26 Jan 2012

Google Panda in Plain English (Infographic)

By Eric Siu

In February of 2011, the Google Panda algorithm changed the SEO world forever.  After a year of ripping through what Google deems as “spammy” sites, how has Panda affected you? There has been non-stop chatter between Internet marketers and SEOs about how to protect your site from Panda, but with all of the updates and revisions to this algorithm change, things can get confusing quickly.  So here it is; Google Panda in Plain English.

Written By Eric Siu
Eric Siu is the CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain, which has helped venture-backed startups and Fortune 500 companies grow their revenues. He's also the founder of the marketing podcast, Growth Everywhere.

  • Wow. This is the best breakdown of Panda I have ever seen. Super useful! Thank you!

  • Great info, thanks for sharing this. Certainly one of the best google panda analysis we have seen in blogs.

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  • Nice breakdown of Google Panda. I hope google brings more changes to Panda to curb spammers and give a sigh of relief to genuine bloggers.

  • I very rarely look at infographics these days, have never before commented on one, and certainly have never considered sharing one.

    Until now.

    This is a truly fantastic piece of work. It looks slick, and delivers the information in a way that almost anyone with a website will understand.

    Huge thanks for sharing.

  • I’ve been doing SEO for 6 months now and I’ve come up to the following concusion: Google chnages his algo all the time. Trying to trck it is useless. Even if it works now, they’ll figure out and stop that down the road.

    Best practice: just create awesome content. It’ll always work because in that case what you want and what google want just boils down to one simple thing: amazing content.

    That is the way to go! What do you think?

    • Hi kenneth, I agree 100%. I have been designing websites since 1995. Back then I took a course on ZDNet that taught HTML creation with SEO built in. It has always been about original content, back links and proper use of the META tags. ZDNet taught people how to get their site indexed by Yahoo automatically within 6 months just by using the META tags correctly. The 2 most important META tags are keywords and description. What Google has done is added logic to the equation – original interesting content + quality back links + relevant keywords + description = top ranking.

      We have 2 websites we use to promote our monthly “Breakfast With Fran Tarkenton” networking event for small business owners in Toronto, Canada. The sites are dynamically powered by a database which I update with the latest breakfast information when it becomes available. Since there are literally thousands of websites promoting Breakfast With Fran each month, it is difficult for us to have original content. But I have been able to pull it off and each month our sites dominate the top 10 and top 20 results depending on the keywords used and whether the search is restricted to Canada or not.

      It was not always like this. Although the site has been has been around for about 6 years, the database was added 3 years ago. Immediately, there was a noticeable difference in search engine ranking but it was still a hit or miss result. Google FriendConnect was added and the ranking temporarily improved. Then last year I decided to add unique keywords to the database which update the homepage as well as the newly created guest speaker details page. Since then the sites dominate the top 20 search results.

      Finally, we started video taping our local guest speaker presentation in September and placing the video on the guest speaker details pages as an experiment. The site with the videos out ranks the site with no video content.

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  • Excellent info-graphic Sujan. This is by far the most comprehensive and yet extremely easy to understand explanation of the panda updates, which are portrayed as rocket science on so many sites 😉

    Thanks for sharing.

  • Very nice illustration, i\m one of those that had a roller coaster ride when they started with the Panda updates, so far I have already did a lot of those mentioned in the infographic but getting out from something like this will take a lot of time (months and hopefully not years)

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  • Wow, nice info graphic. Still learning about this update and this was a great read. Much appreciated.

  • Thankfully I was not badly affected by the Panda updates, but this is a very helpful resource for optimising my sites in the future. Thanks for sharing this!

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  • Thanks for all the feedback!

  • @Sujan Patel, It’s your gratefulness for affixing and giving out your blog with all of us its really interesting and informative . While doing seo for a site we should care about all above guidelines.

  • Probably the best article on Google Panda I’ve ever come across. Thanks for the hard work on this one!

  • Good summary, thanks, and good tips what tacttics to use and what not to, I will use this as inspiration for an upcoming seminar that I am organizing on internet marketing.

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  • That is an awesome infographic and it is refreshing to see that you practice what you preach as you combine , Linkbait , embeddable content and top quality content all in this one post .

    Great job 😉

  • I knew there was an update, but I didn’t realize just how much this update would affect my websites. Thanks so much for defining the changes. Loved the breakdown of Do’s and Don’ts. Google Panda isn’t so intiidating now! Thanks a whole lot!

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  • Rod

    Really very useful. It`s the best info I had read about Panda.Thanks¡

  • This is fantastic! The best breakdown and explanation I have seen so far. Thank you 🙂

  • I love the image breakdown of the Google Panda update, good stuff.

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