Post Panda SEO – What It Means for You

There are plenty of words you could use to describe Google’s latest algorithm update – ‘surprising’ is not one of them. We all know that the war on spam is heating up by the day and we all know that Google’s updates are set to become more frequent and severe than ever before – Panda 4.0 therefore was technically about as predictable as it gets.In terms of what Panda 4.0 brought along, it’s once again a tale of Google taking aim at sites and businesses that try to win traffic with poor quality content and anything dubbed duplicate or irrelevant. The theory being that by getting rid of all the garbage that’s out there, the only sites left will be those of general quality and relevance to the reader – this is at the very heart of it Google’s very purpose. Mounting an assault on lacklusre content effectively resulted in tens of thousands of sites being instantly wiped from the face of the results rankings, with innumerable others on their slow and steady way to a painful death.   Which of course begs the obvious question – what does SEO mean in a post-Panda world?Well, by looking at what Google tells you not to do, it’s pretty easy to work out what it is you have to do to get by. SEO is built upon great content and if it’s taken you this long to realise a great site needs killer content, technically you have no place in the SEO business! Now more than ever though, it’s all about relevant, flawlessly presented and consistently refreshed content for anyone looking to stay in Google’s good graces. This means paying close attention to keywords and ensuring that all such words and phrases used are weaved into the site’s text with such precision they’re largely undetectable…to the naked eye at least.In addition to these fundamentally basic content considerations, post-Panda SEO also means taking into account two way communication channels, incorporation of social media and solid feedback – all of which are again nothing close to new concepts.As for Google’s exact guidelines on the subject, it all comes down to the very same formula all good SEO professionals have been preaching for years – write for readers, not bots. With each update, Google is getting better and better at identifying which sites are genuinely brilliant for the end user and which are just made to come across as brilliant for the sake of indexation. You might think there’s a fine line between the two, but the difference is in fact enormous and one of huge importance. To succeed means to think about what your visitors are looking for and to provide it for them – create a world-class user-experience and you’ll effectively be constructing a highly-effective post-Panda SEO strategy at the same time.The long and short of it with Panda 4.0 is effectively simple – too many site owners have for too long been getting away with pumping out pure garbage and fooling both search engines and by extension search engine users into visiting their sites. This is something that Google intends to put a stop to and will in time delight hundreds of millions of web-users every single day.For businesses that intend to be a part of this future, it’s a case of playing by the rules or accepting a pretty unpleasant fate.