February 2011 changed the search engine listings forever. That was because it was this month that Google first released their Panda update. The main aim of this update was to evaluate the quality of content on website. This was because at the time people were neglecting to really write content, focussing instead on how many keywords they were place in their text.

This naturally lead to keyword stuffing and degraded the quality of content as better phrased sentences were always sacrificed to include keywords instead. Take the two sentences below as an example:

A) We’re a SEO Company Manchester who offer a wide range of Manchester SEO Services.

B) Based in Manchester, we’ve been offering SEO services in the county for years now.

Sentence A is clearly based only for fitting in the keywords relating to roofing in Manchester. You can tell as it doesn’t quite read well. It’s the omission of the “in” between company and Manchester that just leaves the sentence a little off.

Sentence B however has been written properly without the intention of forcibly including in the keywords. So sentence B, according to Panda, has more quality so should rank higher.

Content quality seems to be the only way to combat the Panda update. As seen in Matt Cutts video below:

So now, if you do have a website that’s been hit by the Panda update. You now know how to combat it.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey