The Panda In SEO Habitat

Good SEO is all about finding a balance between your content, on page SEO and the amount of links you build. Because without the proper balance, an SEO campaign can hurt a website far more than it helps. To explain, if you build too many fishy links and point them at your homepage, the odds are, your website will get penalized by Google once noticed. 

Before SEO became a common practice in the field of Marketing, Google’s algorithm ranked websites naturally. This means, it is based on how many people enjoyed the content of a website, which means they will be referenced and shown by the number of backlinks. And websites with authority in their niche naturally ranked on page 1.

As internet marketers learned to play with system, Google found their rankings were being overrun by low quality SEO sniper websites, which are sites designed to rank well for one specific keyword. And as a result, they’ve made significant algorithmic changes over the years in an attempt to get only the most high quality websites to the top of the rankings.

Although they’ve struggled with this in the past, when they released the Panda Update, and it looked like they may have finally found a solution. Because the Panda update is so effective due to its approach. Instead of using external factors or backlinks to completely gauge rankings, Google now determines how much value a specific website offers its viewers. By keeping bounce rates, average time on site, and new social media votes, such as those from Facebook and Twitter, as a factor when ranking websites, the Panda Update seems to be working well for the time being.

Although social votes may replace backlinks in the near future, right now, backlinks are still a great way to get your website ranking. The Panda Update changed the game completely, but by playing along with Google’s rules and naturally building links, we can push our websites to the first page of Google for the majority of keywords.