SEO’s and Internet marketing pros have been sweating bullets this year because of Panda. Why would a Panda cause an SEO to sweat? Because this particular Panda is from Google, and this Panda is changing the way websites are being ranked.
The Idea People in Charlotte provides our clients with a turnkey web design, web development and Internet marketing SEO program. We do it all. And we have since 1994. But enough about us! The one thing that we have held consistent through all of the SEO fads and evolution is that the user experience and general “feelings” that humans get from your business website is vastly important. We design websites for humans, then search engines and spiders.
OK. What is Panda? Panda is the last name of an engineer employed by Google named Navneet Panda. He has led some very interesting work on machine learning algorithms at Google. Navneet really developed some larger curves that advanced machine learning algorithms to a much higher level this past March. See, “Panda” was released this past March by Google.
Panda did some interesting and revolutionary things with how websites are ranked. Some websites
went up, and others went down. Some websites saw dramatic drops in overall traffic…just out of the blue. People panicked. SEO’s panicked. Some SEO’s lost sleep at night thinking of ways to work around this new Panda update. But it won’t work and it won’t happen. Panda is here and it is changing the search.
What Does Google Panda Do to Your Website?
For the first time, Google is including input from their human “quality raters” to mix into the search results algorithms to help the machines learn. The quality raters were asked questions about “trusting a website with giving them a credit card,” “how was the design of the website,” “how would you rate the quality of this website,” and “how is the user experience on this website.”
So, with this input from the quality raters, Google separated websites into ones that the group wanted to see rated higher and ones that the group wanted to see rated lower. The machines are now learning this way. No more “tricks” or “bad tactics” to get websites to rank higher. This Panda update now gives us cleaner and purer search results based on exactly the data we want to see. Cool, huh?
Writing and presenting good content is still important, obviously. And good website design is now more important. And presenting all of this in a website that is highly-relevant, feels good, has a high degree of trust, and is easy to use now rises toward the top over meta tags and stuffing web pages full of keywords. Panda should shake out the SEO riff-raff in Charlotte and just leave the professional web strategists, designers and developers. *shock*
This post is just scratching the surface on what Panda and Google will do to revolutionize SEO and website design. We at The Idea People like it. We like creating websites that have high user experiences, creative designs, and are packed with trustworthy content.
We build websites for humans!
If you would like to learn more about Panda, really good website design, and Internet marketing with proper content development, call Jay Joyce at The Idea People at 704-398-4437 or email jay@theideapeople.com. In our eyes, Panda is a good thing. We’ve waited 17 years for “him” to get here!
