Panda Strikes Again: What It Means for Your Content Strategy

The big, bad panda is back—Panda 4.2, that is. Recently, Google confirmed that it rolled out an update to its Panda algorithm, with 2-3% of searches (approximately 36 million) affected. For sites hit by Panda 4.1, the 4.2 rollout is a blessing. However, sites that have seen their rankings drop in the wake of Panda 4.2 most likely need to strengthen their content strategy.

The first Panda rollout in 2011 was notorious for officially solidifying content as a vital part of any SEO strategy. The algorithm was designed to weed out “content farms” and keyword-stuffed websites that were abusing Google’s search algorithm. Although Google was secretive about the algorithm’s specifics, it was immediately made clear that the algorithm rewarded certain types of content—that which Google deems high quality—and punished other types of content, such as thin content and ugly or broken websites.

With Panda 4.2, Google remained tight-lipped on the specifics but reiterated its advice that websites take a good, long look at their content and make necessary changes according to Google’s 2011 quality guidelines. Now is the time to review your site and take the following guidelines into consideration.

Boost Your Quality and Clean House

As with the original Panda update, Google’s intent with Panda 4.2 is to continue to reward content that it deems high-quality and lower the rankings of content that is poorly written, inaccurate or keyword-stuffed. Google has supposedly improved Panda’s ability to hone in on low-quality content, which means that your strategy needs to focus on following the quality guidelines put forth in Google’s 2011 guide to the original Panda update.

The guide takes the form of questions about content and how users perceive it. Taken together, these questions point towards Google’s intent to reward content that is user-friendly. Quality content is judged for trustworthiness, accuracy and authoritativeness, which means that your content strategy should include time for in-depth research and fact-checking.

One of the most telling questions on the list is whether or not your content is likely to be shared by users. Think of the content you and your social media connections regularly share: it’s content that surprises you or otherwise emotionally engages you. It’s well-written, original, rich and granular, with an authentic, human tone and free from typographical and grammatical errors, which hurt your credibility. Essentially, quality content boils down to old-fashioned good writing. By applying the principles of artful composition—strong narrative, well-constructed sentences, masterful grammar, rich verbiage, factual accuracy—your content will be looked upon favorably by the Google gods.

As you focus on boosting the quality of the content you produce, make sure you also clean up what you already have. Take a good look at your site: is there any content that doesn’t fit the above description of quality writing? Is your content redundant, and if so, can you merge individual pages into a single, high-quality one? Does your site have other elements that Google might punish, such as self-starting videos, banner ads and 404 errors? Get rid of these dregs, which might be dragging your rankings down.

Lengthen Your Content

Content is king, but it’s time to think king-size. Longer content is a growing trend in SEO, and the Panda 4.2 update will only accelerate it. The impetus for longer content is two-pronged: first (as Entrepreneur magazine has suggested), the longer your content, the more useful information the Panda algorithm will assume is in it. Of course, the idea is that you do include more useful information in your content, so lengthen your content the smart way: with interesting quotations, accurate data, entertaining anecdotes and explorations of complexities within what you’re writing about.

Secondly, keyword optimization remains important, but given that Panda’s sight is more akin to an eagle’s when it comes to anything that resembles keyword stuffing, it’s not enough to insert keywords and call it a day. You need to build content around the keywords so that it is natural and user-friendly, which will inevitably require longer and more richly-written content.

Enrich Your Visuals

So far, we’ve been talking about content strictly in terms of writing. However, visuals should start to play a stronger role in your content strategy, as well. Brian Pittman at Entrepreneur states that over half of Google search results include videos, and more than 40 percent of results include photos. Optimize your photo captions and YouTube titles for maximum effectiveness. Plus, interesting, informative visuals will make your content more shareable, thereby boosting its quality rating.

Since Panda is geared towards rewarding user-friendly websites, the forward-thinking will make sure to include design as part of their overall content strategy. “Editorial teams need to work closely with design and development teams to ensure that your content loads quickly on all platforms and that all visuals are formatted correctly,” writes Jordan Teicher of Contently.

Google is rolling out Panda 4.2 over a longer period of time than in the past, meaning that it is still rolling out as you read this. Regardless of whether your rankings have taken a hit or not, it’s time to fortify your content strategy so that you don’t get left behind.