All over the planet, webmasters and website marketers are still analysing the changes made by the Google Panda update to their Google rankings. For some, like Ezinearticles and articlesbase.com these changes have been drastic, losing tens of millions of unique visitors to these sites every month since Panda kung Fu kicked it’s way onto the scene.
So how is Panda likely to work and how does it affect ecommerce websites?
At a very basic level, the Panda update is an additional algorithm which looks at the quality of content based on a number of ranking factors. These factors are though to be bounce rate, click through rate on embedded ads in the pages and time on page as well as quite a few other on-page quality triggers.
Whilst the focus of the Panda update seems to have been to weed out low quality websites with user generated content, the new algorithm doesn’t seem to have affected ecommerce product pages all that badly (traditionally ecommerce product pages are a little thin on actual text content, infact many retailers copy the text on these pages from their suppliers websites so the content which IS there is usually a duplicate of another, more authoritative, website).
We’ve seen no reason to be afraid so far of the big bad Panda, infact using the best ecommerce SEO techniques such as adding quality content to all pages and gaining quality one-way text links from authority websites has meant more or less total protection from the update.