The Google Panda Guide - Part 1: What It Is, How It Works, Collateral Damage

MasterNewMedia, is officially among the Panda victims. The site was hit first by the new Google Farmer update, also known as “Panda”, on February 24th, and then again, even more strongly on April 11th 2011. The impact on the revenue front has been dramatic.



Photo credit: Eric Isselée - iStockphoto

In this MasterNewMedia multi-part guide devoted to Google Panda, you will be able to better understand what Panda is, how it works, what damage it can create, and what I and others have done to come out of it.

As a matter of fact and for the sake of giving myself greater motivation to go on, in such a difficult and adverse situation, I decided, as soon as I realized that Panda had really been hitting MasterNewMedia, to take this as an opportunity to question again and more deeply the integrity of my site, and of the editorial and content practices we have used in the past or that we are using now.

Given the type of content MasterNewMedia publishes, and given the type of editorial effort I place on quality over quantity, if Google Panda had penalized MasterNewMedia, I thought, there must be, however unlogical this may seem to me, something NOT OK that has triggered this new algorithm to fire off at us. And so I have armed myself with patience and with the idea of wanting to look at this Panda thing, and at its logic, with a pair of new glasses everyday.

The major stumbling block, I soon realized, for those web publisher having been hit by Panda, is probably their legacy to an old way of looking at Google, content optimization and SEO, which has now been set to near-defunct mode by Google.

In other words: given the high number of low-quality sites appearing in Google web search results and the huge market for black hat seo, tricks, link exchanges and marketplaces, Google has finally switched into a new era, in which traditional SEO factors, are going to count gradually less and less (at least for most), and instead, data coming from the very readers on your site will become the score points determining your visibility and rankings inside the SERPs.
In this multi-part report on Google Panda, you will find:

Though I had decided not to release this information, in stark contrast to what I had done in the past in similar situations, the time has now come to make this story public.

My objective is to help other web publishers and webmasters, who like me, have found themselves suddenly in this tragic situation and are looking at what steps and solutions to adopt, as well the many more who are wondering whether they have already been hit by Panda, but are not really sure how to diagnose this.

I also hope to be of tangible help to those non-English web sites, which at some point or another, soon, will be exposed worldwide to the evaluation algorithm inside Google Panda. So, if your web site is in French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, Arabic or Italian, or any other non-English idiom, watch out, as the Panda has yet to come and check you out.

Before you read on, one important clarification.

As of today - May 17th 2011 - MasterNewMedia is STILL under Panda penalization. So don’t expect from me a magic formula to get out from it. But wait also before you booooo me and jump to another article.

In this nearly three months of having been under the Google Panda penalization, I have studied and researched the topic in and out and have read every single article, report and analysis having been published. I have even created a dedicated free curated news channel, or as I say, a newsradar, that I manually update everyday with my personal selection of the most relevant stories on how the Google Panda story is evolving:
www.scoop.it/t/google-farmer-panda-update
RSS feed - http://www.scoop.it/t/google-farmer-panda-update/rss.xml

So, if you want to know, straight from someone whose site is heavily under Panda penalization, what Panda is, how it works, and what I have done and plan to do to get rid of it, please read on as I have a lot of really useful new information to share with you.

Original Author: 

Robin Good

Taxonomy upgrade extras: