Google

There has been a lot of buzz about Google’s Panda update and a lot of SEOs are quite worried and concerned about it. An SEO’s role has been to get a client to the top of a Google search for a certain phrase but now this is going to be harder to get sites up high unless they are popular sites that get a lot of repeat traffic.

This could prove to be a challenge. If your site is not already well established it could become hard to actually get established. It will also be very hard to get established if you are competing with big existing sites such as Amazon.com which has a huge monopoly on not only books but almost every product imaginable now.  The main advice thrown around to counter this so far is to sell products that differ from these bigger websites and have content different to these bigger sites.

It is looking as though Google is taking a lot of the variety out of search results and is favouring the big websites, which may seem unfair. To try and see it from their point of view, they must be thinking “quality over quantity” where these big sites are sure winners, so why bother with the smaller lesser known sites? It seems unfair but it might help consumers find what they want easier. The other sites will still be listed but just harder to find. Those looking for a bargain will still be able to “shop around” but those in a rush will probably just go directly to the big sites.

In the old days it was much easier to get your page to rank, having a well set up site with relevant content and quality links was all it really took to rank well regardless of how good your product or service actually is. It seems that Google is now looking at many other facets of a company, perhaps due to the way that websites are different to how they used to be. There is so much social integration into websites now. Most sites will have social media tabs, the possibility for customers to rate and review their content and services etc. A few years ago pages were all very static and had very little interaction with visitors. Maybe Google is just keeping up to date with current trends in user behaviour, but it is still a concern.

If your site has a high level of original content and offers unique services, as opposed to “content farms” with duplicate data ripped off from another site, you should have less to worry about. especially if you are advertising to people geographically close to you. but if you are a smaller distributor of DVDs or books, unless you are serving a very niche market, things could get tricky for you.

Many SEOs are very skeptical about the future of their businesses and their clients businesses due to this update. As long as Google is algorithm based though, SEOs should be able to adapt and manage their sites as long as those sites are worth managing. SEOs freak out every time the algorithm changes but this time the changes have been more drastic, but after a while everyone will have to be used to it and when the next change occurs everyone will just freak out again and again and again.