Google’s Panda update may have sent many huge corporate firms’ SEO experts scrambling to recover, but for “the little guy,” including many Rhode Island websites, the change worked in their favor.
The Panda update, which was first announced on the Google blog in February, tweaked the search engine’s results in order to give people the “most relevant” answers to their queries.
The announcement on the official Google blog (which is not the highest-ranked “answer” when Panda update is queried) came just 12 days after The New York Times published an article revealing the “dirty little secrets” that were used by an external consulting company to drive traffic to J.C. Penney.
When users searched for any number of topics – from dresses to bedding to area rugs – the No. 1 organic (nonpaid) search results always pointed to the same place – jcpenney.com. According to The Times, the rankings were achieved by paying hundreds of sites to link to the J.C. Penney website (JCP denied authorizing or knowing about the arrangements).
When Google was alerted to the linking scheme, it reacted by manually sinking the department-store chain’s search results; JCP, in turn, fired its search engine consulting firm.
On Feb. 24, Google – which had been working on the update for over a year – said in its blog:
“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites – sites which are low value-add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites – sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
Google explained that, although it makes changes to its algorithm on an almost daily basis and does not normally announce them, it was making an exception in this case because the “improvement” impacted 11.8 percent of its queries.
For local websites such as VisitRI.com and GoNewport.com, the Panda update has proven to be an unexpected gift.
Warwick-based Brave River Solutions said the algorithm change has improved traffic for 90 percent of the more than 200 websites it handles.
The city of Providence saw an 11.5 percent Panda bump, VisitRI.com increased 4.13 percent and the Lighthouse Gateway site saw traffic jump 29.2 percent.
Following the Panda update, Brave River investigated the traffic for all of its sites. There was one site – which Gaines declined to name – that was negatively hit because it resold products and used the manufacturers’ descriptions. The company has since reworded the descriptions and traffic has bounced back.
“When there are major updates like [Panda], it has a ripple effect across the industry,” said Matt Moderski, online-marketing consultant for Bristol-based CC Inspire.
“But there’s also an element of relaxing for a second. When something like this happens, there’s a fire drill to adjust this or speculate on the impact it’s going to have. So, it’s good to step back before you reshape a website,” he said.
CC Inspire, whose clients range from the Watch Hill Boatyard & Viking Marina to Eli’s Block Island, has been working on redesigns for GoNewport.com and NewportMansions.org, incorporating “lessons learned” from the Panda update, including social media elements.
“[Social media] is the next frontier of where search is going and you’ll read a lot about how Google is starting to factor in social media metrics into how it ranks some pages, so [we’re] making sure that functionality exists as well, said Moderski.
“SEO is not really a line item in a project, it’s more of a philosophy that needs to be integrated in all the elements of a redesign,” he added, noting that the new GoNewport site will have individual hotel listings and will include a more user-friendly architecture.
“I would recommend for tourism sites that they develop a content strategy where they continue to create original content … so there’s a reason for the users to indulge in the site. Tips for staying the weekend in Newport, travel itineraries … things like that,” he said.
Moderski declined to disclose the traffic of the GoNewport site but noted there was an uptick in page views following the Panda update, possibly due to other, lower-quality Newport sites getting penalized. He also noted the site does not host advertisements, which “probably helped.” •
