Google’s Matt Cutts On What To Do If Your Site Was Hit By Panda

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts posted a new video today talking about the Panda update. The question he tried to answer was, “what should a site owner do if they think they might be affected by Panda?” Matt’s short answer to the question is to make sure to write high quality content, content […]

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google-panda-generic-featuredGoogle’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts posted a new video today talking about the Panda update. The question he tried to answer was, “what should a site owner do if they think they might be affected by Panda?”

Matt’s short answer to the question is to make sure to write high quality content, content at the level of published books or in popular magazines.

Cutts explains that Panda launched on February 24, 2011 and this year has been integrated into the “indexing process” where the algorithm is somewhat baked into the normal ranking algorithms. The reason for this is because now the Panda algorithm impacts a “smaller number of sites” and thus is a safer algorithm to run in an automated way.

So if you notice your traffic dropped and you are “not ranking as high as you were,” Matt said. Then you should look at the quality of your content and improve on that. Matt also references a post named More guidance on building high-quality sites by Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search.

Here is that video:

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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