What are these cute fuzzy Google animals – Penguin & Panda?

If you are new to SEO, then you may have little knowledge on Panda and Penguin which have been the talk for the last couple of years. Penguin and Panda are algorithms used by Google to analyze websites in order to choose which one ranks above the rest in the search engine results page commonly known as SERP. Before Panda and Penguin, Google used other algorithms which only relied on Keywords.

Why Panda and Penguin?

In the past couple of years before the introduction of Panda and penguin, many webmasters had various techniques that they used to rank on the top at the SERP. If you are new to SEO, you should note that the average ‘searcher’ on Google rarely goes past the second result page and therefore, if your website isn’t close to the first page, you may never get visitors to your website. Some of these techniques were genuine while others were totally unacceptable. One of the common techniques was the use of keyword stuffing. Since Google used to check on the page that had the most number of keywords typed on the search box, sometimes ‘Searchers’ got disappointed by what they got on the page. Google realized this and had to introduce a way in which they would ensure the common ‘searcher’ would find the ideal website with the information he or she is looking for.

What are the Effects of Google Penguin and Panda?

The reason as to why Penguin was introduced was to ensure that spammy links into low quality websites were eliminated. Have you ever clicked on a photo online and it automatically takes you to another page which isn’t relevant to what you were looking for? This is the kind that penguin was looking forward to working on. Panda also works on ensuring that website owners provide quality and unique content on their websites. Some webmasters used to duplicate content from other websites and just tweak them which would lead to too much content that is similar. So if your website had low quality content or duplicated content, panda would slap you immediately if not dropping on the SERP ranking. The main aim of these two animals is to ensure that webmasters get organic traffic to their websites and also offer quality content to their visitors.

What if Hit by Penguin or Panda? How do you Recover?

If you are hit by panda or penguin, you only need to do a thorough check on your website. Some of the things that you need to look out for are:

– Quality of your content (Read here for ideas on web content)

– Quality of your backlinks (Here is how to create quality backlinks)

– Ads

– Social networks

If you find out that your website has poor quality content, remove the pages and replace them with others or polish the already existing content. If you find out that you have links originating from poor websites, please take them down and look for genuine links from social media. You should also check your website to see whether you have blank pages or broken inbound links and so on.

Summary

Over the years, many website have been hit by Google’s Penguin and Panda updates. Google uses these two updates to analyze sites in order to determine which site ranks on top of another on search engine result pages, known commonly as SERP.

Before Panda and Penguin emerged, many webmasters and blog/site owners would use “unacceptable” SEO tactics, like keyword stuffing, black hat SEO techniques, and link farming just to influence the rankings of their website.

These site didn’t add any real value to its readers. As a result, more searchers, including people like you and me, found sites containing junk content and spammy results. More people started to get bad experience using Google search engine.

Google noticed this trend and soon decided to take proper measure to ensure that visitors got the most relevant, useful and ideal content for their search terms.

Although the process of SEO has become a little bit difficult than the old days, nonetheless, Penguin and Panda updates are good measures to offer quality content for visitors.

Just consider – you are a searcher too. If you found site that add nothing in value, wouldn’t you be angry having waste your time?