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Google Panda update has left quite a few bitten and some have been mauled. Among those who have been mauled include content farms that were earlier ruling the roost. In this entire melee, many of you must have been bitten. Let me retrospect on some of the reasons for this conundrum.

Google obviously penalized content farms

If I may say so, it was bound to happen one day or other. Content farms were adding inane, worthless, keyword rich content like mad and they were growing by millions of pages a day. As a result, these content farms flooded the first page of search results. As it usually happens, many lookalikes sprouted up making the whole scene murkier. In the end it was a bloodless coup by the Panda. Google results are far prettier as a result of this coup. Till this far everything Google did was clear. But what happened to the sincere guys notching up great content? Even they got bitten by the Panda. But why?

Greater emphasis on authoritative indicators

Will people visiting your site reveal their credit card details? Will visitors transact business on your site with their credit card? This seems to be a crucial indicator. What happens to those who never sell anything? Anyway, you better make sure that your site is reliable and trustworthy.

Too many ads can spoil the broth – I mean search ranking. There are two ways to look at it. One, too many ads are distracting and don’t add value to the reader. For a good user interface perspective, cramming tens of ads doesn’t make sense. Two, too many ads give the impression that the website is living on selling ads and not on providing content. Both ways, too many ads must be avoided. This does not apply to the AdSense campaign. Remember that AdSense belongs to Google.

Getting backlinks from authoritative sites, education or government seems to be a huge plus. Probably sprinkling a few well-known names would be advantageous. On the other hand weightage of dubious web directories has diminished.

Content is still your best bet

I don’t mean that you must fill your website or blog with research papers and thesis. Anyway not all subjects involve great content. What you must ensure is good content and lots of it but not too much. What do I mean by this? Too much content would make you look like a content farm. Too less would mean you are not serious enough. Somewhere in between is the best place to be in.

Conclusion

If the Panda has not yet bitten you, the chances are you have escaped. But that doesn’t mean you can be complacent. You must pay attention to the lessons learnt and make sure that you don’t get into Panda territory. Or else…

About the guest author: Victor Solovey is the owner of crazyxhtml , where they do crazy stuff including ‘psd to css’ and ‘psd to xhtml’ conversion. Victor is passionate about his work and also likes to write.