May 26, 2011
With the buzz around the internet marketing community with the latest big update from Google to their algorithm dubbed as Panda aka Farmer update, Google has come out with some guidelines in producing high quality websites.
The Google Panda Update was designed to kick low quality websites out of ranking high in Google. There is a lot of low quality websites online that Google has to crawl and sift through and I think Google is just fed up with it, plus users do not like looking at junk all of the time. There have been big companies that have been hit by this update including Ehow.com and Ezinearticles.com to list a couple. Plus Google has also been penalizing companies who are getting links from spammy low quality websites including JCPenny, Forbes and Overstock who have participated in shady linking practices. Matt Cutts has officially announced that they have lifted the Penalty from JCPenny after they had them in a Penalty mode for 90 days.
Google is not messing around and is changing the algorithm to put more weight into high quality content. One of the largest copywriting companies in the world, Copify, said they have noticed a surge in jobs coming in since the Panda update started rolling out in February. Having much higher quality content on websites for them to rank well is now becoming even more prevalent.
Here is a a video from Matt Cutts talking about the Google Panda update:
The list that he is talking about in this video is from a blog post from Amit Singhal who is with the search quality team at Google. Here are just a few of the questions that Amit posed that may help people understand guidelines from Google for high quality websites.
To read more about what Amit has to say about high quality websites you can read his post “More guidance on building high-quality sites“.