What You Need To Know About Google Panda and Penguin

The Google Panda update looks at:

• The amount of content above the fold
• The bounce rate for a page
• The click-through rate of the page
• The number of clicks a page gets in results

The Google Penguin update looks at websites who have tried over optimising, particularly those who have poor quality links being built back to the domain, there are a few considerations which are specifically relevant to design practices.

Having content feature above the fold (as opposed to ads) is believed to be a positive with Panda. As images are often a large part of design, we recommend complementing main images which take up a large amount of above-the-fold real estate with concise, yet on-topic HTML text, neatly nested in an attractive textbox.

For bonus points, each box of text should include a <h> tag to indicate the primary key term which the following text is relevant to.

Keyword density is of lesser importance than having a variety of relevant key terms. Striving to incorporate terms you expected to come up in a discussion about the main topic of the page is a less suspect and more search friendly approach to generating content.

The number of pages a site user clicks through before leaving the domain, or returning to the results page, is in itself an indication of relevance.  A domain that has a high number of clicks-through to other internal pages is believed by Google to be more relevant and therefore worthy of high positions. Place clickworthy information into a series and incentivising clicking-through, which in practicality means requiring clickthrough to get the full story/information. This works particularly well on the homepage of the domain, where content can be written to require a click-through in order to completely read all the relevant information.

While dwell time is known to be an established quality signal for Google’s PPC services, we believe that currently a similar consideration has been included in Google’s Panda algorithm.

Considering that bounce rate is now a significant signal in Panda, dwell techniques are beginning to make their way in to SEO site design recommendations.

Key-term anchor text such as: “web design”, “branding and web development” and “web branding” should be replaced with the company’s brand name. Having several thousand links from one domain, all with the same anchor text, is likely to incur the wrath of penguin.

When providing an ‘embed this link/content’ frame into a build, we are currently recommending that all anchor text used strives to include the company’s brand name and change for each new piece of content.

While this is not a big problem for smaller brands with lesser traffic, builds that encourage a lot of backlinks or projects that are expected to attract a lot of links ought to ensure that all links back are branded and not identical.

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