Is The Google Panda Update Really Fair?

Earlier this year, Google completely changed the algorithm of their search engine through one of the largest updates in years. The revision was called the Google Panda update or the Farmer Update, and came out in February 2011. The update involved every one of the English speaking websites in America. Another update followed in April that incorporated the rest of the English language websites.

Since then, there has been much argument and debate on if the updates were positive or negative. A lot of web owners and blog developers thought it was completely negative, as they lost quite a bit of traffic because it caused their page ranking to go down. Google, however, claims that users have said the changes helped make their searches better and the whole thing was mostly seamless to the majority of Internet customers.

The Google Panda revision added an additional layer to Google’s algorithm. Before Panda, Google ranked all websites with a special PageRank algorithm. While this is still how it works, a second layer was added to the mix. Now, Panda ranks also do a quality check of a website. So, even if the webpage has always gotten a lot of visitors and seems to have many high ranking pages, Google checks to see if their actual content matches those high results. If not, then Google lowers their overall ranking, which can lose them visitors or customers. The botton line is that now Google ranks the websites themselves, and not just their pages.

The whole thing has thrown a wrench into the traffic on all related websites and many businesses or blog owners aren’t happy over it. They believe Google has been unfair. But, perhaps instead they should try to figure out just why Google has ranked their sites lower and try to fix the issue instead of just whining about it.

In the opinion of Google users, there still remain 10 organic search results on the page that appears first when they put a word or phrase into the search engine box. As long as they get a lot of choices for the content they need, the users are happy.

Those who gripe and complain should take a good look at their sites and try to instead improve them. It includes far more than just the written data, but must also include the site’s design, how it is navigated, how user friendly it is and how good its design is.

While it hurts to hear it, if a company lost much of its Internet ranking, then there was a serious problem that existed whether they thought so or not. Besides, it isn’t healthy for a company to rely on only one way to get brand new customers.

Instead, they need to be able to use other things such as social networking in order to snag more traffic and therefore more business. This effort needs to include sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as forums and blogs that all can work towards attracting new customers. Even before Google put out the Panda update, even some of the most successful Internet marketers made only a mere 25 percent of their business partners through the Google search engine and those were the ones with excellently designed sites.

The online world is made up of far more than only Google and if a business relied only on Google for all of its potential growth, then that was a plan sure to fail from the start. So, if your company has thrived despite Google Panda, you still should be looking for ways to improve it. You never know when another Google update could take you down as well. If you want to have a profitable web business, you have to branch out into other areas and develop your business from all angles.

One website that shows this is the Shareholders Portal. The site hasn’t been around long and has few links from other places. In the past, Google would barely have given it the nod at all, but since the Panda update their visitors have done better than double in the amount. This proves that Google is giving more credibility to how customers use its search engine to meet their needs.