Google’s Penguin Update vs. Google Panda Update

Google has recently updated its Penguin search engine algorithm. There is no surprise as Google usually keeps updating its algorithms approximately 500 times in a year. But the recent update is on a larger scale, which could affect even your own website ranking.  It’s not as light as Panda, though; but still, it strikes quite hard upon the best practices of search engine optimization (SEO) and could even have an adverse effect on your blog, personal, business, etc. websites.

Google stated that this was an “important algorithm change targeted at web spam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.” The update targets to punish and downgrade the black hat SEO practitioners who violate the guidelines and practice webspam, create planned duplicate content to improve their rankings. They do keyword stuffing and cloaking, in order to manipulate SERPs. To scrap spammy websites and to make search engine results better for web-surfers, Google has updated Penguin. Those who are creating genuine content for their readers are benefited from the new algorithm update with increased traffic.

So, in essence, Google Penguin targets the ethical technical practice and unethical SEO tactics. Even if you experience low rankings, there is no need to panic if you are a practicing white hat SEO consultant; it is just a simple technological change.

On the other end, Google has also updated its Panda algorithm which inflicts site wide penalty. Panda updates are chiefly carried out to target pages that aren’t essentially spam but are of inferior quality – the “thin content”. Obviously, the farmer sites which upload duplicate contents felt tremors after this update, because they were the ones which were affected the hardest. Now, this is a huge penalty affecting the whole site. The farmer sites published dozens of such low-quality, useless pieces of thin content that practically provided little value to the readers and which would be submitted to more than one directories and sites to create more links. So, in essence, Panda is intended to stop such farmer sites, such scrappers from uploading such duplicate contents and outranking them.

According to Google’s official blog post, “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

According to Google, the update was meant to help sieve the low quality websites away which dominated the rankings and ranked higher on the SERPs and to bring in the websites of better quality. Obviously, the latest update hit very hard upon all such websites and many even experienced their rankings rapidly going down. The websites which presented thin content are now filtered which ultimately benefit the websites with better and original content. An SEO Consultant has the required knowledge on all the latest updates to advantageously help you in an ethical and effective manner.
Many of the webmasters have started working upon improving the quality of their website content and fix the issues as per the latest updates. Because, fundamentally Google Panda aims at an enlarged human experience and human engagement rather than merely searching for keywords!

Author bio:
Smartkathy is an SEO Consultant. She heads the team of SEO professionals. Hire SEO from India is an ideal option for website owners looking for affordable search engine optimization services.