Google Panda is a google algorithm that was released in February of 2012. The purpose of the algorithm is to lower the rank of sloppy low quality sites to provide web surfers with only the best content. The Panda filter is based off of the Google Quality Rater. The algorism caused a drop in sites with large amounts of spam and advertisements. Thanks to this algorithm many high quality sites have been put on the radar as authorities of their niche. The Google Panda technology was patented on March 25, 2014.

Basically if you’re site has poor quality or is a result of web scraping meaning that your material is simply copied from one website to another, this could bring down the rank of your website by lowering its quality and search engine ranking. General material also causes websites to rank poorly. This is bad for new bloggers because when you get into the blogging game (and this is especially true for folks who make the decision on a whim) you post things trying to figure out your niche. No posting goes unnoticed by google.

Scraper websites are pretty much created to reap ads and spam profit. These scrapers are also known for domain high jacking. Think things like: domain high jacking, link farms and pay per click websites. Domain high jacking is when someone takes a freshly abandoned domain and all of its subscribers and readers. These scammers do this so that they don’t have to go through the hard work of building a website up through hard work like the rest of us.  Domain high jacking puts customers and brands alike at risk because of the fact that these scammers can scrape contact information as well as personal account information of the website. This includes all profits that the website makes from advertisements and sales.

The Google Quality Rater rates websites on twenty three separate factors and qualities. Panda Algorithm works to asses all of these in order to rank websites. Main factors include assessing quality. These rankers ask questions such as:

1.           Is this site secure?
2.           Is the information on the site written by experts or enthusiasts?
3.      Is this information web scraped or duplicated?
4.      Would one be secure giving credit card account information to this website?
5.      Are there errors that simple proofreading could have remedied?
6.      Are the topics things that genuinely intrigue the audience?
7.      Is there any value to this information?
8.      Is this website an authority on their niche/topics?
9.      Are articles well written?
10.      Are there excessive ads on the website?

The security of a website is important for obvious reasons. Going to a website with expired certificates or an out of date copyright is a security threat of its own. Google Panda reviews this information and ranks the website according based on its trustworthiness.  One of the major signs of a scam site is its poorly written content. Normally, especially on websites with non-native language speaking outsourced writers, the major sign of treachery is in the quality of the articles.

Words are misspelled grammar is nonexistent. The topics don’t flow and one thing has nothing to do with the next. Panda makes it so that upon reviewing this information that the specified website will not rank well due to the excessive quality issues.

Another cool update that Google worked into the Panda algorithm is the information it obtains from a personal block list chrome extension. This makes it so that people who get blocked by high volumes of people will have lower ranking websites as well. So a telemarketing scam site owner would rank poorly as opposed to an Indie music site owner who has very few blocks. The bad thing about this is that because it uses information obtained from a personal block list chrome extension, it would still be easy for scammers (especially if they work in with a large team) to simply put blocks on a person or site to bring their rank up. Yes this would take a lot of work, especially if you’re coming from the bottom of the ranking list. You’d be surprised how far many scammers will go. All in all, Google Panda is an excellent resource that rewards based on merit as opposed to quality.

The good news is that you don’t have to understand how Google ranks the sites. I will do the hard work for you to get your site on first page of Google, Yahoo, Bing. Contact me and I will send you a SEO website analysis to find out what is preventing your site from being ranked.