Thursday, May 10, 2012

"Getting Down" With Google Panda and Search Engine Optimisation

Howdy, there folks. Welcome to another article about search engine optimisation. What we are talking about is this really exciting, outstandingly interesting, very controversial thing called Google Panda.
Let's look at some of the history so we understand the Panda a little more intimately. Panda is also known as "Farmer", and is an update that Google came out with in March, 2011. What it did was rejig a whole bunch of search results and sent a lot of websites down in the page rankings, jettisoned some websites up in the rankings, and people have been worried about the Panda ever since.
Since its birth, Panda has had several updates, new versions have emerged and changes in the Google algorithm have come out of the closet. Like a lot of people you probably have a lot of questions like, "What's this Panda all about and how to I make web friends with it?" What we want to unveil here are some of the principles behind this creature and how Google Panda really changes the way a lot of us need to approach strategize and target our Search Engine Optimisation (S.E.O.)
So let's get out the looking glass and start with a little bit of the history behind Panda. So where did the name come from? Google employed an engineer named Navneet Panda. Seems this guy has done some awesome work with another guy called Bill Slawski. These two guys were part of a patent application that found a great way to use some learning algorithms. Generally, learning algorithms, are very expensive and they take a long time to run. Even more so if you have extremely large data sets, including inputs and of outputs. Before Panda came on the scene at Google, these learning algorithms were at a lower level, and Panda took it to a whole other level.
What Google can now do, due to Panda is, take a whole bunch of websites that people like more and another bunch that people like less. How do they determine this? Well, it's essentially what the quality rater's at Google, yes those men in dark coats, hats and sunglasses that only come out at night, and tell them that a site is good. This means, "This is a good site" versus "I don't like to see this." From here Google Panda take the intelligence of their quality rating panel and scale it using this new learning algorithm process. Are you following?
Here's how it goes down. The quality raters tell Google's visitor's what they like. They ask and answer questions such as, "Would you trust this site with your credit card? Would you trust this expert's information that this site gives about your financial advice? Do you think this site design is good?" That's it, all sorts of questions about a website's trustworthiness, credibility, quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the difference with where it is indexing and ranking now.
The websites that people like more are put into one group and the ones that people like less are put into another group. Then they get real serious with their interrogation and start looking at tons of metrics. All these metrics, numbers, signals, all sorts of search signals that probably come from data metrics, which historically Google has not focused in on as heavily. What the new algorithm aims to do they use those in the process is to separate the wheat from the tares, finding the websites that web surfer's like more and like less. They then downgrade the ones they like less and upgrade the ones they like more. Bingo, you have the Panda update at its best.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nyrie_Roos

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