And for good reason too. Over the past few years, Google has really turned their focus to rewarding sites who constantly generate great content, with higher rankings. Their main motivation behind this is simple: the end user. They want their users to be able to quickly find exactly what they are looking for. In order to do this, Google has to be able to more efficiently weed through the search results, and deliver to the user the sites that will be the most helpful to answering their search query. Having a great website simply isn't enough these days, but rather having a website who's content is great and answers a user's question, solves their problem, or provides the closest and most relevant answer, is. When a user is searching in Google, odds are they aren't just searching for the prettiest website, but they have a specific need that needs to be met, and that need lies within the content of your website.
Google likes to name their "updates" after fun animals, such as pandas, penguins, and pigeons. But what really matters is what each of these updates means for YOUR website, or your clients' websites. Fortunately, the most recent Google Panda update, is actually more of a refresh of the LAST Google Panda update which revolves around content. Think of this way: Google came along several months ago, advised webmasters on what to change in order to avoid being penalized, ran their update, and is now back saying, "we hope you made our recommended changes, if not, it's too late, but if you did, you should be good." The update should only effect 2-3% of all search queries, so it's not a massive, sweeping blow to webmasters by any means. Basically, Google Panda wants to remind us all that content is still king, and having poor quality content just isn't going to cut it.
At Pixel Perfect, we were absolutely terrible at updating our blog, until we realized how utterly important it is to maintain a constant flow of updated content. The more you update the content on the site, the more Google is alerted that something has changed and it needs to send its bots to re-crawl your content. The more Google crawls your site, the better it understands what you're about and sees that you are staying relevant. Over the last 6 months of updating our blog, and focusing on creating and sharing our content, we've received more leads through our website than the previous year combined.
If you are interested in hearing more about how we can help YOU create quality content, and re-think your SEO strategy, we'd love for you to fill out our Get Started form today!
To read more about Google Panda 4.2, head over to Search Engine Land.