Google Farmer/Panda Update Killed The Ranking Star

Welcome to the wonderful world of Google Search Engine Marketing. We are Monstrous Media Group "Monster Creative Management" and are your host for today's blog covering the Google Algorithm release known in our nerd world as "Farmer" or "Panda". By now you may have noticed that your search engine traffic has dropped significantly but may have no clue as to why. Or, you are a naughty marketing guru and have no idea or any clue that anything has changed. Shame on you!

If you're like a lot of our NEW* clients you maybe thinking, so wait a minute, what happened to all of my search engine traffic this month? You were most like struck by Google Farmer/Panda.

On February 24th, the Google Farmer/Panda update was implemented and changed 12% of Google's search results. What?!?! That's right, nearly 12% of all of those tireless hours you spent optimizing your website against your competitors was probably just thrown out the window, that is if you were doing your optimization and marketing strategies incorrectly.



Okay, wait.. what? Seriously, what just happened to my search engine rank? Well, let's check in with our development partners over at Google to hear what they have to say.

Google’s words:

"Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content."

Great, thank you Google, I will break that down for the rest of you:

This algorithm specifically targets sites (not necessarily content farms) that are low quality in a number of ways, such as:

1) Shallow content (not enough content to be useful)
2) Poorly written content
3) Content copied from other sites
4) Content that’s not useful

So who did Farmer/Panda impact overall?

Well, nearly 98% of the Google indexed population. Or, the ones that we like to call "the people that either have no clue what they're doing, or are doing their search marketing improperly". Let's face it, there is an unlimited amount of quote "SEO/SEM Professionals" out there who will quote "Get your website to the top of the search rankings" so be careful who you choose to get your online business included correctly. If you hear the words "Keyword(s)" do yourself a favor and run!

What can we learn as "good" search engine marketing gurus? A lot really.

Let's summarize it for you:

- Substantial low quality on a site can cause the rankings for the entire site to decline (even for the high quality pages)

- Evaluate your web site for poor quality pages (not useful, poorly written, non-unique, or thin) and remove them

- Overall user experience is likely important: design and usability, ad-to-content ratio, brand perception

- Look at both content and page templates (do the templates overwhelm the pages with ads? Provide a poor user interface?)

- After ensuring all content on the site is high quality, focus on engagement and awareness (through social media and other channels) Did you hear me? Social Media MATTERS!!

- Diversify into other channels and even within search, look beyond web search at Google News and “one box” style results such as blogs, images, and videos

- We can potentially learn from content farms, particularly in how they pinpoint what audiences are interested in and what problems they are trying to solve as well as how they harness crowd sourcing.

So now what? I've lost all of my traffic and now I'm showing up on page 20 of my search phrases.

We are very glad you asked that question. The simple answer is to call us. We would be happy to sit down with you to discuss a more proper search engine strategy as well as provide you a practical on-going maintenance plan and road map for proper tracking REO.

Would you hire an auto mechanic to fix the hole in your roof or worse yet try to repair it yourself?

More importantly we will help you decipher those pesky and hard to understand elements such as Brand Perception, Quality Content Ratios, Factors of Impact, Associated Content / Associated References, and Building Content for Searcher Needs (Duh!!).

We are Search Engine Professionals and would LOVE to assist you! Call us today for your free consultation and a free tour of our production studios.

Monstrous Media Group LLC
"Monster Creative Management"
www.omahamediagroup.com
6414 S. 118th St
Omaha, NE 68137
(800) 601-6765
support[at]omahamediagroup.com