Google’s Panda algorithm is turning to be an enigma, a kind of paradox for most site owners and webmasters, sparking a debate over SEO factors related to it.
On one hand, the change has badly hurt many E-Commerce sites and online businesses.
On the other hand, it harbors the potential to improve overall search quality over time apart from evolving a better information retrieval mechanism. But that’s something for the future!
The Panda enigma
For now, it has impacted the search spectrum. Here’s how!
- It simultaneously hurts SEO-reliant websites that have so far successfully leveraged certain vulnerabilities of Google, even as it raises the entry to organic search elements as a marketing channel.
- Panda algorithm change has literally left many sites starved for traffic that has dramatically depleted in its wake.
- On the plus side, the development has brought out the best of determined SEOs experts making efforts to find solutions and answers to the Panda riddle.
In my own assessment, it has improved search quality for some queries, while for a few others, led to an odd retrograde. So it has been a mixed bag, if you ask me? Does anyone out there remember the Vince update? Well, brand bias now appears to be back, and in a big way…
While brands tend to gain from authority signals, Vince, to put it in simpler terms, was technically not a ‘brand bias’, per se; rather a ‘weighting to authority metrics’ for the head terms, within which brands naturally gained the most. This particular aspect is also crucial in the context of Panda.
There is a valid reason to lean on brands when it comes to relevance in search on the web; actually much of what we are witnessing is the ‘real world’ lining up, so to say, with the internet. Big business names and brands rule, both on and off the web, though many would argue that it wasn’t always true! Well, there was a phase when the Web alluded to a level playing field. May be, that’s changing, or that probably is vision of Google for local search?
So, how to solve the Panda riddle and protect a site from complete SEO disaster? That’s what we are going to consider…