Recently Google has integrated the Panda update in to its
normal indexing process. Now, how will webmaster come
to know whether her site is hit by Panda? And, if her site
is already hit, how she will know that she has recovered
from Panda?
Nandita B, India
Some ideas on how to evaluate the quality of a site:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
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Dear Matt, what is with pages that are not referred by users to their friends, community or to the whole web (social, blog, etc.)- because if they would do this, they have to state that they have problems like (in our case excessive sweating) – these sites do not get backlinks and social signals, so even with good content you were not listed on top – there are so many shitty pages that do not solve anything, but they have loads of "incoming link" power, and they rank for keywords that are only part of some (in many cases) bad researched articles… So you rank pages that are not really interested in the problems peaple would not speak about. And leads them to sourced they get as good as no info. I speak about the single focus pages, the high specialized sites. A common problem portal will surly get the signals, but not the specuialized – so when you link on a page that has the intention to focus on single problems, you do always state: This is also my problme … And it really doesnt have somthing to do with bad text or bad content…
Well both insist on blog content original content, but what I have a site that is a job search engine because these penalizing me
Panda killed my bussines..
Well Panda is one big smoke screen, nothing happend only the big ( google friends ) companies got all the rankings, and in smaller countries like the Netherlands, hardly anything changed, i think Google does not really care about small and Medium webmasters allot of blabla, impossible to contact them for spam reporting, What happend to the Nice Google from 7 years ago?? it is all about the money now!! shame on you Google and Mr Cuts!
The explanation Matt gave is clear and well understood, so the bottom line is to have high quality content on your site so as to merit high ranking
What confuses me is we are always told we must put out high quality content ! very important for ranking !! What about porn sites ? how do they out rank each other, if one site has more high quality porn than the next site ?? what about sites like rotten.com full of trashy pics ? when you google "disturbing pics" the #1 ranked site is a tumbler site, its full of crap hardly any text and trashy offensive pics.. Now how is this a "quality content site" how does it outrank every other site on their
Confused with Matt's Answer. Watched it thrice. I'm still confused.
I think the question was not answered… just blah, blah, blah, quality content, blah, blah, quality content, blah blah, check the blog….
What's "high quality content" for a photography website(not blog) where you have a gallery of images and limited amount of text? Why is it you are forced having a blog with a ton of text or your photography site won't be as popular.
Matty Not all websites need new content all the time, you are giving advices just for blogging and news channels!
Why dont you have a traffic light system (similar to your page speed tool), based on how your site is performing with algorithmic penalties?
You could score a site on Quality of Content, Back Link Profile, Social Metrics, Site Health etc.
This would give webmasters guidance into what they need to do to improve their website instead of guessing what the issue is.
Let me know Matt I'll mock something up for you if you like 😉
What Panda really means is… if you are not paying us to advertise …you are not going to show up in the search results.
What kind of KoolAid do they serve at Google? Does anyone believe this anymore?
I comfortably get over 3000 dollars every month just by answering easy surveys at home.
This website shows every detail how snipurl.com27ssgba
High-quality content doesn't perform well in reality. Their bots aren't smart enough to distinguish high-quality content from low-quality ones of similar length. I'd be the happiest person if the things that Matt say in his videos worked in real life.
I paid amount to bankruptcy for advertising but web spam not paid , web spam ranking better than me . you rich but I die
I'm not convinced about the sincerity of your help to speak out all the time.
I'm not convinced about the sincerity of your help to speak out all the time.
I'm not convinced about the sincerity of your help to speak out all the time.
They've been saying this for months. Write to the best of your ability. John Hoff makes a good point about small somewhat static content sites, or with less publishings.
I get Googles angle, but it is squeezing the little guy. Interesting to see how this will be handled.
And Who i the world is Google to regulate or publlicize content in order to appear in their listings or sites directory? They are violating freedom of mi readers to read what they want to read or see, regardles if it is considered of interest or "QUALITY CONTENT" for Google. This people is monopolizing what you want to see or read.
UGHHHH. Lets takke them out of bussines by quitting using Google. Lets use BING!!! or anoher service. Who follow me? I agrree wiht John all the way
google panda's force webmasters to liquidate bizness
Hello Matt Cutts
I'm your follower here from Brazil, their publications are great and always help people like me who live the internet.
Congratulations and thank you!
Success to You!
What's the moral of every Matt Cutts video?
If you rely on only Google for your traffic then you're screwed.
There's at least 30 different traffic generating methods that don't rely on SEO … spend your time on those and stop wasting time being a slave to Google who, at a single press of a button, can destroy you overnight.
Thanks for the knowledge.
I just looked at car-part . com and they don't have any kind of high quality content. Matt, you is a lie!
Well obviously it will. we have a recipes site with well mostly recipes. You can imagine that igredients and instrucitons are as simple as possible (a how-to). They can't be written like a novel. So website dropped to p2 or p3 in google. And now pages nonrelated to this type of food are on first page. Or pages with only small number (4 or 5) of dishes from the geo-area we wrote about (while we have over 120 unique local cuisine recipes). it just doesn't make any sense.
How does a machine determine what "quality" content is besides looking at grammer, spelling, and sentence structure? How can you train a machine to have an opinion and say "hmm this article is really great and very compelling, so let's rank it." A machine cannot think subjectively or have a real opinion like humans. If this was the case, backlinks would no longer be used to determine rankings. This is why backlinks matter because real humans are making the choice to link to your quality content.
He says the same thing over and over again in his every video..
hehe
Yet in the meantime, Google is slowing knocking off Apple and Microsoft off the OS market. They're becoming the only gateway to the Internet.
If Google is all about transparency (lol), why not integrate some kind of quality indicator in Google's Webmaster Tools?
Talk about dodging a question. So how do you know if your website is being affected by Panda? There can be so many things affecting your website's performance in SERPS: internal links, external links, incoming links, content quality, site structure, duplicated content… the list goes on and on and webmasters are pulling their hair to find out what's going wrong.
Thanks for the video Matt, but there are still people out there (myself included) who have followed all the Panda advice over the last few years, and haven't recovered, despite being equal or better quality than big brand sites that continue to rank well. Algorithms can always be improved, and people who feel that Panda isn't accurately categorising their site, have no legitimate way to raise the issue, other than comments like this one.
Let's say that i have a brand new website with quality and unique content with no backlinks and after a few days or a week some noob comes and copy my site content and he blasts some backlinks to his site and rank higher than me? How Panda works in this way?
Customers come to our site to get service => makes me wonder then why you would put "tips" up on the site?
However, if you wanted to, and if each "Tip" was really short (lets say less than 200 words), I'd put several tips together on one page. Get the word count up around 400+ and you shouldn't have a problem. But if you had 20 pages of single tips, each only 20 – 50 words long, then yes, it could look like low quality, and it's not the best user experience.
Forget Google – Their rankings have become so unstable in the last few years, it's like winning the lottery. Forget High Quality Content – all you need is a bit of luck and massive link building like always. Google has become so sad….could have been a great company.
I just dont believe him anymore
what amazes me is that we have got to the point that Google are becoming mind police by indocrinating us as how we should be writing for their search engine it is a dangerous precedent George Orwell 1984 here we come
Can you see, all Matt's answers have duplicate content now ?
Matt seems to be confused. The Internet isn't about original, high-quality content. Just ask Matthew Inman over at The Oatmeal and his "OH MY GOSH GO LOOK AT THIS LINK I POSTED" comic.
I second that! It often ranks dead links and scraped content junk sites over the site that should be ranked high.
Matt, to be honest, your so called 'Panda' has no idea what is "GOOD CONTENT".
I'm so over hearing this same rehearsed spiel over and over again. Unless Matt can explain why a site packed with unique, 500+ word hand-written tutorials with our own photographs doesn't count at "high quality content", then his words are as empty as they have ever been.
LOL yeah but still Panda doesn't have anything to do with that. I doubt they have that coded into the algo. There are people who rank and don't spend on AdWords.
The only way to know if you were hit by Panda is if your traffic shot down after one of the many known Panda updates over the last 2 years. The only way to know if you've recovered is if it shoots back up within a month or two of making significant changes to indexed content or removing light content from the index (basically anything you wouldn't want a user to land on first, like internal search results or post archives).
Bottom line: notifications would be nice.
Is Google aware of all the collateral victims that its famous animal updates have left?
How classified sites can play the game of Google and Panda? Thes sites aren't created so that people write presidential speeches of the items & services they're offering. Also, users tend to copy-paste the same info in other different classified sites. In the Panda eyes, is the Webmaster obligated to re-edit the classified texts? if somebody is selling a DVD, the webmaster has to write an essay of the DVD in order to please Google and Panda?….
Than no one cares as you are not spending money on adwords 😉
That's exactly what I was wondering.
If I got $0.01 for every time Matt Cutts says "high quality content" I'd…. be confused about why someone was paying me this money.
I think it makes sens if content is targeted to US customers no need to show this to asians Rights ? My concern is exactly the opposit, when you search for example in Canada french, a lot of top competing sites are from France, this is frustrating !
Perhaps its only me thinking Google has pushed out another significant change this year that emphasizes locality to search results. My US based site had been getting about 85% of its traffic from SE Asia and since the 1st of the year that dropped to 5%.