The Google Impact – What does it mean for your website?

I’ve been biting my tongue on this one because I’ve been a little uncertain as to what the new Google update changes really mean and how it will impact our websites and search going forward. From the launch of Google Plus I’ve said we must watch and pay attention and use this platform because I felt it was going to have an impact on search. The more I’ve read up and studied this the more I’m convinced I’ve been right.

For a while now, Google has been trying to tap into social media because it realises that social media is vital and an integral part of our daily lives and it has finally made a success of Google Plus and with Google being the search giant,  it is only a matter of time where we will find search and social merge.

However, it is not only Google Plus which will affect possible search results but one of the recent algorithm updates called Google Panda, well not so recent February 2011 to be exact which is going to have an even bigger impact. The Google search engine is going to put less weight on robot ranking content, and start placing more focus on what humans are voting for. The way we vote is by the number of likes, comments, engagement and how long we stay on a website. This will be part of the old and yet new criteria. Google is also placing new guidelines which is a checklist for Panda on your content. Is your content valuable, redundant, news worthy, stylish, out dated. All these factors will now be of even greater consideration.

This change is aimed at penalising websites that use black hat methods to get websites to rank in the top 10.
Google says: “Don’t focus on SEO, focus on user experience and valuable content and the credibility of your content”. Remove any duplicate content, redundant content or pages and make sure your content is well presented.

See Google Panda’s guideline checklist this is vital information for anyone who has a blog or a website, or thinking about setting one up.