When Google launched Panda in March 2011 many websites began to suffer and many were rewarded. It has shaken up the world of SEO. Since then there have been and will be many more baby panda updates. The last major one, Panda 2.2 update, being rolled out around mid June.

Just when we thought we knew how to get ranked; build unique quality content, put your Keywords in the title, url and content body and gather lots of lovely links to the page, everything changed. I’m not saying that these things are not still relevant, or important (they are) but the bar has been raised and the goal posts have moved. The user experience is now a bigger part of the mix. In fact Google Panda has radically changed they way we need to approach SEO.

Panda is designed to weed out content specifically written for SEO purposes. Panda is looking for content written for people, content that people want to share.

What Google seems to be doing is putting more emphasis on a different set of metrics, the user experience. Now Google appears to be basing the quality of a site more on the grading you get from Google quality raters. They (humans) quantify a sites quality on how much they like the site. These raters are hired as contractors to conduct in-depth Internet based research and evaluate websites based on a set of guidelines set by Google. Although these Google quality raters have been around for years, many SEO experts believe that Panda gives more weight to the information they provide in their algorithm than before and in a more sophisticated way.

Quality raters are asked questions like “Would you trust this site with your credit card? Do you think the design of this site is good?” Questions are based around the site’s trustworthiness, credibility, and quality, how much they would like to see it in the search results. Then they compare the differences between the human and machine results.

So now user experience is not just something designers need to think about, but it is also a really important part of SEO. It now has a greater impact on the SERPS. Brand now becomes more important; you need to build a brand that people trust.

They also look at machine data like user and usage data metrics, information they collect from the chrome browser, Android and the Google toolbar among other sources, looking again for the sites that users like more and those they like less. They downgrade less liked sites and upgrade the ones liked more. It is likely that bounce rate is going to be a more important metric. It’s a good idea to rewrite pages with a high bounce rate, or offer something irresistible to click on somewhere on the page. You should also improve the amount of time a user spends on your site. Use the bounce rate and time on site metrics from Google Analytics to work out which pages to work on.

Google is going to be looking at things like the diversity and quantity of traffic that comes to your site. They collect data on where people are going on the Internet, where they spend time, how much time they spend, and what they do on those pages. When people click from a result straight back to the search results this can create a metric that is fed into the machine learning algorithm.

Content doesn’t only have to be unique but something that real people want to share and pass on. Internal links need to be carefully considered; they should encourage users to go to other high quality and relevant content on your site. Websites need to appeal to real people, quality raters in particular, not just to web crawlers and robots.

Design for user experience because:

• It now has more of a primary impact on your SEO
• It generates more links (still a good indicator of quality)
• People contribute more to it
• It gets more social signal likes, shares and tweets
• People stay longer on your site

Remember writing and designing for a good user experience is about creating content that:

• Isn’t stuffed with advertising (sites with lots of ads have been hit hard by Panda)
• Where the content is easy to find without unnecessary clicking
• Doesn’t contain grammatical and spelling mistakes
• Doesn’t contain broken links
• Contains content that is broken up into consumable and logical chunks
• Looks modern and not outdated
• It’s enjoyable to read
• Encourages sharing

It may be time to have a clear out, block or a rewrite of some of your pages. Use 301 redirects and your robots.txt file. Google has actually publicly stated that if you have pages that are low quality on your site, they can bring down the rankings of the rest of the site.

Writing good quality content is not just about grammar, spelling and non-duplicate content. Try and create content that makes your visitors laugh, or contains great images, or is really useful. Would you want to read it?

Conclusion

Improving user and usage metrics for your site will mean generating content that makes people stay longer on your site. Improving your click through rate, reducing your bounce rate and creating quality content using natural language that users want to share.

A Major Panda update will probably occur every 30 or 40 days, (estimated from experience of previous major updates) so you need to be patient to see results from content improvements.

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Here you can see SEO expert Rand Fishkin taking about the Panda update:

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