Google Panda, which was released this past February, is a search ranking algorithm has changed the game of search engine marketing. Panda was aimed to rank higher-quality sites above lower-quality sites on Google. For instance, after the roll-out of Panda, CNET reported a surge in rankings of news and social networking sites, and a corresponding drop in rankings of sites containing large amounts of ads.
One of the biggest disadvantages of Google Panda over older ranking algorithms is that it weighs search results in favor of web pages with newer publication dates. This has resulted in an adverse effect on sites that rely on “evergreen” content, or content that remains valuable and relevant for a long time.
Evergreen content is crucial for the success of blogs and information-based web businesses. Not only is the content itself more valuable than most recently generated content, the value found in the comments of each post is often extremely informative and completely free to you, the owner. Over time, real experts and seasoned professionals leave evergreen comments that answer questions your traffic may be asking. But, because these comments may be months or years old, fewer searchers are finding them through Google.
Searchers are not being served by this update. When they seek information, Panda delivers newer, yet less valuable content in their search results, so they never see the in-depth evergreen information. I assume Google’s reasoning is that newer is better, and if your only goal is to stay on the cutting edge of current events, that makes sense. However, new content hasn’t had time to build that informative comment dialogue that only passionate subject matter experts can give over an extended period of time.
In the next blog post, I’ll explain some SEO tactics for the current Google Panda Era.
