Webmasters Gift from Google: No Panda Updates Till Next Year

Readers, the following is a guest post from Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land's

Yesterday, I made an assumption that Google would put all Panda updates on hold until after the holiday season.

Google tweeted yesterday afternoon that there would be “no major Panda updates until the new year.”

The last Panda update we had was labeled a “minor” update on November 18th and since then, it has been pretty quite on the Panda update side of things.

Google typically does not do major algorithm updates during the holiday season in order to not impact online retailers that much during their most critical business sales time of the year. This all stems from the historic Florida update that put many online retailers out of business right before the biggest holiday retail season.

Here is Google’s tweet:

Search weather report: no major Panda updates until the new year. Context: goo.gl/XqLuN

A Googler (@google) December 14, 2011

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Google's Panda Ranking Algorithm Changes SEO Forever

Every day, I run into people affected by the Panda update. "Affected" always means negatively affected, because when your rankings go up, it means that Google is finally recognizing the quality of your site. When your rankings go down, blame it on Panda. Now, none of this is to say that Google's Panda algorithm update, and its ongoing tweaking that has followed, is not a big deal. In fact, this might be the biggest search ranking algorithm change since Google inaugurated link analysis in the late '90s. Because the search ranking algorithm isn't really an algorithm any more, because people don't set the rules. Google has embraced machine learning, and SEO will never be the same.

Machine learning is a computer technique that uses pattern recognition to cluster together similar things. What Google is doing with machine learning is clustering good search results and separating them from bad search results. How do they do that? They have people working as search quality raters to decide which search results contain quality information and which doesn't.

Those ratings become the training data for machine learning. Then the machine learning techniques go to work, identifying which Web pages and which entire Web sites have qualities similar to the ones that the quality raters have judged the best--and also noting which sites seem to match low-quality sites. Then, in addition to all of the factors that Google has always looked at in its ranking algorithm, there's a new factor--this machine learning factor based on the search quality raters.

So what does this mean for SEO? Plenty. If you've been trying to reverse engineer the algorithm, you can stop now. If you've been playing tricks with content farms or paid links or any other spammy technique. stand down. Those techniques are probably not going to work very well for much longer. I say that not because the new algorithm is perfect. It's not. I've seen plenty of quality sites that have been unfairly downgraded. I am saying it because Google is committed to this approach and will keep at it until they get what they want. They've declared war on spam and finally have a computer technique that can add in a human judgment that is very hard to spam.

So, if your idea of SEO is gaming the ranking algorithm, then SEO is over. If your idea of SEO is providing the best content for searchers to find, then your time has come. I've always counseled companies to optimize for people more than for search engines. Never has that advice been more important than now.

Post By:  Mike Moran

Mike is an expert in search marketing, search technology, publishing, Web personalization, and Web metrics, who regularly makes speaking appearances. 

Mike also writes the Biznology newsletter and blog, is the co-author of the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc., and writes the search marketing column for Revenue Magazine.

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