites with original and good content with top ranking in search results. This algorithm rates websites based on measures of quality, including design, trustworthiness, speed and whether or not they would return to the website. After the launch is Google Panda, huge changes in the website traffic have been seen. There are many websites whose traffic went down badly after this update.

Main purpose of Google Panda

The main purpose of Google Panda is to reward original website and hit poor quality websites. It eliminates spammy websites from the top places of the search engine. It wants to improve the search results with fresh and good quality websites. Website with copy content, loaded with ads, malwares and spamming links will be removed from the top ranking of the search results. So new bloggers and webmaster also have a good chance to get a better ranking in the search results even they are new. Now only quality matters. Page rank and other factors comes after the quality of the website

The Panda update has affected many high traffic web sites like Mahalo, Ezine articles, fixya, howtodothings.com, Wisegeek and a lot of other websites.

Google Panda updates

Till now, Google has released many updates to Google Panda. Google pushed minor and major Google Panda updates in each month since it was first launch back in February 2011. In each update, Google change the algorithm in the way to identify the Good quality websites for better ranking and poor quality website for lower ranking. All the webmaster who copy articles from other website will sure get a panda slap with lower ranking. If you are publishing the content just for the search engines to attract traffic to earn some money, then you are going to get a slap. Google panda reward those websites which provides proper contents to the readers. It badly slaps those website which users black hat tricks to increase the keyword density to get better SEO. All those websites which load their website with ads and pop ups also get bad ratings as they are only trying to earn.

All the search engine optimization tricks still works but the content copied from some where else is going to get bad ratings. But try to avoid loading your website with over use of Keywords. This algorithm is based on Artificial intelligence and can easily identify the proper flow of keywords and force use of keywords. So try to write good only for your readers not for the search engine.

Tips for web masters

If you are a blogger or webmaster then take this update seriously. Because this is not a short time update. If you will not take this seriously, you are going to ruin your website. Prepare your website against this update to get the reward from Panda. Change your linking policies and do care of all the aspects of your website. Use images in the content with proper ALT tags and use keywords in ALT tags. Check your page for SEO. Find broken links on your website and avoid redirects.

Google Panda is a boon to those who are proving quality websites but its a curse for those who are content farmers. This Google Panda update is a big revolution to provide the fresh websites to visitors. So take this seriously and enjoy panda updates.

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